Sprint HTC Touch - User Reviews - Post your FULL reviews here!

[EtherealRemnant]

Full review here... bare with me, I don't do these very often.

I've had the phone for about 2 weeks now. I've tinkered with many things, I've installed and removed many different apps, I've gotten extensive use of TouchFlo, etc. Here's what I've found.

Form factor:

Wow. I don't think any single word can describe this part of the device any better. It looks sleek and sexy (something I thought would never happen in the PDA world) while looking professional at the same time. People see my phone and go "oh my god" and I've made a few people with an iPhone envious, based SOLELY on the aesthetics of the phone.

The rubberized feel not only gives it a very solid look, it also acts as a very tight way to grip your phone. I've never once felt like the phone was going to slip out of my hands, nor do I ever find myself having a death grip on the phone. I used to hold my 6700 so tightly that I would get cramps in my fingers because it used to fly out of my hand so much. This is a very nice improvement. There's nothing gaudy about the phone. No antenna sticking out, no fat body, no tacky color elements. It just looks absolutely fantastic and its the perfect happy medium between a tiny candybar and a large PDA. Very nice HTC.

Wow once again.

10/10

Performance:

Okay. This one is surprising to me. I never thought I'd see the day that a device this small would perform so well, ESPECIALLY under Windows Mobile 6. I very seldomly see the wait symbol, the phone has only ever locked up on me twice. Both times occured when I accidentally set the cache on Opera to 20MB. I set it back to 2MB and haven't had a problem since.

The responsiveness of the GUI is pretty nice. The only real lag time I notice is when flipping orientation (about the same speed as the Mogul here) or when the device first boots. It seems to take about 30 seconds before you can use the device after a soft reset, which can probably be accounted for by the BioTouch/TouchFlo software loading. Other than that, its much zippier than my Mogul was.

8/10

Signal performance:

Okay, this is a mixed bag. I get excellent reception with the phone except in the case of data. My phone constantly was flipping between EVDO and 1x in areas where the Mogul would have solid EVDO. I finally got tired of this and went in to PST and locked the phone to HDR only. It works fine now and I don't have constant EVDO drop-outs.

I've had two cases where the signal faded and the call was lost, with the phone actually prompting me telling me that the signal faded. This has never happened on either my 6700 or my 6800 but we'll see how it goes with my tweak to PST.

From running the debugging tool, my Touch gets an average 10db better signal than my Mogul (ie., my Mogul will be at -85 while my Touch will be around -75) and it doesn't seem to be as sensitive to me wrapping my entire hand around it as the Mogul was. With the Mogul, wrapping my hand around it tightly will cause around a 20-25db increase whereas on the Touch, it causes about a 12-17db increase.

I think that an updated radio would help this phone out. It seems to get a better signal than the Mogul but it also seems like it flip-flops between towers more than the Mogul as well.

7/10

BioTouch/TouchFlo:

This is also a mixed bag. I really do like TouchFlo, however, the touch scrolling ... well, it sucks. Too much of a flick and you're at the bottom of the page. I would very much like to see it work on a level of, flick the screen and it scrolls exactly one page down. This would make the Touch scroll much more usable than it is now. As it stands, I don't use it at all because it just annoys the hell out of me.

The Touch cube, however, is a shining point on the device. The performance is surprisingly zippy. It doesn't seem to lag, it consistently comes up when swiping your finger from the bottom of the screen to the top, and with the customizer, you really can't lose.

The only thing I've found to break the Touch cube from coming up is having the screen in landscape mode but that is to be expected, since the cube is formatted for portrait mode.

Cube: 9/10
Touch scrolling: 3/10

Memory:

Another point where the device REALLY shines. I've yet to see my device go under 40MB of free RAM, even when running (literally) 15 or 20 different apps. On a soft reset, I have almost 70MB of free RAM. Very nice coming from the Mogul, which ran out of memory constantly.

It DOES have the "memory leak" that the Mogul has... however, its about 10MB out of ~70MB of RAM... really not that bad when you think about it.

9/10. Would be a perfect 10 were it not for the memory leak.

Battery life:

For me, the battery is more than adequate. The first two days I had it, it would be dead before I'd even get home from work. Now I have my phone sync my gmail account every 10 minutes and I do various browsing and things while I'm working, texting, etc., and I will still have about 40% when I get home.

In my case, I'd say the battery life is maybe 10% less than what I got on the Mogul. 15% would be the absolute maximum.

Keyboard:

I am not fond of the Touch keypads specifically because they default to the full qwerty in Opera with no way to change it back. Other than that, I like using the 12key for text messages but I've found that a combination of TouchPal and SPB's Full Screen Keyboard get much more usage out of me. That said, I don't miss the Mogul's keyboard very much. There are some instances where I do, in fact, miss the keyboard, however I am happy with using TouchPal and FSK for the most part.

6/10 for the Touch default keyboards
8/10 for FSK
7/10 for TouchPal

Screen:

HUGE and I mean HUGE improvement over the Mogul. I don't have any yellow tint, the screen doesn't change between greens and purples when I press it or use the buttons, and I don't even use the backlight because the very lowest setting is actually visible for me in most settings.

One complaint about the screen (which is NOT going to dock some points off the score, its just a personal annoyance) - if you are using the phone against your ear and you have recently used Live Search, if something turns on the screen while you're on the call (I always turn my screen off when I start a call) and you happen to hit that Live Search with your ear (its not hard, I've done it about 5 times in the past two weeks), Live Search will open and your phone's earpiece AND microphone will be shut off. You'll have to exit Live Search to get your conversation back.

10/10

I hope this review helps someone... Damn was that a long post haha.

My overall rating of the device: 8/10.

Once the GPS gets activated, it will be a 9/10.