The typically pricey HTC Touch reinvents itself as a discount smartphone with Alltel, and as a result you get a lot of power for your dollar here. But given the Touch's troubles with data entry I'm hesitant to recommend this device to average users.

There's an often-ignored yet brilliant buying rule for technology: Get last year's product. Unless you're a voracious power user, the tech will likely be good enough to fulfill your needs, and it will come at a lower price than a brand-new, cutting-edge gadget will. If you're a Windows Mobile fan, the HTC Touch for Alltel is a great example.

This Touch looks just like the Sprint model PC Mag reviewed last year. It's a small (4 by 2.4 by 0.6 inches; 4 ounces), easily pocketable slab with a soft-touch plastic case and a 2.8-inch 320-by-240-pixel display. The only physical controls are a cursor pad, phone pick-up and hang-up, camera buttons, and a volume rocker. A stylus tucks into the upper right-hand corner, and there's a 2-megapixel camera on the back of the handset.

Powered by Windows Mobile 6, the Touch doesn't run the latest WM 6.1, but most of the changes that came with version 6.1 were for non-touch-screen devices anyway. (Alltel says it will offer an upgrade to WM 6.1 for current device owners in the future.) When you turn on the phone, it serves up HTC's custom TouchFLO home screen, a finger-friendly screen that offers a big clock and message and weather alerts along with your chosen apps. Swiping your finger along the screen gives you access to your favorite contacts, music, videos, and popular programs, which is a good thing. But ultimately, this is just a skin. Dig down another level into the UI and you get Windows Mobile's tiny interface elements, which aren't very finger-friendly, so you'll be pulling out the stylus frequently.

Sadly, the Touch's major flaw comes with trying to type or write on it. You get a half-dozen ways of entering data: three types of handwriting recognition along with 12-key, 20-key, and full QWERTY keyboards. But the pop-up keyboards often cover up the text field you're typing into, which has you flying blind way too often.

The Touch isn't the greatest voice phone, but it'll do. Reception was middling. Calls were marked by plenty of hiss and a lot of background noise in the earpiece at top volume. The speakerphone, which is on the back, was very loud but sounded somewhat harsh. There's no standard wired headset jack—you need to use a cumbersome 4-inch adapter for the MiniUSB port—but the Touch supports both mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets. Bluetooth headset performance with an Aliph Jawbone was unusually good, with clear calls even up to 15 feet away from the phone. You can access voice dialing with a headset, but you have to record voice tags for every contact. At 5 hours, battery life wasn't stellar, but it's not too bad for a smartphone.

Less-expensive, higher-quality voice phones abound, but most people want the Touch for its Windows Mobile power and integration with Windows PCs. Paired with Windows Media Player on a PC and a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 SP2 or later, the Touch syncs music and video and all of your PIM information over the air. The e-mail app displays full HTML messages from various sources, including Exchange, POP3, and Yahoo! accounts. With third-party software, the Touch can stream video from your TV with Sling Player Mobile or surf the Web in style with Opera Mini.

Alltel leaves plenty of room on the device for software, with 130MB of free storage memory and 105MB of program-running memory. There's a microSD card slot for additional storage, but you have to remove the back cover to get to it. On our SPB Benchmark performance tests, Alltel's Touch, oddly, scored slightly lower than Verizon's and Sprint's models, which use the same hardware. The 400-MHz Qualcomm processor should handle Windows Mobile programs well.

Alltel's build of the Touch throws a few extra programs onto the device; most notably Alltel's Office Sync (from Seven Networks), which uses a desktop PC–based redirector program to sync your mail, calendar, and contacts over the air without an Exchange server. This sounds good, but I don't advise relying on a solution that requires you to keep your distant PC on (and running properly) all the time to relay e-mail.

You also get a handy MP3 trimmer, so you can make ringtones from your tunes; Handmark Pocket Express, which delivers news, weather, and travel information; and Sharpcast Photos, which makes it easier to upload photos you take on the phone to the Web. The Axcess Shop program lets you buy software from Handango, but it also gives you free news, sports, traffic, and weather information. An instant-messaging app is missing from the list, but you can buy the multi-platform Shape IM+ for $39.95 from Alltel's on-device store.

You can use the Touch as a USB or Bluetooth modem for a PC on Alltel's EV-DO network. But I got slow speeds, under 200 Kbps, which was disappointing.

The 2MP camera could be a lot sharper. Daylight photos looked soft, and low-light pictures were quite blurry. The Touch also takes 176-by-144 videos at 15 frames per second.

There's nothing else quite like the Touch in Alltel's lineup, at least in terms of its combination of price, power, and a large touch screen. The BlackBerry Pearl is also affordable, but it isn't Windows Mobile. If you're looking for WM power on Alltel, you can go for the HTC PPC6800, a fine device with both a sizable touch screen and a full keyboard, but you'll end up paying much more. A 400 MHz, fully fledged Windows Mobile Professional device for a mere $129.99 (with contract) is pretty impressive. Given the lack of a physical keyboard, I wouldn't recommend the Touch to beginning smartphone users, but Windows Mobile aficionados will find a great deal here.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 1 minute
SPB Benchmark: 319
CPU index: 1328
File system index: 130
Graphics index: 3574

Compare the HTC Touch (Alltel) with several other mobile phones side by side.