HTC Touch2 review: Beyond the basics

The multimedia is well covered

The HTC Touch2 offers a small amount of storage - less than 512MB. This is barely sufficient and you'll definitely find yourself needing a microSD card.

The WinMo file manager on the Touch2

The file manager is the standard Windows Mobile one and won't surprise anyone. Well, it's sure to not let you down either.

Image gallery: no accelerometer

The Touch2 offers a nice thumbnail browser straight from the Photos and Video tab on the Home screen. There's another thumbnail browser in the Album app available from the context menu on the Home screen or from the Programs menu.

Browsing images as thumbnails in the Albums application

The image is opened automatically in landscape mode and there is no option to rotate it to portrait view. Once an image is opened, you can zoom in or out using the touch-zoom bar or continue to the previous/next by sweeping a finger on the current one.

Opening an image • context menu

Scrolling to the next image is smooth and instantaneous with a single sweep of the finger. Zooming in and out is extra fast, as well. The Zoom bar comes quite handy for that purpose.

Music player

Just like the previous HTC devices, the Touch2 has a music player that makes good use of Album art. The music player is accessible straight from the TouchFLO home screen, however, the cool Apple-like Cover Flow animation known from the TouchFLO 3D is missing.

The attractive music player runs directly from the home screen

In case you want to filter tracks by other criteria beside album, the Library shortcut will take you to the player backend where you can sort music by artist, genre, composer, purchased tracks or simply create custom playlists. The visual interface of the library is fluid and eerily reminiscent of iPhone's very own music player.

The music library

Equalizer presets are available only when you have the headset plugged in. They are not part of the music player itself but of a separate application called Audio Booster. That setup allows you to make use of the presets when you watch videos or even when you listen to music on an alternative player.

The Audio Booster app is a system wide setting

Luckily, there is a 3.5mm audio jack on the Touch2, so you won't have to stick with the supplied headphones. The headset looks decent enough, but listening to music is not among its strengths and is best left for making phone calls.

Decent audio quality

The audio quality of the HTC Touch2 is only a tad worse than that on the Diamond2 which we rated pretty high. The Touch2 has decent frequency response, which only deviates around the +-1db level at the very end of the audible range.

The noise level, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk readings are pretty good, rivaling some dedicated music phones. The total harmonic and intermodulation distortion scores are also decent.

The HTC Touch2 frequency response graph compared to the Diamond2 and the iPod Touch 2G

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.

FM radio with RDS

The HTC Touch2 built-in FM radio naturally requires the headset to be plugged-in. As we already told you however, you would be better off using a third-party headset as the bundled ones are not well suited for listening to music.

Nevertheless, the Touch2 FM radio has an excellent interface much like the rest of the multimedia players on board and offers memory for some 20 radio stations.

The FM Radio on the Touch2

RDS is available too - so overall, radio is handled pretty well on the Touch2.

Multiple video players

TheTouch2 comes with the standard well known - and sadly underperforming - Windows Media Player. It only manages mp4 and 3gp and for DivX/XviD support you will need a third party application.

The Windows Media player

The HTC Touch2 has an extra video player but it only supports the video/audio codecs available to Windows Mobile. To enjoy a wider range of video options on the Pro (DiVX or XViD for example), you will probably need to purchase a dedicated video player with additional codec support.

We resorted to the well-known Core player for that purpose and as usual it did a great job.

The HTC Touch2 is pretty good at full-screen video playback - we played an XviD-encoded DVD rip for PC playback and, luckily, there were no skipped frames. Probably because of the lower screen resolution, the Touch2 fared a bit better than the HTC Touch Diamond2 in terms of fluid playback.

The Core player

However, videos didn't look as well as on the WVGA displays of Diamond2 and the Touch Pro2.