When Taiwanese wireless-handset maker HTC launched its Touch smartphone in June, I fell for its sleek look and the intuitive touch-screen navigation. But I decided against buying the device because it lacked 3G network support and the on-screen keyboard was too tiny for my tired eyes. Someone at HTC must have been paying attention to various reviews of the Touch because the company has released the more powerful Touch Dual, which suffers from neither of those drawbacks. Key features The Touch Dual ups the ante by featuring a slide-out keyboard, available in 16-key or 20-key versions, for easy typing with one hand. The 20-key version assigns two letters to each key, as does Sony Ericsson's P1i smartphone. An important addition is 3.5G - or high-speed downlink packet access - network support, which provides up to 3.6 megabits per second data transmission for fast internet connection and mobile roaming capability in Japan and South Korea. Another significant upgrade is in processor power. The Touch ran on a 201-megahertz processor, while the Touch Dual sports a 400-MHz chip, which means applica-tions on the new device will run more smoothly. Double the magic TouchFLO, HTC's proprietary gesture-recognition technology, has been enhanced on the Touch Dual. Users can now view photo slideshows using on-screen controls and zoom and rotate images with one hand. Finger-touch scrolling and browsing of Web pages, docu-ments, messages and contact lists have also been improved. More memory - 256 megabytes of read-only memory and 128MB of synchronous dynamic random access memory - helps the Touch Dual run applications faster. Like the Touch, it runs the Windows Mobile 6 Professional system. Missing link But there are some disadvantages to the Touch Dual. It has a 2.6-inch screen, which is smaller than the Touch's 2.8-inch display. It is slightly heftier than the previous model, measuring 107mm x 55mm x 15.8mm and weighing 120 grams with battery. It also inexplicably omits Wi-fi support, which is a feature every other high-end smartphone model has. The Touch Dual costs about HK$4,700.
