HTC Touch

HTC redefines the smartphone. But not a lot.

Smartphones aren't the most glamorous of devices, so the HTC Touch stands out. It's a gorgeous slab of rubber-backed plastic, dominated by a 2.8-inch LCD touchscreen, yet it does all the smartphone stuff that we know and love, from push-email, to viewing PDF documents, to spending hours slogging through horrifically complex menus.

That's the thing about the Touch. It hides the usual Windows cack under a thin veneer of iPhone-style user-friendliness.

You whip your finger up the screen to summon HTC's vaunted TouchFLO menu, giving you easy access to media operations, Internet Explorer and more. However, finger the nice, big touchscreen buttons and you're back in Windowsland, with tiny icons, ugly layouts and demands for IEEE 802.1b settings, whatever they might be. It's like having your order taken by a handsome and immaculately turned-out waiter, only to have the food brought by a drooling imbecile in a filthy smock.

The touchscreen is quite robust, but it does scuff up when you dementedly pound it with a clawhammer after enduring its slow and unreliable response.

The camera and music player, complete with horrid earphones, are poor. There's no 3G, and Wi-Fi sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. The less said about the touchscreen keyboard, the better - it's so wee, it can only be operated by stylus, and is a far less efficient way of entering text than the 12-button SMS system.

This is the best-looking of its breed and Windows Mobile fanboys will mock complaints about the cumbersome OS, pointing to its "versatility" instead. But with no 3G and no proper keyboard, even smartphone nuts won't love it.