Want a deal tailored just for you?

Call now on 0800 7 81 81 00 and see what we can do!

Lines are open 10am to 10pm, Monday to Sunday

• Read full article
• Share this article
• Related articles
• BlackBerry 8100 Pearl Deals
• M700 Black Deals
• KE850 Prada Deals

The touchscreen mobile phone billed as the rival to the iPhone.

The HTC Touch has been released this month and coincides with the American release of the iPhone, which means the two phones are being compared as they are both touchscreen, and similar styled in sleek black.  However they do differ slightly, the HTC Touch is aimed at being a smartphone with Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional.  The Touch comes loaded with Mobile versions of Outlook, Office, Windows Live and Messenger, for business people on the move.

It is the TouchFLO technology that is most impressive on this phone, HTC have managed to devise a screen that can tell the difference between a tap or swipe of the finger.  The main advantage is that you do not need to use a fiddly stylus to access certain menus – they have been specifically designed to deal with finger / thumb usage, where previously using your fingertip to try to access a menu would probably have meant that you press some keys next to the one you wanted (as a fingertip is much bigger than a stylus tip) and finish up in a menu you didn’t need.

The TouchFLO technology also comes into play when you want to scroll around a document or webpage.  By skimming your finger from top to bottom of the screen, the webpage will begin to scroll down - so no more tapping on the scroll bar repeatedly to move the screen along.  You can also close documents and go back to the home screen with the swipe of a finger.

However, one problem is that when wanting to use a QWERTY keyboard for emails or texts you will still need to revert back to using a stylus as the on screen keyboard is too small to be used with fingertips.

The HTC Touch does not disappoint on the media side, it has a 2 megapixel camera with 8 x zoom, Video player and recorder, and MP3 player compatible with Windows Media Player.  The Media Player has an interesting feature in its music editing in that tracks can be cut into small pieces, so if you wanted to use a 30 second piece of music as your ringtone you can specifically cut a portion of a song from an existing track.

The HTC Touch is a very interesting and stylish PDA phone, with more than enough features to compete with existing phones such as the Blackberry Pearl, Orange M700 or LG Prada. And the added feature of the TouchFLO should mean this is a good seller.  Watch this space for deals on the HTC Touch, as O2 and T-Mobile are currently branding it in their own special ways.