While touchscreen devices are nothing new in the PDA world, the Apple iPhone has definitely renewed interest in how your fingers can be used in place of a stylus for manipulating menus, changing views, and opening files. HTC's doesn't dance around their support for the idea with their new PDA phone, aptly named Touch.

You can still use a stylus with the Touch (and HTC includes one), but the large menu icons are designed more for finger tapping. You bring up the touch menu by swiping upwards with a finger, what HTC calls TouchFLO. There are three screens that you can switch between by swiping left or right (a 3-sided Touch Cube). The main home screen offers quick touch icons leading to often used applications such as email, calendar, and weather. The contact screen lets you add pictures for your entries and scroll through them quickly with additional finger swipes. The multimedia screen gives you access to photos, music, or video that you have stored on the PDA phone.

The TouchFLO interface works quite well and is easy to learn, but it loses some of its mystique when you access traditional folders in Windows with normal-sized icons and scroll bars. The Touch is running the latest Windows Mobile 6 Professional operating system, and it also features 802.11b/g wireless and Bluetooth for connecting to the Internet and synching to your computer, respectively.

The touch screen measures 2.8 inches, so it's smaller than what you'll find on most PDAs. But its 320x240 resolution is the same, so text and icons looks just as crisp. Our main beef with the Touch is that text is difficult to enter. If you're typing an e-mail, you'll have to bring up the on-screen keyboard, and the keys are too small to access with your fingertips. That size, however, means that the Touch is an extremely portable PDA phone. Weighing less than four ounces, the Touch goes almost unnoticed in a shirt pocket.

And HTC has packed some decent features into its small frame. There's a 2-megapixel digital camera that takes respectable shots. Storage space is a little underwhelming with only 128MB of ROM available--a few MP3s or video clips and it's full. Luckily, this PDA phone supports Micro SD slots, so you can expand its storage room.

The Touch is also a tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE cell phone, so you can get access to a phone signal or a cellular Internet connection almost anywhere. The battery on this PDA phone has over five hours of talk time life and standby power measured in days. If you need a PDA phone with unique touch-accessible menus, the extremely portable and well-designed HTC Touch gives other touchscreen devices a run for your money.

Pro: Unique touchscreen, very compact
Con: Pricey

Warranty
1 year, limited