At A Glance:

In the box
- HTC Touch Viva
- USB Charger
- Charger

HTC’s Touch Viva is the younger brother of the HTC Touch, and the phone is marketed as a much more entry-level smartphone. By toning down the features, we are looking at a much affordable phone with basic functionality. Let’s see if it’s worth your while.

Design
The Touch Viva sports a candybar design, reminiscent of the HTC Touch family, a wide body width and like the Touch, the Viva has the same layout of buttons, call/end call and the D-pad. The phone’s left spine has a volume rocker while the bottom has the universal port for charging and headphones. The top of the Viva has the screen unlock button which also doubles as a power button. The top right hand corner hides the stylus.

The phone is a little on the heavy side at 120g, but is compact and easy to pocket. The phone relies on a universal port for power charges and plugging in your headphones. So no multitasking when the charger is plugged in.

The Viva has a 65K 2.8 inch screen, the screen is full touch and considering the colours the resolution is quite decent. It does have sunlight legibility issues. The touchscreen is quick and responsive, while we ranted about the thin scroll bar being unresponsive, the Viva’s has been better and responsive. Much of the features have to still be access with the stylus, due to the icons smaller size.

The TouchFlo 3D is also back and is the gloss over the Windows Mobile 6.1 OS, it is noticeably responsive in this iteration. That aside, users can expect the same functionality- from checking you weather forecast to accessing your SMS’.

Features
Windows Mobile users should feel quite at home with the 6.1 OS, newcomers shouldn’t be too troubled with the interface due to the improve response time. And expert users will want to delve deeper in to Windows, where most of the tweaking occurs.

The Touch Viva has an OMAP 850 201 MHz processor and with the dialled down functionality probably explains the improved response time.

The task manager tab makes another faithful comeback, though don’t expect Windows Mobile to automatically shut off programmes remaining on your task manager. So you’ll have to do periodical clean-up your task manager.

As usual, you can set up playlist through HTC’s music player-sorting, adding and creating new playlist are all a breeze to do. Audio quality is good, and at maximum volume our songs came out pretty clear. Another plus is the TouchFlo’s music player ability to recognise your music playlist automatically when you insert your MicroSD card. You can still op for the Windows Media Player, as it works similarly as before. The device also sports a Youtube player.

With Mobile office, you can do work on the go, from Word processing to Excel documents. The phone has PIM functionality, from calendar/organiser, alarm, adobe document reader, notes, tasks and push e-mail.

Another plus is the impressive battery life, which lasts up to almost two weeks on standby mode. We also managed to cram in a day’s worth of battery life from surfing, texting and calling.

We were hoping that Opera was bundled into the Viva, but Internet Explorer does come along with Windows Mobile 6.1.

Camera
The Touch Viva boasts a 2.0 megapixel camera without LED flash at 1600x1200 pixel resolution. No auto-focus though, and the picture quality can get a little fuzzy, especially under low lighting environments.

Connectivity
The phone has a good amount of connectivity options - quad band (GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900), GPRS and Wi-Fi, which is a plus for an entry level smartphone. The lack of 3G stings a little especially in non Wi-Fi areas.

Games
Windows Mobile 6.1 still sees Bubble Breaker and Solitaire, not much here but the same old.

Our verdict
The Touch Viva is a lower-priced alternative to usually up-market smartphones. The phone carries over the bulk of the Touch’s features. The real qualm is the lack of 3G, which hinder it from being a true smartphone. Also, the camera isn’t up to chops if you are a photo buff.

But it’s still recommended at RM 1,299 to entry-level smartphone users, especially those who don’t rely much on data usage.

• Tags : HTC Touch Viva