HTC Leo Caught on Video with Capacitive Screen and Multitouch 2009

By Dan Hope Sep 17th, 2009

We just can’t get enough of the pretty little HTC Leo. Actually, little isn’t a good adjective to describe the Leo because it has a beautifully large screen. We haven’t heard much more about that screen, other than it’s a beefy 4.3 inches diagonally. But a new video of the HTC Leo in action has hinted at some new juicy facts about the Leo screen. That’s right, it looks to be a capacitive touchscreen with multitouch capabilities. Check out the video below to see for yourself.

The video shows the Leo screen being used to browse through albums of photos and videos. The phone supports a landscape mode and uses the familiar side-to-side swipe of the finger to cycle through them. But it’s when two fingers hit the screen that the excitement starts. The video clearly shows multitouch gestures that allow you to zoom in and out on a picture. You can even zoom in and out on a video while it’s playing. No small feat for a phone.

The video doesn’t spend very much time showing us the main UI of the Leo. There is a 5 or 6 second glimpse (at the end) of the TouchFlow3D interface that HTC uses as a skin on Windows Mobile. I absolutely love the more primitive TouchFlo skin on my own HTC phone. It makes the silly Windows Mobile interface much more inviting for fingers and much simpler to use. We’ve been told the HTC Leo will be using an updated version of the TouchFlo3D interface, and while we can't confirm the updated part, that certainly is a nice TouchFlo interface you see at the end of the video. Also rumored but unconfirmed by the video is the fact that the HTC Leo is supposed to be running Windows Mobile 6.5 under that pretty TouchFlo3D exterior. While the Windows part of the interface in the video looks newer, it’s impossible to tell if that’s an improvement of the TouchFlo UI or a sign of Windows Mobile 6.5.

You’ll notice the phone was pretty snappy with the processing, especially for having a 800 x 480 resolution screen. This thing should be really fast compared to a lot of phones because it will be carrying the 1GHz Qualcomm 8250B Snapdragon processor. The Leo should be able to handle quite a bit of app shuffling and media browsing with that little chip humming away inside. The responsiveness of zooming in and out on live video attests to that fact.

If you need a reminder of some of the other specs in this big little wonder, check out the list below. Most of these have been confirmed.