HTC Touch Dual - what a phone

Let me declare my bias from the start: I love this phone. It is unfortunate that I do for a few reasons. I feel like my love for this phone is like that of Romeo et Juliet, forbidden.

Against my better judgement I have fallen for a Windows Mobile phone. I hate Windows Mobile and unfortunately the Touch Dual is based on this very system. What a pity.

Nonetheless HTC has done a wonderful job in creating an interface that works on top of Windows Mobile. The sad part is that their user interface (UI) is under-used. It is merely the skin of a phone that uses an operating system.

Justin and I were chatting and we both agree that what we’d like to see in future is an HTC that has no Windows Mobile at all and makes use of their incredibly sexy homepage and top-level interface.

Anyways, let’s move on. To start with, the battery life of the Touch Dual is not bad, but not great. It lasted me about 2 days or just under.

Basically this phone feels sexy, oozes innovative elegance and makes you look like you know what you are doing (no matter what that is). It’s a phone that you want to have on the table at a business meeting. It’s slick…so slick that it could slide uphill (yes that just happened).

The Touch Dual is exactly what it says it is, a dual phone. It makes use of a touch screen as well as a Qwerty keypad and key-controls.

The touch element of the phone is great, intuitive and reactive. You do have to press fairly hard (not too hard, don’t break it) to get the screen to react but after a bit of time I came to like that aspect. My issue with the touch screen is the stylus. I really hate the thing. I am nervous every time I take it out that I am about to lose it down a drain or under a carpet or something. My advice to HTC would be to make the icons and interface slightly larger to allow for users to use their fingers to interact with the phone.

The keypad is great, nifty and very useful for people who hate the styles (like me). You can either use the stylus to pop up a digital keypad on the screen, or you can flip up the phone and type using the actual keys on the phone. Nice touch (no pun intended).

The browser is of the Internet Explorer sorts, obviously and is actually surprisingly good. It makes use of the keypad or digital interface to enter a url and gets there fairly quickly. You can download entire sites if you have the time and money to do so, it’s not all mobile on this phone.

Further on the email function was great. It asked me to set up my email account as I logged in for the first time. I entered my gmail account, one, two, three little steps and I was downloading mail. Easy.

I did find smaller things, every day things, slightly more difficult to complete. For example, I am used to hot-keys or shortcuts for things like typing a message, making a call and the like. To write an SMS one needs to open up the SMS/MMS application, enter in to all the messages, choose “menu”, “new”, “SMS”, then enter a recipient, move down and type the message. The only reason this is a bug for me is that I am not used to it. In the long run I am pretty sure it would become as mindless as any other task I complete on a cellphone.

One absolutely great little addition to the four homescreen icons (there are only for - I love that) is the weather. Simply connect to your 3G or whatever other connection you prefer, click on the little sun on the homepage, select your region and bam, you have a weather report. And not just for today, up to 5 days prediction is available.

The other 3 icons on the homescreen are the launcher that you can customise and add any application on the phone that you use frequently, the home (it looks like a house) which shows you recent SMS’s, e-mails, the time, alarms, events and more and the sound icon which allows you to choose your sound preferances.

One slight issue that I did have is when the phone is slid up and held, it will turn the backlight off. The only way to get the backlight - or any light for that matter - back on is to slide the phone down, press a button and slide it back up. That’s a little irritating.

This has been a very long post, but I couldn’t help myself. I. Must. Have. It. Now.

If I had the choice I wouldn’t give this phone back, alas it must be done.

For good measure here is a demonstration of the phone:

One disclaimer that needs to be added to this post:

The HTC Touch Dual that I was first given was faulty. The screen began to display weird “ghost-screens” for no reason. Those are some pretty bad odds; one phone, two days, one fault. However, HTC was on it within a day I had a new phone and this one has been nothing but a pleasure.

Price - R5800
Cool Factor - Too high to give a number
Availability - Everywhere, Leaf direct.

Rate this review:

(2 votes, average: 2 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Like this post? You may want to consider subscribing to our web feed and you'll automatically get notified when we post a new review or news item. If web feeds aren't your thing then why not join our email list by clicking here. Thanks for stopping by.

Filed Under Cellphones, Featured Reviews, Mobile, Mobile, Windows