The packaging for the HTC Touch HD is beautiful.   The product inside the box is equally smooth, and it is clearly the state of the art Windows Mobile phone by HTC.

It is the same format and size as the iPhone, maybe even a little thinner.  Really crisp sharp screen, good battery life, a 3.5mm headphone socket and, at last, a loud enough ring tone to hear when it is in my pocket.

But the UI lets itself down in SO many ways.  It is as if the UI was designed by someone who had seen an iPhone or iPod Touch, but only at a distance and had never had a chance to use one in anger. Or maybe HTC’s lawyers said that every function could not mimic those on an iPhone.  Or simply the designer was just trying to be too clever.

Whatever – here are my top 3

Accidentally hitting keys along the bottom of the device – there are 4 touch sensitive keys that are very easily hit accidentally when you are holding the device one handed. They are make a call, home, back &  drop a call.  And they are not back-lit. And the bar is quite narrow. So you are listening to music or trying compose a txt and suddenly you brush over the key and you are making a call, and when you get back to what you are doing you have to start again.  Worse, is that you can’t switch them off.

Answering a phone call -  there is slider appears on screen when the phone rings. Slide it left to answer.  Why not just have a very large ‘Answer’ button. However there is a set of buttons on the bottom of the device which you can use, but they are relatively narrow so easy to miss - see above.

Listening to music – there are some fairly standard approaches for controlling which track and the volume. Large buttons so easy to hit. But – oh no. Not on the HTC. There is no volume control apart from the icon on the top bar which takes 2 clicks to get to the volume, or the buttons on side of the device. The on/pause and next/previous track are small buttons on the right hand side. And the track information is way too small.  So not a great music player.

So the player is designed to be a phone / music player / email device.  It falls short in 2 out of 3 in terms of software. Shame because the hardware rocks.