HTC unveils Touch, iPhone rival
This buzz about Apple iPhone is making finally some good, mostly by motivating other manufacturers to produce something similar or even better. The Touch from HTC, a popular Asian manufacturer supplying phones under various brands all over the world has a lot of ambitions. The Touch is a beautifully sculpted handset, it measures an extremely pocket friendly 99.9 x 58 x 13.9mm, that’s not iPhone thin (11.6mm) and it weighs just 112g (with battery). Furthermore the Touch has a proportionately huge 2.8in QVGA LCD touch screen (though again advantage iPhone: 3.5in, 320 x 480) and it sports the same lovely Multi-touch interface (but HTC dubs it ‘TouchFLO’) enabling sliding finger gestures to navigate its features. Perhaps best of all however is the availability of the Touch since HTC says it will ship in the UK today, the rest of Europe and Asia this month and the US later in Q2 with an aggressive price likely to be in the region of £50 on a mid-level network contract from either Orange or T-Mobile.
This – perhaps more than anything – gives the Touch a huge advantage over the iPhone which still has yet to announce a European network agreement and even then will require a two year contract and hundreds of pounds towards the cost of the handset upfront. But there are also some dark sides: Touch has no 3G only EDGE. That said, talk time is excellent at up to five hours and 200 hours standby is more than enough for anyone. The memory may be also a small problem: memory: while the iPhone comes with either 4GB or 8GB onboard the Touch is once again stuck in traditional Windows Mobile territory offering just 64MB RAM/128MB ROM. A 1GB microSD card does come supplied but it certainly isn’t as elegant. Finally a 2MP camera is fine, but hardly ground breaking. On the other side, the usual HTC compulsories, Bluetooth and WiFi (b/g) are included. It will be very interesting to see how does this gadget sell on markets worldwide and whether it can be a competitor to iPhone. At least the price could be a big helper…
Comments(15)
Doesn’nt come near to what the iPhone looks like. Not that im getting one or anything.
thank god for this!
Price WAR! Price WAR!
I just might get myself an iPhone, it’d look good beside my ultra-portable macbook Im going to buy
Hoping for the price to drop though, but we’re still talking about Apple here, so that might be asking too much. At least for a while. (1-3yrs)
Iphone doesn’t run a crappy application called an OS by some.
HTC – The Touch:
This phone will be no different than any other Windows Mobile PDA. Windows Mobile is BORING and OLD. It makes every DIFFERENT phone that has it, the same. And this PHONE in NO WAY will EVER compete with the IPhone. Period. The IPhone is going to completely dominate and CHANGE the Telecommunication industry single handedly. The IPhone is going to be unbelievable, and nobody will be able to get one with it being so expensive with such a limited supply, it’s going to change the industry, but even then, HTC still won’t sell, so it doesn’t matter.
Sorry, guys.
Good day.
Don’t get me wrong it’s a nice, sleek looking phone. But come on, it’s Windows Mobile! The thing is a BUG haven. I had a PDA with Windows Mobile the entire phone crapped out in less than a year, and I treat my phones like royalty. I-Phone is going to be a spectacle, that Phone is so ahead of it’s time.
Oh no !! Vista on an Handheld ^^
Had it only not been HTC
They’ve only ever made one phone that actually met the quality requirement to get subsidized and sold through the operator i work at.
that was HTC s710 btw
that phone is well ugly
would anyone here buy itt ?
if that phone runs linux it will be interesting. I would put amarok on it…
http://www.openmoko.org/
This phone also looks like iPhone but it runs linux.
My bad, well, still Microsoft, and it looks very simular to Windows Mobile. (Calendar, Contacts, Start). I bet Carriers will rape this phone anyways.
it’d be interesting to see the specs of the phone and whether it’s multimedia capabilities are any different from other products. Unless it comes with anything other than WM10 then you’re stuck with buying Core Player for it, that’s if it can run it at a decent speed.
iPhone sucks! No built-in GPS, no 3G, no Skype and any other application like Navi software, nothing but the phone and iPod at all!
this gonna be like the battle betwen Playstation 3 and the xbox 360…