HTC Touch, also known as the HTC P3450 is a Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone designed and manufactured by HTC (A Taiwanese based manufacturer)

I heard about HTC Touch Phone from my brother when he returned from Taiwan. When we stopped by a shopping mall we even had a check on the HTC Touch in a mobile phone shop.

However due to the unavailability of a demo phone, we were not able to get a good overview of this touch phone and hence decided to defer the purchase until we had good knowledge of its features and shortcomings.

I came back and had a look at all the HTC videos uploaded on YouTube. It did look cool. After reading reviews including the one from MobileBurn I came to the conclusion that HTC Touch was a worthy replacement for my 2 year old Sony Ericsson T630. And at 20000 INR, its probably one of the cheapest slimmest smallest smartphone available in the market.

Here is my quick take on HTC Touch !

Packaging

The packaging is an extremely sturdy all black box is contained inside a logo sleev; Opening the top flap reveals the Touch staring you in the face with the two earphones on either side.

The other package contents include:

• User Manual – I was also surprised to see a color manual
• 1 GB Micro SD Card
• Power Adapter
• USB Cable – To connect the device to the PC.
• Extra Stylus
• 1 CD Containing ActiveSync 4.5 and Outlook 2007 Trial Version (3 Months)
• Another CD containing GPRS Monitor and Sprite Backup Software. These 2 application setup files use only 10MB on a 600MB CD !!

Specification

• TI’s OMAP 850, 201 MHz Process- The processor is probably on the slower side;
• Windows Mobile 6 OS
• 128MB ROM and 64MB SDRAM
• 112g with Battery
• 240 X 320 dots resolution – With the removal of the hardware keyboard, you now have more space for the display.
• Supports Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth
• 2MP camera
• Rechargeable Li-lon battery with an estimated Talk Time of 5 hours
• Micro SD Expansion Slot – The device can support a maximum of 2GB memory cards on this slot.

Features
HTC Touch is supposed to be first touch phone released and I have seen in many places where this device is compared to Apple iPhone. Mac Fans even have accused HTC of copying features from iPhone.

However going by iPhone’s announcement date, I wonder if HTC had time to come up a phone design and release it before Apple released iPhone.

One of the features highlighted in HTC’s marketing is the TouchFLOW feature. TouchFLOW features the Touch Cube which is a 3 Dimensional interface that gives you one touch access to your messages, Internet , Contacts and more.

The home screen also looks stunning. It features a instant local weather widget along with a customizable program launcher.

The home screen also features a shortcut via which you can easily stop the running programs.

The phone feature worked pretty well. The phone pad is large and hence I faced no trouble in typing the phone numbers.

However the Speakerphone doesn’t work that well. There is a shrill noise along with the audio output. I still have to test the camera !

To get a quick overview of other features, check the following video.

The below video is my first directorial venture . YouTube seems to have screwed up the video while processing the uploaded WMV file. I suggest you to view the video in the Full Screen mode. If it still looks odd, have a look at the original video here

The software used to capture the actions does not capture the touch navigation clearly and the screen changes might get confusing at times.As you can see from the Video, the UI is rarely sluggish and even if you did observe few, they were due to the simultaneous video capture.

My Initial 2 days with HTC Touch

As with any HTC Touch owner, I first tried out the TouchFLOWfeature. I immediately got used to it and had no trouble in bringing the cube to the foreground. I switched on the Wi-Fi via the communication manager. The weather widget immediately refreshed with the latest weather update. The Bluetooth pairing also went fine with my notebook.

On the applications front I tried out mobile versions of GMail and Google Search and yes I didn’t forget to download a Sudoku game app . I even synchronized all my Plaxo/Outlook contacts onto the handset.

Typing SMS was troublesome with the small keyboard and hence I installed the HTC T9 Phonepad (Usage of same can be seen in the above video). If any of you are using a smartphone/Pocket PC let me know if there some “must have” mobile applications.

Conclusion

At my workplace we do develop and test handset applications and till now HP iPaq was the popular choice. In terms of build/size and features I should say that HTC Touch does beat HP iPaq by a huge margin. The same even applies for the pricing. As of now I am happy with my choice and hopefully this phone would last for another couple of years

Of the few sports that I love watching, F1 and Tennis tops the list. Regarding the latter, its not just restricted to watching, I play the game a little bit too .

Yesterday’s French Open final between Roger Federer and Nadal was supposed to be a clash of the “titans” and I expected at least a 5 set thriller. However it turned out to be more of a one sided match. I have never seen Federer play that bad; The number of unforced errors he made were so untypical of him.

After Schumacher’s exit previous year, I was not sure if I would watch Formula1 racing with the same enthusiasm. However the guy who has caught everybody’s attention including me is the rookie Lewis Hamilton !

This guy has had a dream run till now on his debut year. He has stepped on the podium in all the 6 races and now leads the driver championship. The car that he is currently driving (McLaren Mercedes) is definitely of some help, but even then you got to have something to be in the top and win races.

He reminds me a little bit of Jacque Villeneuve when he entered F1 in 1996. His début was nothing less than spectacular; he became only the third Formula One driver in history to achieve both a pole and a podium position in his maiden grand prix.

He led the race until an oil leak, and team orders, forced him to slow and allow team mate Damon Hill to pass. He held on to finish second.

So is Hamilton the next Schumi or the next Jacque ?

