HTC Titan review

HTC has really pushed the boat out with the HTC Titan. Not only does it have one of the biggest displays currently available, but it also has the latest iteration of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform, known as Mango, and a 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor.

The Titan, as the name suggests, is a big device. At 132x71x10mm it’s even larger than last year’s HTC HD7, and, at 160g, just as heavy. The reason for these slab-like proportions is simple: the HTC Titan has a huge 4.7-inch display. Despite the screen’s huge size, the resolution isn’t spectacular: at 480×800 pixels, it’s a long way behind Samsung’s Super AMOLED Plus and Apple’s Retina Display, both in terms of pixels per inch (ppi). Yet despite this, the Titan’s display is still very impressive. Web pages, video and games look truly spectacular when viewed on the phone’s near-5-inch screen.

Because of its dimensions you’d think the handset itself would look and feel enormous. The clever design negates much of this heft, however. It’s weighted so precisely that despite being extremely large it feels perfectly balanced when held in the hand. The chassis is constructed out of a single piece of aluminium, and the Titan looks every bit the flagship handset.

The phone has a 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor and 512MB RAM. Although the processor is single rather than dual-core, we couldn’t fault the phone’s performance. When using the operating system we didn’t experience any lag whatsoever. Scrolling, typing and switching between applications is as smooth an experience as you get on the iPhone 4 and in some cases, notably text entry and scrolling, it certainly outperforms Android.

Like the HTC Radar, the Titan has an 8-megapixel camera and a backlit sensor. Still photos are particularly good in low light, and 720p video capture is reasonable, but suffers from some compression artefacts.

The Titan also has a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera, which will eventually be used for video calling. Unfortunately the ability to video-call didn’t make the cut in Mango, so users will have to wait until the next update, known as Tango, before they can Skype on their handset.