HTC Touch -- A Smartphone Designed to Compete with the iPhone

HTC Corp. has just launched the HTC Touch, a smartphone whose fingertip-oriented control system was clearly created to compete with Apple's iPhone.

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The Touch runs Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, but it includes a new way of controlling touchscreen-based devices developed by HTC.

Like the iPhone, this model is capable of recognizing and responding to the sweep of a finger across the screen. HTC's new system is even intelligent enough to distinguish between finger and stylus input and then respond accordingly.

Welcome to TouchFLO

The HTC Touch is the first device to feature TouchFLO, the new touchscreen control technology developed by HTC.

By sweeping their finger up the display, users launch an animated, three-dimensional interface made up of three screens: Contacts, Media, and Applications. The interface can be spun by swiping a finger right or left across the display, providing easy access to the features used most.

TouchFLO also offers finger touch scrolling and browsing of Web pages, documents, messages ,and contact lists.

"With the HTC Touch, access to your most commonly used content, contacts and features is only a simple finger flick away," said Peter Chou, chief executive officer of HTC. "Mobile phone makers have done a great job of cramming ever-more exciting features into ever-smaller phones. But the way in which one accesses these increasingly sophisticated features has not kept pace. That ends today with the HTC Touch."

Windows Mobile, Too

HTC may have put a new application launcher on the Touch, but at this smartphone's heart is Windows Mobile 6 Professional.

This comes with a suite of business-related applications, including Office Mobile, which lets users work with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in their native formats.

Windows Mobile 6 Pro also offers support for Microsoft's Direct Push email system, and well as the ability to view email in HTML format.

Don't Forget the Hardware

There's more to the Touch than software. The device itself is a version of HTC's Elf, a Pocket PC phone with a consumer-oriented design.

The all-important touchscreen will be 2.8 inches and have a 320-by-240-pixel (QVGA) resolution.

This GSM phone will offer GPRS/EDGE, but no 3G capabilities. It will, however, have Wi-Fi b/g and Bluetooth 2.0.

It will include 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB of ROM, and the Touch will ship with a 1 GB microSD card.

A 2.0 megapixel camera will also be part of this device.

Availability

The HTC Touch is now available in the United Kingdom and will be released later this month in Asia and throughout Europe.

A version for North America and Latin American will be released in the second half of 2007.

More information on the Touch can be found at www.htctouch.com.

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