P.S. Yesterdays race also had a spectacular crash by Robert Kubica. The fact that he survived with just a sprained leg is a testimonial of the safety standards set in Formula 1. (Move the video slider to 1:10 sec to quickly have a look at the crash)

I am sure many of you know what Sudoku is and many of you are also aware of how addictive the game is.

Sudoku sometimes spelled Su Doku, is a placement puzzle, also known as Number Place in the United States. The aim of the puzzle is to enter a number from 1 through 9 in each cell of a grid, most frequently a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 subgrids (called “regions”), starting with various numbers given in some cells (the “givens”).

Even though I had heard about Sudoku from many of my friends, I never bothered to solve these puzzles;i.e. until last week

Since then I am completely into Sudoku and one of the thing that any new Sudoku addict does is to find as many puzzles as possible.

Following is the list of the resources I have found:

• WebSudoku generates Sudoku puzzles on the fly and you can take a print of the same. It also allows you to print an e-book of Sudoku puzzles at 3$.
• Newspapers also carry a puzzle everyday; Fortunately I had 2 months of TOI newspaper sitting in my room and I just filtered out the Bangalore Times (The supplement of TOI which I never used to read )
• The official Sudoku site has a PC based game which churns out an endless supply of random, unique, original Sudoku puzzles. The trial version runs for 28 days after which you have to pay 15$ for the license.
  
• If you have own an iPod you should definitely check Sudoku for iPod developed by Electronic Arts and published by Apple Inc. Podophile has a very good review on the game and at 5$ it looks like its worth every penny.
  
  However I couldn’t buy the game from iTunes since I happen to stay in India and Apple doesn’t have a iTunes store in India. As far as I know Apple probably will never open the iTunes Store in India !!

If you are aware of any other good resource to find/play Sudoku, do leave a comment.

My hands are aching as I type this post ! All credit for the pain goes to this game called QWERTY Warriors !

The game is pathetically addictive and is supposed to improve your typing speed !

When I took the “Typing Test” some time back I was impressed by my own abilities. However I have not been able to find the same kind of success with this “warrior” game. This was the best I could get after trying 7 times !! Almost in all the tries I ended with a score near 55-60K !

Yesterday I was in the top 50 list, as of today you need at least 1 Lakh to be in the top 50 !! I am not going to pursue further unless one of you guys (readers) make more than 67 K && leave a comment challenging me to break it

My Acer notebook has a ATI Mobility Radeon X700 Graphics card with 256MB VRAM. Playing games with this high end card is always a treat ! However from the past few weeks, I am facing a weird problem.

It all started when I was playing one of my favorite games : Railroad Tycoon 3. This game was running normally for a few days. One day the screen suddenly went blank and the best I could do was to restart the system (after doing a forceful shutdown).

I tried the game few more times and ended with the same result; Display blanks out and doesn’t respond to any keyboard input, not even Ctrl+Alt+Del. I thought the problem was more with the game rather than the graphics card.

Few days back I downloaded the trial version of Caesar 4 (Another favorite game ). Guess what ? The display blanked out again !

I am trying hard to find the reason for this weird problem ! One thing I noticed is that the GPU (not CPU, CPU performance seems to be normal) does make a lot of sound when I start these games ! Does it blank out after the GPU reaches some max temperature ?

Is there a problem with the driver ? Also can somebody suggest me a nice tool to diagnose the graphics card health ? The Direct X diagnostic seem to be reporting no problems !

A “video” of How video games are designed (Its a part of one of the episode of Discovery Channels “How Its Made” Series)

Here is an video showing Top 10 ping pong rallies of all time. The top 2 are worth checking out, in fact the Top 1 rally extends for about 49 seconds !!  There is a nice song playing at the background, don’t forget to switch on your speakers

We all know about the famous or I should say “infamous” Zidane headbutt to Materazzi. On the next day itself, there were quite a few games (flash based) based on this incident.

I found another cool game at this link

http://footyflash.com/game/144/Zidanes-Forehead-Fr…

You just need to move the mouse and headbutt all those “Materazzis“. Zidane does grow bigger after some time and the materazzis do start coming in faster. A test for your mouse skills, or should I say a test of your mouse ?

I tried it couple of times (5 times to be exact) and came out with this score !

Really feeling sleepy, else would have liked to hit the century Give it a try and let me know if you beat this score ! Other than this, there are lot of other Games at the home page i.e. Footy Flash. Check out the Highly Rated games, I am sure you will be hooked onto these games for some time..

P.S. The Re-Play Link in the game is oddly placed (actually it doesn’t look like a link), you can find it at the top left corner, I am sure you will definitely be using this quite often to beat/reach my score.

I have a craze for computer games, especially strategy games. Age of Empires, Caesar 3, Railraod Tycoon,Rise of Nations, Dune are some of my favorites. Once I get hooked into the game, I never realize the passage of time.

Before I was introduced to a computer, I was hooked onto board games like monopoly and business.

Atari Play has online versions of some of the greatest games including monopoly. The multiplayer environment loaded up pretty fast and it was nice playing monopoly after many years .

Somehow I managed to land in jail more than on properties . Even the “chances” I got, asked me to go to jail . And on every turn rather than getting 200$, I was paying it in the form of taxes !

And its not just monopoly, There are many other games like Scrabble, Battleship etc.

Go check out ..