OKTA-stic Touch
Finally, a genuine smartphone/PDA that doesn’t feel like you just put a concrete block in your pocket. Telecom has launched an own-brand range of mobile devices dubbed OKTA (your guess is as good as mine) and the first one off the rank is the slim and sophisticated Touch.
Ted Gibbons | Tuesday, January 29 2008The main contributors to the Touch’s super slimness and pocketability are the lack of a physical numerical keypad or a QWERTY keyboard. However, the fact that all this functionality has been relocated to the screen presents some problems. The onscreen numerical keypad has good big buttons but without the physical feel of an actual button, dialling becomes something of an exercise in concentration. Of course, it’s a whole lot easier to dial out of your contacts, especially as you can run you thumb down a descending alphabet at the side of the screen to instantly bring up contacts listed under each letter.
For text, the Touch offers a range of options. There’s a full QWERTY keyboard but these keys are too small to use anything but the included stylus. Alternatively, there is also a 20-key multi-tap keyboard, much like that on the Blackberry Pearl, which places two letters on each button. You can happily use your thumbs here but it’s still awkward to make the multi-tap work easily without the physical feedback of actual buttons. Finally, you can choose to write on the screen with the stylus using either a letter or block recogniser like Palm’s venerable Graffiti, or the handwriting recognition. Of the two, the handwriting recognition is streets ahead, picking up scrawl almost flawlessly.
Within multimedia applications, TouchFLO really comes into its own, especially within your photo library. Here you can move through images with a finger-swipe, rotate them with a semi-circular gesture, zoom in or out with a circular gesture, and bring up a menu with a tap.
The Touch has a 2-megapixel camera but provides no flash. Image quality provides good definition and bright colour, and, as usual, tapping the screen brings up camera controls and options. Disappointingly, video capture is only QCIF (176 x 144 pixels) and looks very pixelated.
Call quality and network reception on the Touch are both very good with a speaker that delivers voice loud and clear. Web browsing is also a pleasure with Mobile IE loading pages on the Touch very quickly indeed.
One final niggle about the Touch is that although the microSD slot is supposed to be handily external, you actually have to take the battery cover off and then pry up a reluctant metal cover to get at the slot. Even then, it’s hard to access. User-friendly this ain’t.
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