HTCS TOUCHI ITIALLY LOOKS LIKETHEWI DOWS Mobile iPhone. But underneath its Potemkin touch interface lies the same old Windows Mobile operating system, which struggles with serious usability problems if you want to operate it with your fingers alone. The result is that the Touch adds up to a handset that seems half-fast and ultimately unsatisfying. There's no denying that the Touch is a beautiful little slab smartphone, a rounded black pebble of a piece with a big touch screen above two buttons and a five-way cursor rocker. On the back, there's a 2-megapixel camera.

Turn it on and you're presented with the bold, usable, and finger-friendly interface that Windows Mobile 6 should have hadand that we hope Windows Mobile 7 will feature. A big digital clock sits on the top of the screen, above alert buttons for messages and calls and a list of your day's appointments. By sweeping your finger up the screen, you bring up a launcher with nine bold icons corresponding to popular applications. Sweep your finger to the side and you get to choose among music, video, and photo options. Sweep it to the side again and you can touch the picture icons of your top contacts to make calls.

This "TouchFLO" interface is great. It's just what Windows Mobile needs. But with a few exceptions, it doesn't go past the launcher stage. (HTC has also loaded in a finger-friendly music application, a camera application, and a phone dialer.) So when you drop into e-mail, Office Mobile, or any other application, you're back to poking at extremely tiny icons with an extremely picky stylus. This gets old very, very fast.

Since the Touch is an all-touch-screen device, figuring out how to get text into it is one of the phone's big challenges. Microsoft's on-screen keyboard is built for tiny miniature people, and alas, the full-screen transcriber had some real trouble with accuracy. I had the best luck with the "block recognizer" mode, which is like an old PalmPilot's Graffiti area. But I still had to scribble with my stylus, not my finger. +The Touch also feels slow, a problem endemic to touch-screen Windows Mobile 5 or 6 devices with 200-MHz processors.

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Sometimes the virtual buttons took several presses to respond. Launching applications, especially Windows Media Player, feels gummy. If you try to change the volume during the first few seconds after launching HTC's audio manager, there's a noticeable delay in button response. Don't get me wrong, the Touch is a decent phone. Volume is loud enough, and voices are pleasing, though there's no noise cancellation in the microphone. You can use wired (via USB) or Bluetooth headsets, and there's a built-in voice-dialing application, but it requires you to record tags. Considering how slim the device's svelte profile is, battery life is excellent. Basically, the HTC Touch is a tease. It tempts you with a new interface that makes you feel like you'll fly across the device.