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HTC Touch vs Apple iPhone |
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It was an undoubtedly clever piece of staging by HTC to launch their new Touch smartphone to the Australian media mere days after the iPhone's celebrated US debut.
The Taiwanese colossus produces most of the world's Windows Mobile smartphones (under their own brand as well as the brand of many other companies and telcos) and PDAs, including original designs from HP and Palm, but this smart timing gave them guaranteed coverage as part of the iPhone wave and now allows them to surf off the off the extraordinary awareness of the iPhone and its entirely touch-driven interface.
So while the company's visiting executives initially seemed somewhat coy about mentioning that other touch phone during the Sydney launch of the HTC Touch, chief executive officer Peter Chou cheekily admitted that "We are actually very pleased that a company like Apple agrees with our direction".
Despite the Touch being in development for some two years, according to Chief Marketing Office John Wang, HTC wants it known that the Touch is no copycat, quickly whipped up to cash in in the iPhone's cachet. Wang also describes the Touch as a device that's "much more fine-tuned to the mobile experience. Even compared to previous Windows Mobile devices it is a huge improvement in innovation."
And compared to the iPhone? "The iPhone is a two-handed experience, because it's much larger" Wang told APC. "The whole thing is designed assuming you're holding a computer and using the other hand as the mouse. It's a great computer ... as a computer it's a wonderful device" he allows.
The Touch not only lacks a keyboard but any keys on the front panel, bar the obligatory Send and End keys plus a small five-way navigator. The rest of the front is give over to the screen, which sports a new HTC interface named ‘TouchFLO' (yes, we cringed as well). This is a combination of software and hardware to let users drive the device's main functions with a swipe of the finger or thumb.
More precisely, the movements are described as dragging or flicking your finger up, down or across the screen. This scoots through list-based applications such as an address book, scrolls through long document windows such as a web page, and also dives into and out of application menus.
The top-most layer of this is a ‘cube' representation which on each face has icons and controls for multimedia (pictures, video and audio playback), your contacts (starting with thumbnail photos of your most-called contacts, a sort of visual speed-dial) and a set of most-used applications.
It's all incredibly intuitive, and thanks to media coverage of the iPhone reaching almost Paris Hiltonesque heights, it seems people have suddenly become preconditioned to the novelty of a touch interface.
In fact, when we waved the HTC Touch in a few people's faces, the first comments ran along the lines of "So it's like an iPhone?", "Is it as good as an iPhone?" and "Stop waving that phone in my face!".
So let's not pretend that the HTC Touch lives in a vacuum. Here's a quick blow-by-blow comparo of these two touchy talkboxes.
Price & availability
The HTC Touch will be available around Australia next week through Optus and OfficeWorks, along with selected PC and mobile phone stores, with an outright cost of $699.
The iPhone is available in the US for US$499 or A$585 (for the 4GB model) and US$599 (A$700) for the 8GB model. Airfare from Australia is extra.
Wireless
Both the Touch and the iPhone use the GSM system - the Touch does the 900, 1800 and 1900MHz bands while the iPhone adds 850MHz to the mix to cater for widespread US and Canadian use of that band (due to pre-existing allocations at 900MHz, which despite our best efforts is something we can't blame on George Bush).
This may make them 'world phones' in terms of global roaming but it sucks in terms of data speed -- the multiband capability simply ensures it sucks in over one hundred countries.
While both phones use the EDGE enhancement to the GSM standard which can boost real-world data throughput on networks that support it to about 150Kbps, serious mobile emailers and those wanting to put the internet in their pocket will want to wait until these devices ship in at least a 3G variant (and ideally with HSDPA), which we'd tip for sometime next year.
Beyond the mobile telephony bands, both devices include inbuilt 802.11b/g WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0.
Size and weight
The HTC Touch is a just shade less of a brickette than the iPhone, although at the cost of a slightly smaller screen (see below). The Touch stands 99mm tall, 58mm wide and 14mm thin compared to the iPhone's slightly larger 115 x 61 x 11.6mm.
That final figure puts the iPhone on the slimmer side but it's also slightly heavier at 135 grams against the Touch's bantamweight 112 grams.
Screen
Here's where the iPhone starts to claw back the lead with a 3.5in diagonal widescreen display cast as a 480 x 320 pixels and driven at 160dpi.
