Really irritating to use after a while!. Review on HTC Touch P3450

My wife had a HTC Touch P3450. She bought it mainly because she was desperate to have a touch screen phone. Finally after 8 months, she got totally fed up with it and sold it recently and bought a Sony Ericsson w610i.

Here are my observations on the HTC Touch:

Cons:

• I feel this phone is not good for regular users who mainly want to SMS or call or want to listen to music/FM. Because it uses Windows Mobile as the OS, you have to navigate a bit to reach the menu of your choice(call/SMS/media player menus). This, coupled with the fact that you have to use a stylus to browse(touch screen) makes it really irritating to use after a while.

  
  




• The touch screen is not as sensitive as that of the iPhone and fonts are very small, so many times you have to use the stylus to tap though sometimes you can manage with your fingers. Even scrollbar is very narrow so it's difficult to scroll up and down in the web browser or system folders.

  
  




• Built-in alarm tones are not at all useful. There is not a single decent alarm tone in the phone. All the available ones are just fancy message tones. And it's not straightforward at all to import new tones. So as a result, my wife used to set up her alarms on my phone instead!;-)

  
  




• Using the built-in Internet Explorer browser is not convenient as you have to type by tapping the on-screen keyboard which again has very small alphabets, so you can't type fast. Handwriting recognition is present but is not very efficient and needs a lot of "training". And even after that, the recognition is not very accurate.

  
  




• Camera(2MP) is not very good(blurry pictures) and doesn't have a flash.

  
  




• Basic Windows media player. No FM player.

  
  




• Phone came with 128 MB external memory, which of course is not at all enough nowadays.

  
  




• Phone is a bit slow overall.

  
  




• Battery drains really fast. She used to charge it almost daily. Also, the phone gets heated while charging.

  
  

Pros:

• Might be good for business users, since it has Wi-fi/Bluetooth, Calendar, Microsoft Exchange support, Microsoft Office Word/PowerPoint/Excel viewer, PDF viewer, handwriting recognition and other standard advantages of Windows Mobile OS(Media Player, Internet Explorer, etc.).

  
  




• Good for those hooked to touch screens but don't want to spend a fortune on the iPhone

  
  

Conclusion:

In short, for regular uses it's better to go in for a regular high end phone. This phone is frustrating for day-to-day phone applications like calling, SMSing, listening to music, etc.