Verizon Wireless launches a new flagship Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone, running their V Cast Mobile TV service. Read our full HTC Imagio review.
Review summary of the HTC Imagio:
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 To answer the critics who complain that Verizon Wireless doesn't have any unique smartphones, here's the HTC Imagio. The phone packs most of the best features we've seen across HTC's Windows Mobile lineup, then throws in Verizon Wireless' best services, including V Cast Mobile TV. It's a big phone, but touchscreen fans will like the huge, 3.6-inch, hi-res display. Plus, now that the phone comes loaded with Microsoft's newest Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, the latest mobile OS is as pleasant to use as ever. There are a few lingering remnants from the older generation that keep this phone from being superior, disappointingly in the multimedia and GPS features, both of which are usually perfect features for the form factor. The HTC Imagio has all the great calling and contacts features of the Touch Pro2, plus Web browsing with Flash video support, and even the blossoming Microsoft Windows Marketplace. The interface is still a bit flat, with few options to customize the main menu tabbed screens or add features to the main display, and Windows Mobile is still behind the curve compared to some of the more snazzy smartphone systems out there. But the HTC Imagio is still a rock solid device, with plenty of great and occasionally unique features, and if you're a dedicated Verizon fan looking for an innovative, high-end smartphone, the HTC Imagio deserves consideration. Release: October 2009. Price: $200.
Pros: Large, responsive touchscreen. Great features, especially for calling and contact handling. Solid Web browsing.
Cons: Disappointing camera. Media player could use an interface upgrade. VZ Navigator should be much better on this device.
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Full HTC Imagio Review:
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Design – Very Good
The HTC Imagio for Verizon Wireless is a great looking tablet phone, and it strays a bit from the normal, minimalist tablet style. The phone is banded by a textured edge that makes the entire bezel look like a speaker cover. It doesn't add to the device's sound, but the extra texture, plus the blend of glossy plastics and black, soft touch paint on the back give the HTC Imagio a decidedly multimedia style, as opposed to the more boardroom glamour of the similar HTC Touch Diamond 2. Like the Touch Diamond 2, the HTC Imagio also gets the zoom bar beneath the screen, but glance up from that zoom and you'll find a much larger display. The 3.6-inch screen on the HTC Imagio is almost a half-inch larger than the screen on the Touch Diamond 2, or the 3.2-inch screen on the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, for that matter. It's a big touchscreen phone, but its size suits its feature set nicely.
In fact, there's a few things we'd add. There are no extraneous ports or buttons around the side of the device, but we'd definitely add a camera shutter button. We'd also bring the microSD slot out from under the battery cover. On the face of the HTC Imagio, there's a multimedia button that you can set yourself when you perform your initial setup with the phone. We kept Verizon's suggestion to use the button for V Cast TV, which let us jump into the higher quality video service with a single press. The HTC Imagio is the first Verizon Wireless smartphone to use the V Cast Mobile TV service, and the phone lineup for the service has shrunk dramatically in recent days, so besides the Motorola Krave ZN4, it's one of the few V Cast TV phones left available at launch.
Interface – Very Good
The HTC Imagio is also one of the first Windows Mobile 6.5 phones to launch, though you'll hardly know it, with all the tweaks and additions HTC has made to the OS by layering their excellent TouchFLO 3D interface on top. You can find Windows Mobile 6.5 lurking beneath, if you look hard enough. The new Start menu and the new Settings menus are both WinMo designs, and you can even turn off TouchFLO 3D in the Settings menu for the "Today" screen. What's left beneath is the new honeycomb look for Windows Mobile touchscreen phones.
We didn't spend too much time on the new Windows Mobile interface because that's really not the point of this device. Needless to say, after digging through the settings and native applications from Microsoft, we were less than impressed with the depths to which Microsoft has dug up the old, decaying WinMo interface. We were also let down by bugginess in the OS. In fact, the first time we started up the phone we were greeted by a crashed executable, and the phone started with a minor glitch or crashed app on numerous occasions during our test period. Perhaps we should wait for Windows Mobile 6.6?
The real star of the show is HTC's TouchFLO 3D interface. While even this sparkling interface has started to show its age, its still an effective and slick design, and it runs very smoothly on the HTC Imagio. The large screen was very responsive to the touch, and for a more nuanced approach you can dig out the stylus. We never had to use the stylus in our first few days of testing, though. The interface is mostly fingertip friendly.
Calling – Very Good
Since the HTC Touch Pro2, the company has continued to impress with their calling features. The HTC Imagio gets most of the best features from the TouchPro2, except for the duplex speakerphone. Still, the phone sounded very good in our tests, clean and clear, and reception was always solid. Battery life was pretty good, but it could have been better. We could usually get a full day's use out of a single charge if we didn't spend too much time watching TV or taking pictures with the screen as a viewfinder. But we always had to charge the phone overnight or risk a dead battery before lunch the next day.
For calling features, as we mentioned, the Imagio gets an impressive lot. HTC integrates the contact list into the calling screen, so during a call you can see your caller's contact info, their recent messages to you, calendar information and more. It's a great, well-organized and helpful system that will become a standard in smartphones. But beyond HTC's innovations, the Imagio also gets great features from Verizon Wireless, including Visual Voicemail. There's also speaker-independent voice dialing, and the voice dialer usually recognized our commands, once we figured out the proper syntax. The speakerphone is okay, but could be louder. We love that you can flip the phone over during a call to engage the speaker. It's a great trick stolen from the Touch Pro2's playbook.