The Touch's panel measures only 2.8in diagonally running at a substantially less dense 240 x 320 pixels (quarter VGA), which ensures the iPhone delivers not only better graphics but a more lush user experience.
And talking of things visual, both the iPhone and Touch sport a 2.0 megapixel digital camera.
Battery life
The Touch's 1100mAh battery sees the device rated at up to 200 hours standby and up to five hours talk time.
A physically larger battery (although we don't yet know the actual charge rating of the cell) helps Apple claim the iPhone delivers up to 250 hours on standby and 8 hours of talk time.
Processor
While Apple hasn't revealed the processor used by the iPhone (the official specs page doesn't even mention that it has a processor, although we doubt that it's powered by tiny mutant mice running in a miniature wheel), the recent ripping apart of numerous iPhones and leaked firmware reveals this is a 620MHz ARM chip, while those poking around inside the covers believe it's specifically Samsung's fresh-baked S3C6400.
HTC settled for Texas Instrument's OMAP850, which is a 200MHz ARM-based processor with integrated GSM+EDGE.
Memory
The Touch stores its OS and bundled software in 128MB of flash memory and 64MB of RAM. Users have access to 30MB of the flash memory for storing essential files or applications which you want protected from disaster and immediately available upon a hard reset. However, the Touch claims over half of the RAM for running applications so you'll find only around 20MB available for loading additional software and documents. That's why you'll appreciate the Touch's microSD memory card slot and the 1GB card which HTC includes tossed into the box.
The iPhone takes a very different approach to memory due to its iPodic nature, with a choice of 4GB or 8GB flash drives, with first reviews indicating that around 700MB of this is claimed by the operating system. However, we're not sure about the existence or size of any extra system memory, but we know for sure that there's no memory card slot.
Operating system
HTC enjoys BFF ('best friends forever') status with Microsoft and so it's no surprise that the Touch runs on Windows Mobile 6 - specifically the Windows Mobile 6 Professional variant which is equivalent to the former ‘Pocket PC Phone Edition' favoured among combo PDA-smartphone devices. This includes the Office Mobile suite for creating as well as viewing and editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.
The iPhone introduces Apple's own take on the mobile Mac OS, even if they're simply calling it ‘Mac OS X' and implying it's the exact same OS as your desktop or notebook Mac. It's not. Technically, the iPhone's OS is a subset of the real Mac OS X, which has not only been stripped of everything that's not needed on a iPhone in order to reduce the footprint to the aforementioned 700MB, but completely recompiled to run on an ARM platform (as the current OS X runs only on PowerPC and Intel chips). An error message spotted on the iPhone has reported the OS as being build ‘OS X 1' - that's right, not OS X 10-point-anything, but a raw 1.0 edition.
Of course, the iPhone's OS X still shares its foundations with the mainstream OS X 10 series, including the ‘Core Animation' feature that's slated for Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5).
Third-party software
The HTC Touch can run any of the wealth of Windows Mobile software, so right out of the box it's a mote flexible tool than the iPhone, which is currently limited to whatever applications developers choose to whip up using Ajax or JavaScript (which will then run via the Safari browser).
And finally: touchability
Within its TouchFLO environment, the HTC Touch is a slick device with a smooth end-user experience which delivers everything it promises. Once you step into Windows Mobile, however, it loses some of that shine.
You can still touch and tap with your finger - in fact, the interface has been tweaked so that if you touch an application's close button, the device senses that you're in ‘finger mode' and enlarges the hot spot which is associated with that tiny X icon (you don't see any change, the icon doesn't suddenly grow in size, but there's a larger response area around the icon). And you can scroll up and down through Web pages, Word documents, your contacts list and inbox with a swipe of your finger. There's also a stylus for when real accuracy is needed.
But this simply can't compare with the iPhone, where the OS, software and hardware are all designed by Apple, so the touch experience is far more deeply ingrained into every application. This is what gives the iPhone its additional gestures such as pinching or expanding as well as their effects on web pages and other iPhone apps.
One device which is done top-to-tail by Apple, another that's built in layers (and with varying degrees of integration) created by Microsoft and partners - it's the old desktop story, now repeated in the palm of your hand.
Submitted Date: Jul 06, 2007
Source: Australian Personal Computer
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