Click to View

Alltel this week became the latest mobile operator to offer HTC's Touch smartphone, the original design manufacturer's successful answer to Apple's iPhone. HTC has shipped more than a million Touches worldwide since its introduction last June.

As with the iPhone, the main means of interaction between the user and the Touch is through ones fingers (instead of stylus) and the smartphone's display, which measures 2.8 inches diagonally, sports a 240 x 320 pixel (QVGA) resolution, and supports 65,536 colors.

Unlike the iPhone, the Touch is built on Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6 Professional operating system, currently a far more open mobile platform for which thousands of applications are available. Expect the amount of software for the iPhone to explode after Apple introduces a software development kit for its smartphone next month.

The Touch features HTC's TouchFLO technology, which essentially grafts an advanced touch interface onto Windows Mobile. As a result, it is capable of recognizing and responding to the sweep of a finger across the screen. It is even supposed to be intelligent enough to distinguish between finger and stylus input.

Sweep your fingers across the display to launch an animated, three-dimensional interface comprising three screens: Contacts, Media and Applications. The interface can be spun by swiping a finger right or left across the display, providing what appears to be easier access to these features for consumers than a normal Windows Mobile interface for most.

TouchFLO also delivers finger touch scrolling and browsing of Web pages, documents, messages and contact lists.

As a Windows Mobile Professional device, the HTC Touch offers Outlook Mobile, Office Mobile for editing and reading native Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Pocket Internet Explorer and Windows Live. With it, you can view HTML-formatted e-mail and push e-mail in an Exchange environment.

The Touch measures only 4 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches and weighs 4 ounces. It lacks Wi-Fi but sports Bluetooth and supports Alltel's high-speed EV-DO 3G data network.

There's a 2 megapixel with 5x zoom for picture and video, 64MB of RAM, 128MB of ROM and a microSD slot for extra storage.

Touch is powered by a 400MHz processor and battery that specs out to last 200 hours standby and up to 5 hours of talk time.

The Alltel Touch includes some carrier-specific features, just like the version offered by Sprint in the U.S.

Alltel's Touch features four panels on the smartphone's "cube" interface, for example. These include an Alltel-exclusive panel that provides users with quick access to the latest smartphone applications. There's also Alltel's Voice2TXT service from Spinvox, which converts incoming voicemails to text and sends them to the user's text inbox.

Alltel is offering the Touch for $200 after a $100 mail-in rebate and after a two-year contract.