I had mixed feelings after trying out the HTC Touch Dual phone several weeks ago. I am not very familiar stylus-navigated phones so it took more than the usual time to familiarize myself with this unit.

The specs include — 3G/HSDPA, a 2.6 inch 240×320 pixel screen, 2 MP camera with another front-facing camera for video calls, 128MB RAM/128MB ROM with microSD expansion slot plus a TFT Touchscreen. It lacks the Wifi capability though.

The phone is powered by a Qualcomm MSM 7200, 400 MHz processor running Windows Mobile 6. This model is targeted towards business people so the productivity suite that came with the mobile OS is more than adequate. The one-click internet sharing functionality allows you to hook up the phone to your laptop/PC via USB cable and enable the Internet Sharing function to get online. No more PC Suite to install or anything.

The TouchFlo interface may take you some time to get used to but the handwriting recognition feature addition. The built-in virtual QWERTY keyboard allows you to input SMS (or notes) using the stylus or the normal keypad. Weird thing is that I find myself using the stylus rather than the keypad more often — it’s faster but I have to use both hands. My review unit comes with the standard 16-key but I learned there’s another version with a 20-key pseudo-query keyboard.

The unit is a little thick in girth as expected from a slider-phone and looks like a heavyweight sumo-wrestler but it doesn’t really  weigh that much at 120g (just 6g heavier than the N77 and N82, 8g heavier than the N78 and 15g heavier than my Samsung i600).

The biggest drawback I discovered about this model is the price — at Php36,000 (with free 1GB microSD), this could be one of the most expensive mobile phones out there. HTC also owns the Dopod line as a subsidiary (of High Tech Computer Corporation from Taiwan).

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