Handful of Nothing

Well, I finally got to use the HTC touch, and the only word that came to my mind was: crap.
Why? simply when you look at the videos you expect a little more.

First disappointment was the sensibility. Ok, it’s a lot better then the N800’s but at the same level they wanted to sell the user the “touch” marketing thing, to face the IPhone touch style but it just doesn’t work that easy. I tried once, twice and finally was able to bring the menu up, that was when the second disappointment happened:

Not smooth as it should. When you activate the “touch UI” you get a grey looking big GRID that animates like my grandmother running a marathon. (Actually my grandma would be a lot smoother, as she’s quite healthy) Then you flick your fingers across the screen and get the famous cube animation (again more or less smoth) and can look at the 3 main screens. And this is my third and final disappointment :

Shallow. Only 3 screens (maybe more) but the most important critic : it’s just ONE layer. you click and you will see the regular windows mobile UI (yes, you know those old scrollbars drawn only with lines?) and it’s very very bad designed UI. So people shouldn’t take me for not saying about the others because I already criticized here the Nokia multimedia UI for giving us a incredible taste of wow (the N95 screen) but then killing our excitement in the first click.

Please manufacturers: NO SHALLOW RICH UIs ok? Better you should call it menus or launcher. Only that but you end up bothering more than helping users. Why? Not only users today need to deal with Rich IDLE screen that can already launch your applications but also not-so rich menus, shortcut keys and multimedia menus. A lot of ways to accomplish a basic task. Instead of help you create doubt and that’s BAD.

So, if you are not a Windows mobile die hard fan, I really don’t recommend the HTC touch. And if you are a WM fan, go with other windows mobile device!