TUS Rating:

4 of 5

Size matters. Or at least it does on HTC’s latest Windows Phone, the HTC Titan. With a brilliant 4.7″ screen, the appropriately named Titan towers over its smartphone siblings and is equalled in size only by another HTC smartphone, the Sensation XL. But is this freakishly large display the only thing the Titan has going for it?

Click images to enlarge

Built like a tank

The aluminium unibody construction of the Titan continues the HTC tradition of a slick yet solid build that’s similarly found in the HTC Sensation line. While you may think that the large 4.7″ screen would result in a chunky phone, you’d be quite mistaken. Weighing in at 160g, the Titan feels deceptively lighter than it looks; not quite as light as the feathery Galaxy S II, but only a little heavier than the iPhone 4S. At 9.9mm, the Titan is significantly thinner than the Nokia Lumia 800 (which has a 3.7″ screen) which measures a thick 12.1mm and is virtually the same thickness as the iPhone 4S which in turn, only has a 3.5″ display. So for all concerned, it’ll slide perfectly into those denim pockets without you needing to invest in a pair of baggy trousers.

Indeed after removing the backplate of the Titan, which feels discernibly more like you’re removing the screen from the phone, you’ll see just how well constructed the Titan is. The rigid aluminium shell provides hardly any flex and feels a lot tougher than many other smartphones out on the market. Let’s put it this way, if the Galaxy S II is the nifty footballer winger with a bag of tricks, then the Titan would be the hard as nails South African I wouldn’t want to meet him in an alley-way rugby player.

And to address the elephant in the room, yes the 4.7″ inch Super LCD display looks gorgeous. It may not be as sharp as the Super AMOLED screen on the Samsung Galaxy S II or the Retina display on the iPhone 4S but with the stark colour palette used in all Windows Phones, tiles stand out bright and clearly. We’ve seen a number of other reviews comment on the low pixel-density, but unless you’re constantly switching between an iPhone, a Samsung and a Titan like some smartphone crack addict; you’re never going to tell the difference. Notably, the screen also does a great job of boosting brightness when you’re out and turning it back down so you’re not blinded by the shining light in a darkened theatre.

What we should also quickly add is that the much praised Windows Phone keyboard is easier than ever to type on the big screen. Sure you won’t be typing out a thesis (as you should never do on a smartphone anyway), but shooting off emails and text messages are an absolute breeze.

No slow-poke

If I tell you that the Titan is powered by a 1.5GHz second-gen Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 single-core processor coupled with an Adreno 205 GPU, that probably won’t mean a thing to most people. But safe to say, the Titan is by no means underpowered. While it won’t be taking on the dual-core A5 processor on the iPhone 4S or a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 “super phone” in a foot race any time soon, it certainly excels at driving the Windows Phone operating system. Animations are smooth, round upon round of Fruit Ninja can be handled without breaking a sweat, and internet browsing was just as quick, if not quicker than phones with more powerful processors.

Now you’d think that having this processor, graphics package and huge 4.7″ bright display would kill the battery, but the Titan surprisingly manages to last from dawn to dusk under moderate to heavy usage. If we had to stretch, we could probably have pushed it to a full two days with the help of “battery saver” mode turned on. Of course throw in the bells and whistles like long romantic phone calls to a foreign land or streaming online video and that’ll disappear. But for the average user, it’s not half bad. And let’s face it, most modern smartphones these days require a nightly charge anyway.

Flashy Features

While Instagram is notably missing from the Windows Phone Marketplace (as are so many apps right now), budding photographers will still have an 8 mega pixel camera aided with dual LED flash to play with. Most interestingly enough, the camera package features a rare f/2.2 aperture lens which in layman’s terms, means you’ll be able to take better pictures in low-light situations. And if you listen very carefully, you’ll even be able to hear that satisfying sound of a lens auto-focusing on its subject.

Sample Titan Photos

Movie-makers will be able to shoot 720p flicks at 1280 x 720 resolution and although this isn’t the full HD we’d like, the 720p is still a nice thing to have. We found the colours to be a little saturated and blown out perhaps due to the sensitivity of the lens and while you won’t be shooting the next Hollywood blockbuster, it’ll do just fine capturing that YouTube video of your dog chasing his own tail.

Minor nuisances

The Titan isn’t without its faults however. HTC have placed the micro USB charging slot for the Titan awkwardly on the left side of the phone. While it’s something they’ve done many times on other phones like the Sensation, it still means you’ll be forced into playing a game of finger twister if you want to use the phone as it’s charging. Obviously not a game changer but it’s certainly annoying considering that pretty much any other position on the phone would’ve been better than where they placed it.

Unfortunately we’ve also discovered a few issues with WiFi reception. Compared to the iPhone and a few Android models we tested, the Titan does seem to get weaker WiFi reception in the few locations we tried. While this could be isolated to just our device, a few other users are reportedly having a similar issue with their Titans. And that leads us nicely to the issue we get downloading apps off the mobile network. Even apps that are less than a megabyte having trouble downloading if not connected to WiFi. We’re not sure if this is specifically a Titan, HTC or Windows Phone issue but it’s something to keep in mind.

You’ll also have to make do with 16GB of onboard storage as with all Windows Phones, there is no native support for expandable memory. It should do just fine for the average smartphone user, but I wouldn’t count on carrying around that high-def Lord of the Rings Trilogy copy just yet.

Other little highly factors aren’t so much to do with the Titan specifically but are more related to the OS in general. For example; the glaring lack of “official” apps (Dropbox or Wikipedia?), a pretty dysfunctional native calendar app, why double-tapping the search icon doesn’t focus on the search box or why there still isn’t a way of locking the screen orientation universally.

But of course let’s not forget that you do get some great things that naturally come with every Windows Phone, like the very impressive social network integration into the phone book and messaging app, the beautiful updating live tiles or indeed any of the new Mango updates.

Conclusion

So what do we think of the Titan in one word? Outstanding. That is, if you’re looking for a phone with a very big screen. The Titan will obviously not be for everyone, and as sleek and slender as the form factor allows, it’s still a big phone. But putting aside some of the connectivity issues we’ve had, the Titan still manages to brilliantly showcase the Windows Phone platform and stands out as being up there along with some of the best smartphones to date. The minimalist design and interface of the Windows Phone platform perfectly suits the big screen and when passing the phone around curious hands, the first reaction is nearly always, “Wow”. For that and everything else, it gets our seal of recommendation.

TUS Rating

Form Factor:	5 of 5
Performance:	4 of 5
Features:	3 of 5
Overall:	4 of 5