Mobile Tech Reviews

The HTC Touch is the smallest touch-screen phone available on the market measuring 3.9 inches long and 2.8 inches wide by 0.5 inch tall. The design of the phone is pretty neat especially the soft-touch finish and the smooth and rounded corners.

TOUCH FLO:

The heart of the device centers on the innovative Touch Flo interface. The interface is revolutionary in the fact that it allows you to operate the device with finger taps and swipes. This compliments the main OS which happens to be Windows Mobile 6. The Touch Flo operates by giving you easy access to main applications such as contacts, music, messages, email and such.

The features of the phone include GPS, and support for Sprint’s EV-DO network (the nation’s fastest mobile network). Unfortunately it does not support WI-FI access which means you are left with the Sprint network or none at all. On the bright side it’s not as expensive as Blackberry’s media package plan.

The onscreen QWERTY is a little small and it was quite hard for me to enter information by hand. The good thing is you have the option of a 20 button QWERTY keyboard that is bigger but of course loses some of the not so used keys. The phone dialing keyboard is big and specious, about the size of the iPhone and very responsive.

To be expected the phone carries a media player and comes with a 512MD microSD card, protective pouch and USB cable. Since its Windows Mobile operated it supports play-for-sure which means you can download all your Napster or Rhapsody tunes from your computer to your device. Other features include speakerphone, voice commands, dialing, text and multimedia messaging, smart dialing, and contact memory is only limited by the available memory installed and can support up to 12 numbers per contact (as if you’ll ever need that). Photo caller ID is also available as well as 15 polyphonic ringtones. You are also allowed to dial by photo, meaning you can access your address book by pictures of your contacts instead of scrolling through boring text names.

The Touch also supports Bluetooth wireless options such as wireless headsets, object exchange, file sharing, hands-free-kits, dial-up networking and stereo Bluetooth. Also included is a 2.0 megapixel camera with 5x zoom. While the 2.0 megapixel camera is impressive in name I have seen better picture quality from 1.3 and 1.2 megapixel phones. The same thing goes for the camcorder which is also present on the phone. The phone includes a 400MHz processor which has 128MP of ROM and 256 of RAM. According to HTC the Touch has 3.5 hours of talk time and up to 10 days of standby time.

To sum it up the HTC Touch is a revolution in the touch sensitive device world….unfortunately it lacks the matching revolution in the OS world.

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The original PSP was one of the best handheld game systems in a long while and while not totally revolutionary many of the features had had not been seen on a portable system till that date so it was only right for Sony to follow up with a redesigned version to one of its most popular products.

The new PSP Slim as it is dubbed is 33% lighter and 19% slimmer. The original PSP system actually felt like you were holding something and the extra weight made it a little heavier on the hand but did add some volume to it. The lighter system is a lot better in terms of portability and the slimness of the system adds more appeal to an already appealing system. The main draw back of the new lighter design is the durability. The metal frame that was used to protect the system incase of sudden shock has been done away with which means your system is prone to more damage in case of an accident.

Other major upgrades include internal memory being increased from doubled from 32MB to 64MB to improve load time of UMD’s and also accommodate for the extra memory needed by the browser. The new system also supports USB charging although it has to be in USB mode to work (a couple of hacks which might void your warranty can fix this problem). The battery has also been reduced in size which also means it holds less charge. No need to worry as the new system has been optimized for power saving which means it still gets the 3 hours of play time as the original system got.

The UMD loading tray has also been improved to be more efficient. The Wi-Fi switch has been moved from the left corner of the system to the top and the speakers have also been moved as well. Although the gaming controls were almost perfect the D pad still had some glitches and would sometimes get stuck or lag due to its close proximity ot the system. This has been solved by raising the D pad and the other game controls have also been improved. The infra-red port which served almost useless except for those who hacked the system has been removed.

The system can also be used as a controller for the Sony’s next generation console the PS3. And a new video out port has been added. Game play on the PSP is still as impressive as before and I was surprised with the quality which seems to have improved. Music plays well and so does photos.

The GUI (graphic user interface) has not been updated although a new “cookie” theme is available. Software is always being updated and at the time of the writing of this article the system has just gone through update 3.80 which adds a bunch of security features including two internet radio channels including one from AOL along with the ability to connect to wireless hotspots. The two major things I see that are still lacking from the PSP that should have been fixed in this upgrade is GPS and of course a much needed keyboard for internet browsing.

All in all the new PSP Slim is a worthy upgrade to its original predecessor and matches the improvements made to its rival the Nintendo DS.

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