Messaging - Good
Messaging is a bit of a soft point for the HTC Imagio. Perhaps Verizon Wireless felt they didn't need to overload a phone with messaging options if it doesn't pack a keyboard, but we're disappointed that the HTC Imagio can't do more messaging out of the box. The phone does a fine job with e-mail. Our corporate and personal accounts all synchronized perfectly. Verizon confuses the issue by bundling their Mobile Email client, but the phone can handle e-mail just fine on its own without Verizon's extra software.
The Instant Messaging app is a dated bit of software, capable only of handling AOL, MSN and Yahoo. That might be enough for you, but we think many customers would like Google Talk and even MySpace or Facebook for instant messaging. There are apps available from the new Microsoft Windows Mobile Marketplace for Facebook and MySpace, but we like when these apps are tightly integrated with the phone, as they are on the Palm Pre and the new Motorola Cliq. The HTC Imagio can pull pictures and birthdates from your Facebook account into your contact list, but that's as deep as the social integration goes.
The keyboard on the HTC Imagio is HTC's standard touchscreen keyboard, and no company makes a better onscreen keyboard, not even Apple. On the Imagio, we found the keys to be less sensitive than we like, harder to press accurately than the same keyboard on other HTC phones we've seen. But we still like the keyboard layout and some of the keyboard features. The phone uses XT9 to autocorrect mistakes, and the software does a fine job fixing your typos while you tap along. We also like the trick where you can hold down a letter key to type the symbol above, instead of using a modifier key. All around, it's a smart keyboard design. We just wish the keys were larger in landscape mode.
Multimedia - Good
For music and video fans, HTC hasn't improved much over the last few generations, and Windows Mobile has improved even less. The HTC Imagio still does a fine job with music playback. The HTC music player launches and plays music directly from the main TouchFLO 3D screens, though it was difficult to navigate our library without digging too deep into the confusing, buggy and unreliable menus. The phone still has trouble finding our music, and it's still easy to take a wrong turn and end up in the purgatory that is the standard Windows Media player.
Still, if you can get past the wonky controls and the aging interface designs, the HTC Imagio does a great job actually playing the media. Music sounds good, and the Imagio comes with all the right hardware for music fans. There's a 3.5mm headphone jack to use your own earbuds if you like, or stereo Bluetooth for wireless cans. We wish there were a few Gigabytes of internal storage, but we'll take the high-capacity microSD slot. If you need to buy music on the go, the HTC Imagio even gets access to the V Cast Music Store. It's pricy, but the selection is quite deep and entertaining.
Videos look fantastic on the HTC Imagio's screen. We tried pre-loading our own movies on microSD, watching video on V Cast Mobile TV, and also streaming videos from the V Cast Video service. The various options offered degrading quality in that order. Our own, home-ripped movies looked gorgeous, taking advantage of the high resolution and the screen's great size. V Cast TV was good, but only a few steps better than the streaming service. Sometimes, V Cast TV service was blocky, sometimes reception dropped out entirely, even though we kept our testing on the map. We tried the service in Dallas, San Francisco and San Diego and found the best service in the Northwest, but all 3 cities offered reliable coverage through most of our test period.
Web browsing – Very Good
The HTC Imagio offers two separate Web browsers, and the surprise is that they're both good. The standard browser on the phone is Opera's Mobile browser, but even Internet Explorer 6, the newest version for the Windows Mobile OS, worked very well on this phone. IE6 even uses a sort of mini map aid that helped us navigate pages quickly, and the responsive Imagio let us flick pages by in both Opera and the standard Internet Explorer browser windows.
Pages also looked very good in both mobile browsers, and the HTC Imagio can even handle flash. We loaded up YouTube in IE6, and watched a stand-up comedian in a flash video window that took up nearly the whole screen, then blew-it up even more. Without a separate app, the Imagio was able to play flash videos inline. This is a trick we've seen before on new smartphones, but the HTC Imagio on Verizon Wireless handled flash videos in the browser better than any other smartphone we've tested.
Camera - Good
The camera on the HTC Imagio can take good pictures, but it's still a disappointment considering the great experience we had with the HTC Touch Diamond 2. Perhaps we just got luck with that phone, but the HTC Imagio produced images that lacks subtle details, instead bludgeoning the finer points with oversaturation and strange-looking postprocessing techniques. Whites explode and blow out their surroundings in a fog. The touch focus feature didn't seem to help much, and often failed completely, and the HTC Imagio could never create the interesting depth of field effects we wanted. Even the panorama and the DVD-resolution video recording features were both a letdown. Panoramic shots were not properly lined up in the camera, as the Imagio relies more on your own steady hand than on software tricks. Videos were better than most cameraphones thanks to their VGA resolution, but still looked watery and blocky, especially while the camera was moving. Check out our image samples below.
Self Portrait at DFW
Blue Bottle Coffee
Fountains
Hazy Parade
Del McCoury
Hardly Strictly Panorama
San Diego Skyline
San Diego Night Sky
GPS - Good
The HTC Imagio uses VZ Navigator for turn-by-turn directions. The gps tracking and navigation worked well on the device, but it lacked some of the frills we were expecting. On a high-end, touchscreen smartphone device like the Imagio, we're expecting an advanced version of VZ Navigator, but this wasn't even the best we've seen from Networks in Motion's software. The navigator can't use spoken input for directions, as we've seen on other Verizon Wireless phones, and the maps didn't interact well with the touch interface. TeleNav does a much better job adapting their app for high-end smartphones as Sprint Navigator and AT&T Navigator, so we're disappointed that the navigation experience on the HTC Imagio was sub-par.
Price and availability
The HTC Imagio will be available from Verizon Wireless on October 20 for $200 with a contract agreement and $100 mail-in rebate.
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