First impressions: it should just work
I’ve just spent a while down in a carphonewarehouse as Graham from the engineering team asked me to chum him along and help make the difficult decision of what new phone to get to replace his ancient Motorola RAZR. iPhone is too big and he already has an iPod Touch so he’s quite familiar with the user interface.
The choice was between an HTC Touch Diamond and the Samsung Tocca. Both roughly the same size, both touch screen, and both with cameras and the like. But the big difference is that the HTC Touch runs Windows Mobile with their own layer of graphics on top of it.
The HTC was the first device to be brought out, in a fancy pyramidal box. Once extracted from the case has a slightly strange diamond cut back to it. Impressive packaging and design, even if none of us actually liked it.
However the real horror was switching the thing on for the first time. It’s just like starting up a Windows PC - lots of questions, restarts, and well, it’s just not consumer friendly. We had to hand it over to Garry, our laconic Carphonewarehouse salesdroid to actually get it into the graphical user interface. And when we did there was at least a 2s lag on every operation. I clicked on what I thought would be SMS, to try the virtual keyboard, but it turned out to be e-mail and wanted configuring. Most consumers would have given up by this point. Someone at Microsoft and HTC have forgotten that this is supposed to be a phone primarily.
Clearly this is a lesson that Samsung have taken to heart. A nice package appeared out of the plain packaging and in a few seconds the phone was working. Particularly like the easy dragging of widgetty sort of things onto the desktop. However scrolling through lists was pretty wierd. Nice feedback on the touch screen, and the virtual keypad worked really well. That phone is really getting places. Only non-consumer issue was that the keyboard selection had EN as it’s label. For people who are not familar with locales, that’s not particularly clear.
In the end Graham decided that both devices had their strong points and their weaknesses and is going to think some more.
