HTC Touch Dual

Interface and Practicality
The HTC Touch Dual runs on Windows Pocket Mobile 6, with a lot of tweaking. It has 128MB of RAM and 256MB of ROM, along with a Qualcomm MSM 7200, 400 MHz processor. This has helped it shed some of the sluggishness of the Touch, yet the heavy mechanics of the TouchFLO coupled with the memory intensive applications ensure that the handset continues to be slow.

TouchFLO happens to be inspired heavily by the iPhone interface, and you'd be forgiven for expecting it to be as smooth as in the latter. However, while this isn't the case, the TouchFLO does seem to respond much better than the Touch – the processor speed is WAY better. Navigation is simple, even for those who have never used Windows Mobile before.

Getting to the settings, however, can be a pain. Especially if you need to get one of your favorite songs to be your ringtone. However, there's an easier way of doing this. Just click on the the Start menu and go to File Explorer. Press and hold down the stylus on the selected file, wait for the drop-down menu, and choose "Set as ringtone".

The touchscreen isn't very responsive either. It's time HTC pulled a couple of rabbits out of its hat, including a new innovative touchscreen interface. I also found ActiveSync a problem. More than half the time it kept connecting and disconnecting on its own whim. I faced another problem when it came to transferring files. I thought it was a computer-specific problem, or maybe a handset-related one. However, a friend who recently bought this phone claims he's faced similar issues.

Messaging on a touchscreen Windows Mobile phone has never been this convenient. You now have the option to use the touchscreen QWERTY keypad or the numeric keypad, just as in regular phones. It makes use of an adaptive XT9 dictionary, which can be sheer bliss – once you get the hang of it.

Settings are pretty extensive. However, this makes life a bit complicated if you are not really interested in tweaking the phone. HTC clearly wants to give you control of everything, right down to what happens when you "long-press" the end key!

Enterprise Utilities
Like all Windows Mobile phones, the HTC Touch Dual is equipped with office tools, plus some more. It does have Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and at the same time you can open files received as attachments. You can open Zip files, and for good measure the phone comes equipped with Adobe reader to read PDFs. Having a numeric keypad also helps in taking notes etc.

The phone supports push mail facility; so you can synchronize Office mail with Outlook.