HTC Touch HD2 – Win Mo speed champ Review

The HTC Touch HD2 has a lot of features and HTC Sense, all packed into its large well-built frame, as well as a super-snappy interface. Its 4.3-inch screen is definitely the best thing about the phone, but unfortunately, it is no longer the best screen around. 65K colour limitation and poor sunlight legibility are also serious limitations, as is the mediocre video playback experience. We would recommend you wait till Windows Phone 7 comes along, and the HTC HD7 might just be what you are looking for. However, if apart from a large screen, you are also looking for a phone that will be able to handle whatever OS you throw at it, then this might just be your thing, though its still high price should make you think twice.

The hardware of the HTC Touch HD2 has led people to try out newer, more demanding operating systems on it, such as, Windows Mobile 6.5.3, Android 2.1 and Android 2.2. The device is open enough, and not requiring a jailbreak to uploading Desire ROMs, complete with HTC Sense – a user interface that’s usually an exceptionally capable overlay on Windows, Android, and even Brew operating systems. Who knows, we might even see a Windows Phone 7 port on the device soon enough. But we digress…

Let’s take a look at those specifications again: 1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250 processor, 448MB RAM, 512MB ROM, and of course, the massive 4.3-inch screen. It’s got the works alright, a Wi-Fi router, HSUPA, a 5MP camera with dual LED flash and touch focus, multi-touch and stereo FM with RDS. The 4.3-inch screen might justify the phone’s current MSRP, Rs. 29,000, but we’ll have to see if anything else makes the phone worthy when newer phones with newer operating systems are around for roughly the same price.

Build Quality & Ergonomics
The Touch HD2 bears its monstrous screen well, and is a better looking phone than the HTC Desire. It’s wide, sure, but can fit in both pockets and hands comfortably enough. The screen has a 2.5mm bezel on either side, with a nice groove for the ear speaker on the top, and smooth ovular Windows Mobile 6.5 buttons at the bottom. The buttons aren’t flimsy, and though they aren’t raised much more, are quite distinct and tactile. The back and the sides of the phone are made up of hard rubber-like plastic, except for the large battery cover, which is built out of metal with a dull sheen. The left side of the phone has the volume rocker, while the right features the indentation required to slip the metal battery cover out. Above the battery cover is the 5MP camera, slightly raised, with the loudspeaker and dual LED flash on either side.

The screen’s size makes it a little hard to be able to reach everywhere on it with just your thumb, nor is reaching the call button very easy. However, the tradeoff is acceptable, you got what you wanted – a large screen. Capacitive, the screen is very responsive and quite fluid, with pretty good accuracy as well. The phone offers a four-line QWERTY onscreen keyboard in both landscape and portrait orientations, which are plenty accessible. Haptic feedback is also good, and adjustable. As for screen brightness and colours, this is where the phone’s age shows, with newer display technologies like SuperAMOLED, OLED, Retina Display and SuperLCD making it seem pale in comparison. However, the screen is bright and colourful enough indoors, with a good contrast. It’s only outdoors that the screen’s lack of sunlight legibility becomes apparent.

Apart from the standard clock and animated weather widgets on the homescreen, there are homescreen tabs below, which includes everything from calendar to people, internet to photos, mail to music player, settings to Twitter, weather to stocks, footprints and Facebook. These can be swiped directly from the bottom, or, you could just swipe the screen itself. These homescreen tabs can be rearranged and selected independently.

There are only four types of profiles, which are Normal, Vibrate, Silent, and Automatic. These can of course be customized. The Automatic profile can be set to vibrate for appointments. Other features include the pocket mode, which will automatically increase the volume of the ringer in volume mode when the phone is in your pocket. There is also the ‘quiet ring on pickup’ option. Another feature is how the ringer gets muted when you turn the phone around from on its back onto the screen. As for alarms, the phone lets you set three different alarms, each of which can be made set on used-defined weekly patterns.

[RELATED_ARTICLE]Contact management is excellent, and HTC Sense does a good job here as well, with smart search, and well arranged data, apart from favourites and groups. As for messaging, you will find threaded conversations, and as mentioned earlier, you’ll find great onscreen keyboards, with several types of input options, from HTC’s own QWERTY layout, to the standard WinMo QWERTY layout. While the phone supports handwriting recognition, our handset had Chinese character recognition built in.

The phone also features Facebook and Twitter integration, with the Facebook integration also bringing Friends onto your phone as contacts, with updates and events showing up, and your Facebook photos into the HTC Albums app. As for the video, audio and FM radio interfaces, they’re all very user friendly and eye-candy. The calling feature is also well-built, with smart dialling and a conference mode built in. No voice dialling though!

The native browser is not bad, but doesn’t deal with Flash too well. Pinch to zoom is great though, as well as the pinpoint accuracy of the touch interface, which doesn’t make you reach for the defunct stylus. Opera Mini was also loaded onboard, which provided slightly better support all around, but Flash support was still a little jerky.

Importantly, the task manager can’t be accessed by holding down the Windows key like other Win Mo handets, but you’ll have to find it in Settings>Other Settings>Task Manager. Overall, the interface is very snappy, of the sort that almost no other Win Mo 6.5 phone can offer, because of the speedy 1GHz processor, adequate RAM, and uber-responsive touchscreen.

Read on to know more about the HTC Touch HD2 and its performance…