• PC World
• »Phones

Sprint Touch -- Trying to Be an iPhone

This handset isn't the iPhone, but HTC--the manufacturer behind Sprint's version of the Touch--certainly does what it can to introduce iPhone-esque swipes and glides to the Touch's Windows Mobile 6 interface. The company does so with hardware tweaks and its own software, written to integrate with Windows Mobile yet provide a very different, more simplified experience. The result includes screens such as this one: a home screen that's easy to read and navigate compared with a typical Windows Mobile home screen. Other screens include a weather shortcut and a customizable quick-launcher. The TouchFLO interface is single-touch, as opposed to Apple's multitouch design, and you can't pinch and squeeze. What it does do, though, it does well: Swipe your finger from the Sprint logo on up, and you'll activate the cube interface; swipe your finger again from left to right (or the reverse) to rotate through "faces" of the three-dimensional cube. The interface has a dialing-shortcuts screen (up to nine contacts with images); a screen with six large square shortcut buttons to Sprint's software store, instant messaging, Internet Explorer, SMS messaging, the device's Comm Manager, and e-mail; and a Sprint shortcuts screen leading to Sprint Music and TV shopping services, plus Sprint On-Demand for current news, weather, sports, and finance information (customized by zip code). You can use touch to scroll or page through options in many of the Windows Mobile applications, including contacts, calendar, and e-mail.