CTIA: Hands-On With the Sprint Touch

As we mentioned in the sidenote yesterday, we're at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment Expo this week. The conference starts today, but last night we got a chance to hang out with Vincent Nguyen of Slashgear and ogle his Sprint Touch for a spell.

New details and photos after the break, y'all.

Form factor

As you can see below, the Sprint Touch is different, subtly different, from the HTC Touch. It's a smidge (technically speaking) taller and (as we mentioned in our first hands-on with the Sprint Touch) just a bit thicker. It's also slightly “blockier,” denser, and heavier. Still, it's basically the same shape and feel as the original Touch: great in the hand.

In all the pics below, the one that's just barely bigger is the Sprint Touch.

(Photos by Joel Martin)

TouchFlo 2 and Keyboard

I wasn't expecting the Touch to feature the improved TouchFlo features that HTC has been showing off lately. Stuff like:

• “circle to zoom in on a picture,”
• a nice new “big theme” start menu,
• HTC's Today-screen close submenu with large thumbable buttons
• Much faster flick-scrolling

...So seeing it on the Sprint Touch was a welcome surprise.

Even better is the “suretype-esque” keyboard that Sprint/HTC have put on there. It's very similar to TouchPal but with an added feel of refinement. It really does make the Sprint Touch very usable - I can't wait for somebody to hack it off there and make it available to the GSM crowd.

Last bit - the touchscreen on the Sprint touch seemed much more responsive to my thumbs. I don't know if that's a sign that I've been beating on my GSM Touch too much or if they've genuinely improved the screen on it. Just pointing it out.