HTC Touch Viva

HTC Touch Viva Review

The HTC Touch Viva is a revisit to the original Touch phone, but with a classy new look. Unfortunately the original HTC Touch that was launched in 2007 lacks many of the innovations that have come onto the mobile phone scene in the last couple of years; the result is that the Viva comes out behind with new technologies.

With the HTC Touch Viva you will not get 3G, GPS, or headphones, but it does feature WiFi, which is little, considering all of the other omissions. This phone is also sparse on internal memory with only 256 MB, but there is the capability of adding more memory with a microSD slot that is placed beneath the battery.

The Viva’s touchscreen is actually recessed a little from the rest of the body, which is different than other touchscreen phones from HTC. This may help protect the display from being scratched but unfortunately it does make it more difficult to use.

Despite these problems the HTC Touch Viva offers some great features such as TouchFLO interface and Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS. Although not as classy as the 3D version on the more expensive models, it does well enough to help you organize all of your applications.

HTC has included Opera as a default web browser, which works magnificently and would work even better if the HTC Touch Viva had included 3G. While surfing the Internet you can easily zoom into web pages with the zoom scrollbar; this can take a lot of the frustration out of surfing the Internet with a mobile.

The camera and video capabilities of the HTC Touch Viva is another area that you will likely be disappointed with this phone. There is a 2-megapixel, but you won’t have flash. If you are taking picture in good lighting the camera does all right, aside from that you won’t get good pictures. In addition, the video camera produces some very blurry video. You find that this phone does offer a great music player, and if there were headphones it would likely be one of the best features of the Viva.

The biggest problem with the HTC Touch Viva is that it does not excel in any one feature. The multimedia features are very basic, and connectivity suffers due to the fact that it doesn’t offer 3G. The Viva may find a market as a low-end smartphone, but if you want a really great phone with better features you’ll possibly want to look at the Hero, or HTC Touch Pro.

The good news is that you will likely find some fantastic HTC Touch Viva deals, as this is one of the more affordable phones manufactured by HTC.