LAST Friday, the handphone industry had one of its biggest shakeups ever with the release of the Apple iPhone.
The reviews have mostly been positive and almost every reviewer agrees that the iPhone is truly revolutionary both in looks and use.
That's good news, because I'm sick and tired of the stagnation in the industry.
It's increasingly difficult to write handphone reviews because the improvements are often superficial or marginal.
Surely you don't want to read about another slim or shiny phone?
To steal some thunder from the iPhone blitz, HTC decided to roll out the HTC Touch ($848) worldwide a few weeks ago.
Who's HTC you ask?
Well, the geeks will know.
HTC has been making PDAs and PDA-phones for the likes of Compaq, O2, i-mate and Dopod.
Recently, HTC bought over Dopod, so you'll be seeing HTC instead of Dopod-branded devices from now on.
And what's so special about the HTC Touch?
Well, it touts a special Touchflo interface that lets you scroll or pan across screens with your fingers, much like the iPhone's touch interface.
So say you are looking for a contact in the address book - you just nudge the list downwards with your thumb until you find it. Or flick your thumb to let the list scroll and slow down automatically.
Nudge the screen surface upwards and you get a TouchCube menu.
It's basically several screens of big buttons and often-used icons for your phone-call or messaging needs.
It's 'cube-like' because when you switch between screens, they rotate as if they are different faces of a cube.
But an iPhone-killer this is not.
Underneath the Touchflo interface is the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 (WM6) operating system, which you will be using very often.
Unfortunately, WM6 cripples the Touch's potential.
WM6 can be quite power-hungry, and the Touch's 200MHz processor sometimes cannot keep up.
Often, I had to poke at the virtual buttons to get a response, and some screen menus take too long to load.
WM6 also relishes the use of tiny fonts, and even though the Touch has a relatively large 2.8-inch screen, it can be frustrating to poke at the small text on screen with or without the stylus.
But I'm not saying that the Touch is lousy.
In fact, it is the best compact PDA-phone for WM6 fans, having all the works, from microSD memory card slot to WiFi to a 2-megapixel camera.
The ultra-compact size is great too - it's as small as many normal handphones.
But while this may really excite the geeks here, the Touch really isn't that different from older HTC-designed products I've reviewed before, just smaller and cuter.
