HTC "Touch and Shadow" worst phones ever :review by ABC

[ghengis]

This was an interestingand funny review of the HTC Touch and HTC Shadow by ABC news which is one of the worst articles I've ever read.

If you reach too far, you can lose your balance and fall on your face.
That's what happened with the design process for the "Touch by HTC," one of the smart phones fighting for our attention this holiday season in a field that has been both energized and shaken up by Apple Inc.'s iPhone.
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The $249 Touch, carried by Sprint Nextel Corp., overreaches badly in trying to be a touch-screen phone controlled by the user's fingers on the screen just like the iPhone. The resulting mess is the worst phone I've tried in the last few years.

Oddly enough, T-Mobile USA just introduced another phone made by High Tech Computer Corp., the Taiwanese company that makes the Touch, and it's a diametrically different approach. The $149 Shadow is conservative and restrained. It's a good phone, if not a home run. The difference in results is even stranger when you consider that both phones run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile software, though somewhat different versions.

The version in the Touch is designed to be used with a stylus. HTC has tried to make it finger-friendly, but it just doesn't work. Scroll bars and menu items are too narrow to hit with a finger. You're supposed to be able to scroll with a flick of the finger across the screen instead of the scroll bar, but it doesn't work in all windows. The finger-typing keyboard that pops up obscures the fields you're trying to type in.

Luckily, the Touch has a stylus, though it's a stubby little thing. Once I stopped trying to use the touch features and went with the stylus, my experience improved. For a moment, I considered retracting my "worst phone" judgment.

The Touch crams a lot of features in a light and small package. The 2.8-inch screen isn't as big as the iPhone's but it's big enough to enjoy movies. It isn't cluttered with buttons, yet it does e-mail and Web browsing on a fast data network. It synchronizes calendar and contact data with Microsoft Outlook. You can watch Sprint's mobile TV on it.
But even with a stylus, the Touch is full of problems. When I turned the screen on, I often found it cluttered with inscrutable Windows error messages that I sometimes had to perform a reset to get rid of. The Windows Media music player would skip while playing MP3s, making it useless. For every digit of a phone number you tap, there's delay before it appears on the screen. Cellular reception and call audio quality were not as good as a Palm Treo on the same network. The "worst phone" tag sticks.