HTC Touch HD with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional

    We've all seen TouchFLO 3D by now, but the version included on the Touch HD has been modified. Just like the hardware buttons, you get a slight bit of vibration feedback when you tap any of the TouchFLO 3D icons along the bottom. The Touch HD will do this in other programs like YouTube and Opera. Here on the Home tab, because of the taller screen, we can see several appointments without having to swipe your finger up to see more.

We now have a Stock tab which you navigate much like the music and photos tab - by swiping your finger up or down to move through each chart.

If you tap on one of the stock charts, you get a more detailed graph with other bits of info about the stock. This is powered by Yahoo Finance.

The taller screen on the Touch HD allows you to see more of each picture in the Photos and Videos tab.

Like other HTC devices, the Music tab will scan your device for audio, and let you flick through album covers and play songs right from the Today screen.

In previous versions of TouchFLO 3D, you could get a 4-day forecast, but you'd have to open another tab. Because of the longer screen, you can see the forecast without the second tab on the Touch HD.

Here in the Settings, we have a new option: Customize Tabs.

And this is great - you can turn off tabs, or move the order of them. Unfortunately, some tabs cannot be removed like Settings, Program, and Home.

SOFTWARE

Ok, let's go through the software. Being an HTC device, we have the HTC task manager which allows you to have the "X" button actually close programs in Windows Mobile.

Here is the Start menu, which has large, finger-friendly entries.

The Touch HD has the full suite of Office 2007 mobile programs.

Here's the first pane of Programs. The software on the Touch HD is almost identical to that of the Diamond and Touch Pro. I should mention that all lists (like this one) are flick-scrollable.

Tweeter, the game that uses the phone's accelerometer to move a ball around, is even more fun in WVGA resolution =D.

Navigating and viewing photos on the Touch HD is a great experience.

When you plugin your headset, you can use the equalizer to adjust the frequencies for audio.

The FM radio is the same as found on the Touch Diamond and Pro.

Here is the second pane of the Start menu.

I was excited to use remote desktop on the Touch HD, since, at 800x480 resolution, it would actually be pretty usable. But unfortunately, there is no way to use Remote Desktop in landscape, which is a huge bummer.

MP3 trimmer is a neat little app that lets you make ringtones from songs you load onto your device.

The Voice Speed Dial application that comes on the Touch HD is not as good as Microsoft Voice Command.

WorldCard Mobile lets you take a picture of any text or a business card and convert it to editable text. It works pretty well but takes too much time to use.

YouTube works great, and videos scale to the full screen.

Some of the Touch Pros and Diamonds out there don't have this Program Guide menu option.

    Speaking of video, here is video playback at VGA resolution in Windows Media Player. Unfortunately, the video doesn't stretch to the whole screen unless the video is outputted in WVGA resolution (so, VGA/QVGA videos won't scale).

    Using a program like CorePlayer, you can not only play many more file formats than WMP, but the player will stretch all video to the whole screen regardless of resolution. Using CorePlayer to watch DiVX video really lets the Touch HD shine. Video playback is super smooth, and the clarity is fantastic.

    Here I have a high-quality episode of The Office playing in full screen glory on CorePlayer. The clarity of the video is breathtaking. Like I said, this is where the Touch HD really excels as a multimedia device, it's just too bad you need additional software to make it happen.

    Internet viewing is great on the Touch HD. You get to see a lot on the screen at once, and you don't have to zoom in as much as you do on the Touch Pro and Diamond because everything is bigger. Unfortunately, the Touch HD's version of Opera Mobile still doesn't have flash support.

If you tilt the screen to landscape, the accelerometer will automatically rotate the orientation. A new feature to this version of Opera is the zoom slider in the bottom left corner.

Here's what the keyboard looks like in landscape.

    Let's talk about text entry. Obviously, the Touch HD doesn't have a keyboard (or D-Pad). Included on the device are many input options. In addition to the defaults for Windows Mobile (transcriber, stylus keyboard, letter recognizer, and block recognizer), you get the three great HTC on screen keyboards. The screen of the Touch HD is sensitive enough to where you don't have to press very hard to type.

    Here is the first keyboard, which is SureType style. This is the best keyboard for typing long messages if you use both thumbs on the keyboard. With T9 switched on, I could type pretty darn fast. Note the D-Pad arrows on the bottom of the keyboard. This is where you have to turn if you want to move the cursor around on the screen without moving your fingers up to where the cursor is, or to select an item in a list.

The second keyboard is a T9-numeric style, which is best for one-handed use. Again, keeping it in T9 mode allows you to type pretty fast. You can quickly switch into ABC mode if you need to type a unique word.

And here is the full QWERTY option, which is my least favorite. I didn't find it to be very accurate.

PHONE

    To make a call, you can enter the phone application by pressing the Call start hardware key (or, at least, that's the quickest). You then get this screen. You can quickly bring up the person you want to call by using the letters on the keypad here. There's a problem, though. Because you have no D-Pad, you can't go down to the third name, press right to switch "m" to "h" to call home, and place the call. In order to do this, you can swipe your finger right or left on each entry to cycle through the different numbers. This took me a while to discover.

In the bottom left corner, you can switch the selector to Video Call. We can't do video calls in the US.

This is what call history looks like.

    This is new. When you get an incoming call, you get this. Slide left to answer, and right to ignore. You can use the Call Start/End keys for this function as well. From here you can also send a text message to the person, or mute the ringer. I wish there was a way to disable the hardware keys when the phone rings - there were a few times when I accidentally picked up the call while taking the phone out of my pocket because one of the buttons got pressed on the way out.

    And this is what it looks like when you're on a call. It's the same screen that you see on the Touch Pro and Diamond. Regarding call quality, the Touch HD performs well, and the Speakerphone had a nice amount of volume.

Click on to the next page as we cover Settings and talk about photo quality on the HTC Touch HD.