The first thing to mention is that the HTC touch is both light weight and small, weighing 112g and measuring 99.9mm (L) X 58mm (W) X 13.9mm (T), as a result this makes it a useful alternative to a smartphone.

Plus unlike a smartphone you get a Windows Mobile 6 operating system with a touch screen display and access to a larger variety of applications to boot. It certainly looks smart to, with a stylish black finish and a rubberised coating around the exterior which makes it both durable and easy to hold.

Its external buttons are minimised to a joypad at the bottom - below the screen - and a pair of small phone buttons as partners to the side, at the base is a USB port which also doubles up as a main charger port and a place to use the supplied headphone/headset (though you can use a pair of A2DP wireless headphones if you have them).

The majority of the device is taken up by the 2.8” touch-screen which is coated in a slightly thicker glass front, it’s tougher to allow for HTC’s innovated touch design called TouchFLO.

From the Windows Mobile home screen you can use your finger to swipe up from the base of the screen to the top to reveal a contact menu, where you can add contacts from your address book and assign images to them, but another swipe from left to right or vice versa will reveal more options (which rotates in a nice 3D effect) that you can select with your finger.

In essence these are your standard applications such as email and Internet explorer but they are all displayed in a nice graphical finish. However once you have picked an application to launch, you will find that underneath there is simply the bog standard Windows Mobile 6 interface, so though its fun to use at first after a while it becomes pointless and you end up reverting back to your stylus pen - especially for inputting text.

Its price tag is fairly high as well so we think you are paying more for Research & Development than for the technology under the bonnet, as the internal specification has been dampened slightly to accommodate the interface.

There is no 3G support and only around 26mb of free internal memory to play with, though you do get dual wi-fi support and a 1GB microSD card in the box, but this may be specific to the re-seller. The Processor is what you expect to find in a smartphone as it runs at 201Mhz, so it may struggle with programs designed for full Windows Mobile use.

But surprisingly its general performance was actually pretty good, with videos, music and office programs all working fine. We did run a Spb benchmark on the device and its CPU performance was poor as we expected, but its graphics and file performance were actually quite good.

Thanks to the connection manager setting up Bluetooth 2.0, phone and dual wi-fi connections was pretty easy, but on the subject of wi-fi this does put extra strain on the 1100mAH battery but its standby life is 200 hours and you have 5 hours talk time.

Its Tri-Band call quality was good, with both caller and recipient being able to hear each other clearly.

We forgot to mention that the storage card and sim card - for that matter - can be installed without having to remove the battery first (but it does reset the device). One of the images in the gallery shows how the side part comes out to reveal the memory and sim ports underneath.

For budding photographers there is a 2MP camera to play with which is identical to all the other HTC products in the range. It does take some nice shots, with outdoor colours coming out quite vibrant, but there is no flash support so for low light conditions it will be a challenge.