The Sprint Touch looks like the GSM HTC Touch we reviewed a few months ago, but it's different inside. It's a small (4 by 2.4 by .6 inches; 4 ounces), easily pocketable slab with a soft-touch plastic case and a 2.8-inch 320-by-240 display. The only physical buttons are a cursor pad, phone pick-up and hang-up buttons, a camera button, and a volume rocker. There's a stylus tucked into one corner, but ideally you'll never have to use it.

The Touch's major challenge has always been to take the Windows Mobile interface, which is full of tiny buttons, and make it friendly for fingertips. The original Touch redid the home screen, giving you a big clock and some large action buttons, and introduced a rotating "cube" of large buttons. With the Sprint Touch, sliding your finger across the screen will access easily your top nine contacts, mail, and Sprint's music and TV options. It's a big step from the traditional Windows Mobile way of doing things.

The Sprint Touch improves the tactile experience in several subtle ways. The Start menu is wider, and there's an option for larger fonts, making links and buttons easier to tap. You can scroll through most applications and screens by swiping your finger down the middle of the screen rather than finding and prodding a tiny scroll bar. And HTC revamped Windows Mobile device's keyboards. For most text entry areas, the Touch pops up a 20-key pad with two letters per key, similar to the BlackBerry Pearl's. You can double-tap or use predictive text to enter information. When you get to a password field, the keypad turns into a full QWERTY keyboard, which is larger and wider than the standard Windows Mobile keyboard and thus far more finger-friendly. For dialing the phone, you get a traditional number pad. The touch functions are more responsive than on the original Touch, too.

The new keypad has one big minus. If you're entering text into a field on the lower third of the screen, the keys cover the field, so you're typing blind. I found that to be really annoying, and I'm hoping HTC will find a solution.

Inside, HTC doubled the processor speed from the original Touch to 400 MHz and added high-speed EV-DO Rev 0 networking, software-upgradable in the future to Sprint's even-faster EV-DO Rev A. Tethered to a Windows Vista laptop with a USB cable, I got download speeds of more than a megabit per second, according to speed test sites, which is excellent for a Rev 0 device. A microSD card slot in the side of the device took my 4GB Kingston card without a problem; Sprint will include a 512MB card with the device. The 140MB of storage and 72MB of program memory should satisfy most users.

As a phone, the Sprint Touch is good enough, if not as good as the Sanyo models that are our standards for Sprint excellence. It did acceptably, but not spectacularly, on our RF signal test. The earpiece and speakerphone are both loud, and there's enough in-ear feedback on your voice. I heard some wobble in incoming sound, but I couldn't tell whether the actual device or Sprint's network was the culprit. Very loud background noise obscured my own voice in the microphone, when heard from the other end. Voice dialing requires you to record tags for each name. Battery life was nearly 5 hours, excellent for such a slim device.

The Sprint Touch has very good messaging options, including support for POP3, Windows Live, and Yahoo! e-mail (including supporting full HTML) and a built-in multiplatform IM client. Microsoft's Web browser, Pocket Internet Explorer, is far behind browsers from Nokia and Apple when it comes to displaying Web pages in their full glory. Adding the $24 Opera Mobile browser helps.

The 2-megapixel camera takes somewhat underexposed photos, which is mostly a problem in low light—a slow shutter speed means you could experience some blurring. Videos are smooth, if a bit blurry. There's no GPS on the device, but Sprint is developing its own navigation application, which will be available for download in the future.

Thanks to the speedy processor, music and video played well in both Windows Media Player and on our CorePlayer benchmarks, over both wired and Bluetooth headsets. But when underground in a New York subway, out of Sprint's coverage area, I had to switch the device to airplane mode to stop music from skipping while it searched for the network. This wasn't a problem when a signal was available.

I had a less-entertaining time with Sprint's self-branded media apps. Sprint TV has plenty of channels with brand-name content, including live news feeds from CNN, ABC, and FOX, and full episodes of ABC and CBS shows like Lost and Numb3rs. But when I tried to watch shows, I experienced stuttering and jerkiness. SlingPlayer Mobile also didn't work on the Touch, but that's typical with new Pocket PC devices; Sling often needs a few weeks to come out with an updated version for a new device.

Sprint's Music Store app has become more finger-friendly in that it now has an unattractive, text-only interface with large links and buttons rather than small ones. And Sprint's 99-cent price for over-the-air music downloads is great. But the Music Store app refused to acknowledge the existence of my 4GB memory card, when every other app on the device (including Windows Media Player) had no problem.

The device has some other minor problems, as well. If you want to listen to music through a wired headset, you have to use a huge, 4-inch adapter. When you slide the volume key, video or music skips. These little quirks add up to general clunkiness, which is common among Windows Mobile devices. Though this is the most elegant and finger-friendly Windows Mobile phone yet, it's no iPhone.

On the plus side, like all Windows Mobile 6 devices, the Touch integrates seamlessly with Windows Media stores such as Napster and Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Windows Media Player on the desktop, and Microsoft Exchange 2003 (and later) servers for direct push e-mail. And the device offers flexible, over-the-air calendar and contact syncing, which the iPhone doesn't.

In Sprint's lineup, the Touch sits between the Palm Centro and the HTC Mogul. It's smoother and more stylish than either, and its form factor and tactile interface make it the best media player of the bunch. Still, the competition is stiff. If you don't need the big screen, the Centro gives you full phone and PDA capabilities for less than half the price, and the Mogul's integrated Wi-Fi and keyboard will help you work more efficiently than on the Touch.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 55 minutes
SPB Benchmark: 357
CPU index: 1498
File system index: 145
Graphics index: 3985

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

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