Building on its ten year history of developing Windows Mobile smartphones, HTC aims to offer a unique way of controlling touch screen based devices by recognizing and responding to the sweep of a finger across the screen. According to HTC, the Touch distinguishes between finger and stylus input and then respond accordingly.
Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, claims that the HTC Touch will make it easier for users to interact with a smartphone's ever-more exciting features.
The HTC Touch will be comprised of a wide variety of communication, entertainment and professional capabilities, a trend recently seen with smartphones such as Samsung's F700 and Apple's iPhone.
The HTC Touch is the first device to feature TouchFLO, the new underlying touch screen technology developed by HTC. Users sweep their finger up the display to launch an animated, three-dimensional interface comprising three screens: Contacts, Media and Applications.
The interface can be spun by swiping a finger right or left across the display, in order to provide efficient access to the most used features. TouchFLO is also claimed to enhance finger touch scrolling and browsing of Web pages, documents, messages and contact lists.
Leveraging the broad functionality of Windows Mobile 6 Professional, the HTC Touch includes Outlook Mobile, Office Mobile, Windows Live and the capability to run third-party applications. Users can surf the Web with Internet Explorer, send and receive e-mails, chat on Messenger and send files to their own web space through Windows Live.
The HTC Touch measures 99.9 by 58 by 13.9mm and weighs only 112g with the standard 1100 mAh Li-Ion battery. A 1 GB microSD storage card is bundled, and the smartphone features 64 MB RAM, 128 MB ROM, a 2-megapixel camera and GSM/GPRS/EDGE Tri-band 900/1800/1900 MHz network support.
The smartphone also sports a 2.8-inch LCD screen with a 240 by 320 pixels resolution with 65,536 colors, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0. The battery is claimed to offer up to eight days of standby time and up to five hours of talk time.
The HTC Touch will be available in two colors at launch - soft black and wasabi green - and will be hitting store shelves in the UK and throughout Europe later this month. A North American version of the HTC Touch will be available in the second half of 2007.
|