HTC Titan review

The HTC Titan reminds us of quite how enjoyable Windows Phone is to use. It's quick, intuitive and stylish. However, this phone also makes us realise quite how silly the trend for ever-expanding smartphone screens is. This is undoubtedly a great phone, but for most people it's just that bit too big.
The HTC Titan's name is no joke. This phone is gigantic, bridging the gap between smartphones and tablets in a manner not seen since Dell's 5in Streak. It runs Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, has a 4.7in screen and HTC's usual superb build quality. What's not to like? Aside from the fairly high price and that its body works the phone into a niche, not a great deal.

Upon first grasping the HTC Titan, you feel as though you've grabbed a device made for someone else - someone bigger. Unless your hands are quite dainty, it still fits comfortably between the butt of your palm and fingertips, but it strains against the traditional definition of a smartphone. This tech trend of larger screens on pocket devices can't continue that much longer.

For its size, though, the HTC Titan fits remarkably comfortably into a jean pocket. It's only 9.9mm thick, so its cubic volume isn't actually that great.

The Titan's styling continues the trend set by the HTC HD2 and HD7. It's black, simple and feels wonderfully strong. Most of the back is made of metal, and the front covered with toughened glass. The design of the back is rather deceptive, though. The seam a couple of centimetres up from the bottom suggests there's a small pull-off battery cover, as seen in the HTC Salsa. But it's a sham, because the backplate is full-length, released with the press of a little button on the Titan's bottom.
The seam isn't entirely meaningless, though. It shows where the metal of the cover gives way to soft touch black plastic - there's a cutaway of this material at the top too, where the power button and 3.5mm headphone jack live.

These touches don't detract from the rather stern, non-nonsense look of the HTC Titan. It's hard not to be a little impressed by the efficiency of the design - the phone's front is 90 per cent screen, leaving just a 15mm expanse at the bottom for the mandatory touch sensitive Windows nav keys and a similar bit up top for the HTC logo, the speaker to pipe out phone calls and the user-facing camera.
Missing hardware features common to other smartphones, but absent from virtually all current Windows phones, include a microSD card slot and video output. There's 16GB of internal memory built-in, but beyond that you have to rely on the cloud to provide you with storage. The most famous non-expandable smartphone series is, of course, Apple's iPhone range, which now offers models with up to 64GB of internal memory.

The HTC Titan's specs could be seen to fall behind in other ways too. This is the time of the dual-core smartphone processor, featuring in the new iPhone 4S and most top Android phones, but this phone has "only" a 1.5GHz single-core Snapdragon chip backed-up by an unremarkable 512MB RAM. Looked at in isolation, this will be enough to put some off buying the Titan when, at £500 SIM-free, it's a top-end model. However, specs mean little when considered out of context. That's where Windows Phone 7.5 comes in…Overuse of the term "iPhone killer" since Apple's phone hit critical mass, following the release of the iPhone 3G in 2008, has robbed it of most potency and meaning - but it's what Windows Phone 7 was originally intended as. Things haven't quite worked out for Microsoft's smartphone OS yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't rather brilliant.

One of the best things about the HTC Titan, compared to an Android or Symbian phone, is how wonderfully quick it is. The core user interface implements are hardware acceleration, letting it benefit from the handset's graphics power all the time, rather than just when you're trying to play a 3D game or HD-quality video.

It's intensely fast - not just in how quickly it responds to gestures on the super-responsive capacitive touchscreen, but in how fast menus are able to scroll and how snappily animated transitions are. This speed, combined with the aggressive styling of the system, makes using Windows Phone a very refreshing experience - like a pint of ice cold lime juice following days of drinking lukewarm, half-flat coke.  Of course, not everyone likes lime juice and not everyone will love the unique look of the Windows Phone 7 interface.

The Titan's home screen is a scroll of very sharp boxes Microsoft calls Live Tiles. These are shorcuts - some animated, some static - to apps, phone features and contacts. They're fairly uniform in appearance, 90 per cent of them adhering to whatever colour scheme's in place, but do helpfully show you updates. The Google Mail and Hotmail tiles show a number, for example, indicating how many new emails you have. It's a notifications system and a home screen all in one, and while it's not very flexible or customisable, like an Android home screen, it's immensely easy to get on with.

You can move Live Tiles around, add and remove them, as well as changing their colour from a selection of 11 hues. Windows Phone is really into uniformity, and you can't pick and choose - it's strictly one colour at a time.
The look can be customised a bit. But only a bit.
At the launch of Windows Phone 7 in 2010, the system had all the rigid styling and speed it has now, but the recent Mango update filled-in the many feature holes that peppered the software. Including multitasking, which is simple and intuitive.

Hold down on the touch sensitive back soft key to bring up a row of snapshots of any running apps, which you then tap on to restore. There are still technical limitations when mulitasking with third-party apps, though. For example, skip to another app during an Angry Birds level and you'll be directed to the initial load screen and main menu upon returning. It's not quite the real deal yet.

Multitasking feels good, but is technically a bit "meh" at the mo
Social networking integration has improved too. You can pre-tag photos of your friends before uploading them to Facebook, and clever messaging updates lets you carry on conversations with people over multiple platforms - IM and SMS, for example. The Mango update is an enrichment that has added depth to the Windows Phone OS, without dramatically changing the basic experience - you can now simply do more within its ornate walls.

Like an ornate, marble-walled museum, though, you can't simply do what you like while inside. To transfer files, most crucially videos and MP3s, you have to use the proprietary Zune software - you're not given access to the file system when you connect to a computer. Using the HTC Titan is a bit like living within a totalitarian regime. Accept its rules and marvel as everything ticks along nicely, the trains arrive on time and the streets are clean. If you like to go your own way, though, you may not find the Windows Phone life so accommodating.

Posted in: HTC TECHNOLOGY