I recently got to spend a few weeks playing around with the Sprint Touch. This is yet another great phone from HTC. There has been quite a bit of attention being paid to touch screen phones this year, mostly due to... well, that other phone. But HTC and Sprint really have something going with this new model. One of the first things I noticed was how good the packaging looks. Right after that, I noticed that my digital camera seems to be having issues, so the pictures I took aren't that great.
The box is a very nice piece of work. The image on the front has a picture of the cast of MTV's "The Hills".
I've never seen the show myself, but if you are a fan, you can watch it with this phone. But more on that later. Opening the box we find...another box.
The lid of this box is held closed with a magnet. When you open it, you get a picture of what your new purchase is going to look like, once you open that last flap.
And there it is.
The phone, weighing in at a mere 4 oz. is amazingly light. All the areas that are black are rubberized, so the phone is easy to hold, and feels comfortable in the hand. Now that it was out of the box, the first thing I wanted to try was the TouchFlo interface. It took a few tries for me to figure out exactly what motions the phone was looking for, but once I did, the TouchFlo system was a breeze to navigate. Sprint's much improved home screen provides easy access to what you need most, and it's all accessible with a few touches of the screen.
Actually, the home screen has a top pane that can be switched to four different functions. All three screens show if there are waiting emails, voice mails, or missed calls, plus upcoming calendar appointments. The main home screen provides a large digital clock, the next one is for weather, which displays current conditions and forecast, the third function is a quick launch section that is fully customizable, and the fourth is for accessing music. But that's just the beginning. An upward thumb slide brings up the main TouchFlo interface.
With a swipe across the device, you can scroll between three main screens. The picture above shows a mid-scroll capture. One screen has launchers for the Sprint Music Store, one for Sprint TV, and one for the On Demand program. The second screen has launchers for common items such as email, the Comm Center (where you can enable or disable the phone, bluetooth, etc.), IM, and so on. The final screen is basically a speed dial screen. Pick the people you call the most from your address book, add them to the list, and you've got one touch dialing.
For the most part, you don't even see Windows Mobile on this Windows Mobile 6 phone, the TouchFlo interface can quickly put you where you need to be. I know I used the Start button a few times, but probably about a tenth as much as with other Windows Mobile phones.
The next thing I tried out was SprintTV. I have SprintTV on a phone I currently own, but it's a tiny little screen, and it's almost painful to watch. But not on this phone. The screen, roughly 4" x 2.4", is large and bright. I launched SprintTV, and was told I had to download an update. It seems they could have shipped it with the latest software already on it, but that's not a huge issue. I watched several programs, including some South Park, streaming down in all its 3G glory. The picture was great, and the playback was very smooth. I really think Sprint should have that on the Mogul as well, it wouldn't be that difficult to add. However, after installing the update and launching the program, the phone goes into landscape mode for TV viewing. That's fine, but on a few occasions, the phone didn't revert back to normal after exiting the application. I was able to get it back, but for people with less experience with Windows Mobile, it might not be so easy. Also, after installing the update, there were two SprintTV icons in the Programs folder, which sort of annoyed me.
The camera took average pictures for a 2 megapixel, but that's more than made up for with the picture viewer, which is part of the TouchFlo system as well. It was really easy to scroll around from photo to photo, and to start a slideshow. Several other apps on the phone also have TouchFlo integration, like the address book and Pocket IE.
This is a solid phone, and the interface is superb, but there are a few things I didn't like about the phone. Not having a keyboard, when you're very used to having one on your phone, was a serious drawback for me. There are three on-screen keyboards. A full qwerty, a 20-key Touch Keyboard and a 12-key Touch Keypad. The 20-key layout is qwerty-style, with most keys having two letters assigned to them. The 12-key layout is basically what you would get on the keypad of a telephone. I was starting to get pretty good at using the 20-key layout, mostly due to the fact that as you type, the software extrapolates what words you're typing, and you usually only have to end up typing a few characters to get a full word. But phones with full qwerty keyboards extrapolate as well, and I can type much faster with one of those. There is a new HTC Touch Slider in the wild now, but the keyboard is not a full qwerty, it's more like the 20-key onscreen version that this Touch has. And I don't think any US carrier has picked up yet, anyway. Also, the phone sadly does not come with WiFi, but Sprint's network speeds make that a little less painful than it could be.
The phone comes with an array of accessories like a USB sync/charging cable, headphones, a splitter so you can use the headphones and charge at the same time, and a 512M MicroSD card. The directions for accessing the MicroSD slot left a little to be desired, but I was able to get it installed without incident.
Overall, I loved this phone. It performed well, and the TouchFlo interface was a pleasure to use. I would recommend this phone to anyone who was looking for a new Windows Mobile phone. I give it nine stars out of 10.