Sprint Fires a Bullet at the iPhone With the HTC Touch

The year 2007 may very well go down in PDAPhone history as the first year of real choice for US consumers. In the last month, a lot of different new PDAPhones have been cropping up all over the place. I believe that Apple and its iPhone may have something to do with it, as they seem to have woken up the media and public to the idea of a powerful cellphone that can do more than make calls, play crude games and send text messages.

This announcement seemd to have come out of nowhere. While the 6800 and i760 with Sprint and Verizon have generated thousands of posts and over a million views in their rumor threads here, there was no discussion or hint of the Touch coming to CDMA and Sprint until it was announced. Perhaps I was asleep a the wheel and missed it, but there definitely hasn't been a lot of discussion here at PDAPhoneHome about it. I'm a keyboard guy, so it isn't probably my cup of tea... but its another choice and choice is good.

The HTC Touch has been well received by the industry and sold very well in its GSM flavor around the world. Its sales numbers have rivaled that of Apple and the iPhone, and its the most compared PDAPhone to the iPhone. HTC pulled out the stops in designing a new TouchFlo interface for the Touch, and it has some similarities with the gesturing that the iPhone uses. But, the underlying applications that run on the Touch are still Windows Mobile and so eventually the gesturing stops and the finger or stylus kick in.

Compared to Sprints other Windows Mobile 6 Professional based device, the Mogul - PPC6800, the Touch has some puts and takes. First off, the Touch doesn't have any keyboard, so its TouchFlo interface is the only game in operating it. It also has no GPS (as does the Mogul) and no WiFi. It does, however, have double the RAM and that has been the Mogul's biggest complaint item. Since I am on the Sprint network, I will most likely get one and try it out. It is due in Sprint stores on November 4th.