Larger Than Life

The HTC Touch HD is one of the most attractive and well-designed Windows Mobile phones in the market today. Living up to its name, it features a gargantuan 3.8-inch high resolution (800 x 480 pixel) touchscreen. The design emphasizes a clean, uncluttered look. Even the usual volume rocker and power buttons have been slimmed down and there are no additional physical buttons on the device. The stylus snaps into place magnetically which is a nice touch. On top is a standard 3.5mm audio out jack and at the bottom is (thankfully) a mini USB jack for data transfer and charging The reset button is under the battery cover; seems they're quite confident that you won't need it that often. At the back is the lens for the 5 MP camera, which clicks average quality shots.

Being HTC's flagship, the hardware is sufficiently beefed up. You get a 528 MHz processor, 288 MB RAM and 512 MB RAM. So as you can imagine, things move along at a fairly rapid pace. The graphics-intensive TouchFlo 3D overlay that HTC has works without a stutter. Even after installing another 3D GUI (SPBs Mobile Shell), it all worked well. The main reason for this is a dedicated graphics chip, which frees up the processor for other mundane tasks. The screen has four touch sensitive buttons on the lower edge; answer, back, home and end. Each one gives a little haptic feedback, but strangely enough, they're not backlit. The mammoth battery will easily last two days. Overall very impressive if you don't mind the equally impressive price.