HTC Touch HD2

So many smartphones are flooding onto the market right now it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees, but the hotly-anticipated HTC Touch HD2 is one of the few that stands out.

Big, bold and desperate for attention, this is an absolutely huge phone, measuring a pocket-stretching 67mm wide and 120.8mm tall - it's not what you'd call shy and retiring. The size is largely due to the screen, which is the largest and brightest screen we've ever come across on any phone. It measures 4.3in across, boasts a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels and is eye-poppingly bright.

But it isn't just impressive on paper. The first time you meet this phone in the flesh it makes you go weak at the knees. It's the perfect smartphone specimen: shapely in all the right places, tightly knitted together and with the sort of quality feel that even Apple would be envious of. It's a phone that'll make you dribble like a fool the first time you clap eyes and fingers on it, and it makes every other phone on the planet look second-rate.

Screen test
Start using the Touch HD2 and that love affair may well continue, for though this phone does unfortunately run Windows Phone, it's the first we've come across with a capacitive touchscreen. All others Windows phones we've seen, including HTC's, make use of resistive touchscreens - the reason is to keep the potential for stylus operation and handwriting recognition alive.

Fortunately, HTC has layered its own touch-friendly user interface over the top of Windows Phone, which makes a stylus unnecessary, and it's a great decision. Where the resistive touchscreen of the original HTC Touch HD required pressure, or the end of a nail, to activate, you can merely brush the display of the HD2 with a touch as light as a feather and it will respond instantly.

It's multitouch too, so where BlackBerry Storm2 and Android handset owners are left tapping feverishly at their screens to zoom in and out, those lucky enough to have an HD2 can use iPhone-alike pinch gestures. Again, the response of the Opera browser is instantaneous, with very little lag on zoom operations, adding to the feeling that this is a phone that means business.

Under the hood
In fact, in general operation, the HTC Touch HD2 feels more like an iPhone 3GS than any other smartphone we've tested and that's largely down to what's inside. Instead of simply transplanting the innards from its last Touch HD - a practice that HTC has been following with every one of its smartphones over the past couple of years - this second generation boasts the cutting-edge Snapdragon chipset.

The clockspeed is an impressive 1GHz, backed up with 448MB of RAM, and this helps it feel like there's nothing the HD2 can't do. Want to watch video at native resolution? Check. Edit video? Check. Browse websites without having to wait an age? Check. In fact it's the only phone we've found that can come close to the iPhone 3GS for speed, loading up the BBC homepage over Wi-Fi in an average of 13 seconds compared to 8 secondsfor Apple's finest. And don't forget the HD2 is having to render more pixels than the iPhone too.

Elsewhere, the phone is very well equipped - as you'd expect of a top-end luxury handset like this - with GPS, digital compass, HSDPA, 802.11g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and an FM radio tuner. You also get a 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash and such niceties as face detection and touch autofocus. Plus, of course, it shoots video - in this instance at up to VGA resolutions and 25fps.

Sound quality is decent and picture quality from the camera good too, with clean colours and crisp detail capture, but video is not up to the same standard. Movies looked soft and blurry and the phone has a tendency to burn out highlights badly.

Software
HTC's TouchFLO 3D UI is still firmly nailed down over the top of Windows Phone and that's a good thing as Microsoft's mobile OS didn't impress us with its overhaul earlier in the year. It's had a little lip gloss applied this time around, with customisable application shortcuts added to the main home screen and thumbnail shortcuts added to the browser home screen.
The big bonus is that it's now harder than ever to drop into the ugliness of Windows Phone. Appointments, contacts and alarms can all be added without recourse to tiny checkboxes and fiddly dropdowns. And the new Windows Phone honeycomb application launcher grid helps to shield you even further, to the extent that it's actually quite hard to find those old, PDA-style settings screens.

HTC has included a host of social networking tools, with apps for Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live preloaded. And the phone also comes stacked with useful applications and tools. There's a trial version of CoPilot Live 8 (satnav never looked so good), a utility that lets you set the phone up as a mobile Wi-Fi router complete with encryption (WEP not WPA), plus an MP3 audio trimmer and a YouTube viewer for when you get bored on the road.

Plus, there are all the traditional benefits of owning a Windows Mobile phone too. Although this phone is firmly in the consumer camp, you benefit from tight synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, plus there's the full suite of mobile Office applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

Weaknesses
But this is not a perfect phone by any means. The size might have obvious benefits for browsing and videos, but try squeezing this phone into your jeans pocket and you're going to struggle. It's not just the size that gets in the way - the sharp-edged camera lens housing protrudes a couple of millimetres from the main body of the phone and catches on the lip of your pocket.

Hold it up to your ear to make a phone call and you'll likely feel a little silly, not to mention uncomfortable. The five buttons below the screen don't feel as well made as the rest of the phone either. They might look nice in their black brushed-aluminium-effect finish, but there's little travel or click to any of them.
Performance, while excellent most of the time, isn't quite up to the mark when it comes to spinning the screen around from portrait to landscape, with a two-second delay rudely interrupting an otherwise responsive experience. We also found it wasn't 100% stable, with the phone falling over from time to time while browsing.

Although HTC would like us to forget that the dowdy Windows Phone sits underneath all that glitz and glamour, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that it occasionally rears its ugly head. Read an email message, for instance, or fire up any of the Office applications and the bland screen that results can be quite jarring.

And, no matter how hard HTC tries, its Windows Phone handsets will always be more complicated and confusing for consumers than its main rivals. Witness the way synchronising Gmail and Facebook contacts is handled: with Android handsets, Gmail messages and contacts are synchronised with one simple sign-in; here you have one for email and another set of credentials to add to synchronise contacts. And oddly the main People view doesn't integrate all of your contacts in the same way as the same tool on HTC's Hero phone.

The final weak point is battery life, which is far from stellar. In our new battery tests we attempt to simulate a day of medium-intensity use and record how much charge remains after 24 hours; the HD2 only had 37% remaining. That compares unfavourably to every phone we've tested in this way to date - worse than the HTC Touch2 (60%), the BlackBerry Bold 9700 (70%), the Samsung Galaxy (61%) and the iPhone 3GS (55%). Only the abysmal LG Chocolate proved worse, failing to even make it to the end of a day.

Conclusion
Don't get us wrong, there are many reasons to love the HTC Touch HD2. Its screen is quite brilliant, its build quality droolworthy, and performance is generally excellent too. It has a competent camera, leaves no feature unincluded and is available on some surprisingly reasonable deals from T-Mobile. Pay £166.37 inc VAT for the phone and you'll only have to fork out £22.50 per month for a contract that includes 200 minutes and texts plus unlimited internet. But, if you're seriously considering buying one, you need to be prepared for the occasional rough edge.

Price when reviewed: £435 (£500 inc VAT)