ItQLab

The Taiwanese mobile manufacturer HTC is in no way lagging behind any other major mobile makers in terms of technology or innovative product features. The only thing its lagging behind from others, perhaps is the hype that others create or get. It quitely entered the wold market and our countrymen now don't hesitate to vouch on HTC's touch phones. And that too in the era of Apple iPhone.
Following groundbreaking innovations like the Android-powered G1 and the iPhone-bothering Touch HD, Taiwanese whiz kid HTC has gone back to the future with its latest handset, an updated version of the original Touch from 2007. many telecommunication countries have always loved new technology and poses as the biggest market for the mobile manufacturers. However, its a budget conscious country too. HTC launched the Touch Viva.

It's launched with an alternative budget handset with the same styling as the Touch 3G, but offers a few updated features over its predecessor. With higher specced alternatives seemingly emerging almost weekly from HTC, the HTC Touch Viva is more easily defined by what it is missing, most notably a 3G connection, GPRS and a 3.5mm jack, plus it's several megapixels short of a decent camera.
Holding back to the original Touch's form factor, with a large D-pad flanked by call start and stop buttons, it manages the trick of being slightly larger than its predecessor, but lighter too, and comes at a little over half the price of an HTC Touch or Pro.

It uses the lessons learned from the Touch's shockingly rapid learning curve, but the cost-cutting omissions soon make themselves known. It has the TouchFLO interface riding on top of the Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS, for instance, but not the slightly more groovy TouchFLO 3D. It doesn't look as good, but it looks okay, certainly better than the original, and it's every bit as practical.
It was a strange decision to recess the touch screen though, which means it's awkward to reach it with your thumb at the edges, where the scroll bars are. It means you're encouraged to use the stylus, whether you want to or not. There could be an argument that the recession helps to protect the screen, but not as well as the cover that came with the original Touch (there isn't one with the Viva), and what's the point of protection if it interferes with useability?
Almost as debilitating is the lack of 3G, though it will deliver quad-band GSM as well as 2.5G GPRS and EDGE. You'll find Wi-Fi included though, so higher-speed browsing isn't an impossibility, you'll just be a bit restricted about where you can do it.
The screen is a sizeable 2.8-inches with 240x320 pixel resolution - nothing that's going to push the envelope but perfectly adequate for what's required. The internal memory has been beefed up to 128MB from the painfully measly 64MB of the original and there's a microSD card slot too, though it's under the battery so unlike the original Touch, it's not hot-swappable.
Perhaps surprisingly, the 210 MHz TI OMAP 820 processor is the same as that in the original Touch. Improved processor speed is generally given with updated smartphones, though to be fair, it only seemed to struggle when we had half a dozen applications running at once. Listening to music while browsing the web for instance, didn't present any problems.

The browser defaults to Opera, though Windows Explorer is also available, and browsing is for the most part every bit as good as on other recent Touch models. You can move around web pages by brushing the screen in whichever direction you choose, and pressing the zoom icon onscreen produces a slider which allows you to adjust the page size to whatever you like. Unfortunately, there's no accelerometer on board, and no option to switch the display's orientation to landscape mode, the best way to view full web pages.

The onscreen keyboard is just about big enough to work with thumbs, though again, the lip of the recess can make it a bit tricky to reach the characters at the extreme edges of the screen. We also missed having the option to flip the handset on its side, which might also have made room for larger keys, though switching to compact Qwerty keyboard mode, where each key has two letters helped speed things up a bit.

HTC's addictive YouTube connection is here, allowing you to browse and view the site's online video with ease and fortunately, it switches to landscape in this app for viewing video.
The camera sports a mere two megapixels, which seems almost perverse in these eight-megapixel plus times. The camera has always been the weak link on HTC's Touch devices, with even the five-megapixel version on the recent Touch HD failing to deliver as well as other similarly specced snappers and with no autofocus or flash, photography is clearly not a priority here. That said, there's a 2x digital zoom and the pictures aren't bad if they're taken in reasonable light and don't have much movement going on in them. Viewing pictures isn't as much fun as on other Touchs models however, as the Viva doesn't do the automatic zoom thing when you move your fingertip in circles on the screen, or allow you to brush your way to the next picture.

The music player is the same as other Touch handsets and very good it is too, even through the surprisingly punchy loudspeaker. Disappointingly though, it doesn't come with any headphones, which wouldn't be so bad if it had a 3.5mm headphone jack, but it only has the USB type, so you'll either need to use headphones which already have one of these connections (which are usually pretty shoddy) or you'll need to get an adaptor. Either way, you're probably not going to be listening to music or viewing videos on the bus straight out of the box, which seems unnecessarily stingy.

Battery life is better though, and we got a good couple of days of average use out of it, something we always struggled to manage with the original Touch.
It's not so sexy from a spec point of view, but with its attractive price point, the HTC Touch Viva could prove to be popular with corporate road warriors who get their works phone provided for them. If the recent highly specced versions of the Touch have been a bit rich for your blood and pocket, then this is a perfectly worthy alternative, and if you really need 3G connectivity (and GPS) on a budget, you can always step up to the Touch 3G.