Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

My first piece of work at Tom's Hardware's Gear Digest site in the US is a review of the HTC Touch, one of a large number of finger-touch devices that are beginning to appear:

You might not be able to tell from the advertisements, but the Apple iPhone isn't the first smartphone with a touch screen. HTC has been making Windows Mobile phones since they were PDAs with add-on GSM cards, under a variety of brands, and many of them have been touch screen phones. But the new HTC Touch is the closest thing to an iPhone running Windows Mobile, which means a huge range of applications are already available for it, and there's a CDMA version on the way this year. Has the little Taiwanese smartphone development house managed to beat Apple to the punch, or has it lost its touch?

HTC's new TouchFlo user interface is what prompts most of the comparisons with the iPhone. Certainly there are similarities, in that both are designed to work with your finger rather than a stylus. However that's where the similarities end. The iPhone uses a multi-touch screen that lets you use two fingers to zoom and detects when it's against your face or in your pocket. The Touch is still using the more common (and much cheaper) single-touch screens that have been a standard feature on PDA phones for a while.

Read more here.