The K-Touch H88, H899 and H999 are early generation smartphones. These devices rely on QWERTY keyboards with a smaller touchscreen above the keypad, similar to a BlackBerry. These applications are able to run WhatsApp although it is not as straight forward as simply downloading it from Google Play or the App Store. There are a few additional steps involved with it.
K-Touch H888
This mobile phone has a 2.2 inch display screen offering 220 by 176 resolution. It does have some initial applications installed such as Twitter, Facebook and Google, but it does not come with WhatsApp installed. The mobile phone uses Java as the native operating system so it requires external downloads and installation. This model of the K-Touch has 20MB of internal memory with a microSD card slot allowing an additional 8GB of storage space.
K-Touch H899
This model of the K-Touch is very similar to the previous model. It supports 2G wireless but does not support 3G or 4G. Like the other phone it uses a 2.2 inch display screen. It also has a microSD card slot for up to 8GB of additional storage space. It does support FM radio playback while running Java MIDP 2.0. It has some native applications like Facebook, Twitter, Google and some other features, but it does need external installation to import WhatsApp.
K-Touch H999
This variation of the smartphone is a slight upgrade from the previous models. It is used primarily in India and it hit the markets in 2010 during the second quarter. It still uses the QWERTY keyboard on the bottom of the phone while sporting a 2.4 inch screen. The visual resolution is also a slight upgrade at 320 by 240 pixels. The screen is not touchscreen but instead the phone uses a trackball (the other models used an up and down button). It supports a microSD card for an expansion memory of up to 8GB. It supports 2G wireless data but nothing higher than this while it also uses Java 2.0 as its operating system.
Installing WhatsApp on the K-Touch Mobile Phones
The WhatsApp Java messenger does use a slightly different base for its installation than what it does for iOS or Android. It utilizes a Nokia Series 40 construction, which strips it down of some of its more complicated design features in order to allow it to install on the older mobile phone. As these models have been on the market for over five years now, most do not come with the appropriate Java Application service. Instead, a user needs to log onto the Java MIDP website and search for the WhatsApp application link. From there, they need to download the file to their computer. Once on the computer they can connect the mobile phone to their computer using a micro USB cable, then drag and drop the file into the mobile phone’s file listing.
After the application has downloaded onto the phone the user needs to select it. This automatically beings the installation process. Once the installation process has finished, the user is able to open the app and begin the registration process.
They need to type in the phone number associated with the K-Touch phone they are using. From there they just need to follow the remainder of the activation process and WhatsApp is good to go.