HTC Touch Pro (Sprint) review – high-end features, sluggish performance

Thumbs Up:

Gorgeous touch-screen; full QWERTY keyboard; Wi-Fi; Bluetooth; GPS; EV-DO Rev. A support; Windows Mobile 6.1 OS; Jetcet Print 5 to connect with printer; ClearVue Presentation 5 Pro for creating, editing, and viewing PowerPoint presentations

Thumbs Down:

Sluggish performance; bulky design; lacks dedicated camera and 3.5mm standard headset jack

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM

Band: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900

Phone Design: Slider

Caller ID: Yes

Other Features: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, 3G support, HTC TouchFlo 3D interface

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

The HTC Touch Pro is powered with 528MHz Qualcomm MSM 7201A processor, 288MB RAM and 512MB ROM. The operating system is Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition. The supported wireless interfaces are Bluetooth 2.0 EDR and IEEE 802.11 b/g.

2.8 inches touch-screen has 640×480 pixels resolution that supports 262,000 colors. The additional features are HSDPA, EDGE, GPRS, and mobile-email. The 3.2-megapixel camera features flash, auto-focus, and video-recording.

The supported audio formats are AAC+, MIDI, WMA, WAV, MP3, AMR, and AAC. The connector set includes 1×11 pin HTC ExtUSB – Video out / hands-free microphone connector.

The 1340mAH lithium ion battery has a life of 419 minutes talk time and 462 hours idle standby time. Accessories supplied inside the box include reference material, a software disc, a carrying case, an audio adapter, a wired headset, 1GB micro-SD card, a USB cable, and power adapter.

Razzle Dazzle:

The HTC Touch Pro is 4 inches long, 2 inches wide and 0.7 inch thick and weighs 5.3 ounces. It is heavy and thick that makes it tight fit in the pants pocket. The smartphone has solid built and soft-touch finish at the silver back.

Inside Dope:

The HTC Touch Pro has been described as “the sophisticated approach to business” by its carrier – Sprint. The smartphone really deserves this claim. It runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system and its HTC 3D TouchFlo interface is the main highlight. Not only this, but the Touch Pro also offers GPS, Wi-Fi, EV-DO Rev. support, memory card slot, full QWERTY keyboard, various business tools, and so forth. The Touch Pro costs $299.99 with two-year Sprint’s contract after rebates and including $25 or higher data plan. Like its predecessor HTC Touch Diamond, the Touch Pro has attractive silver trim, rounded edges, smoky mirrored face, and sleek appearance. However, there are also some drawbacks. The smartphone performs sluggish occasionally and it is more bulky than others in its price range. You will find any dedicated camera key and 3.5mm standard headset jack. Still, the HTC Touch Pro remains one of the best and most powerful smartphones for Sprint. What’s more – it is more compact device than the HTC Mogul.

The 2.8 inches touch-screen has 640×480 pixels resolution that supports 262,000 colors. Like the Touch Diamond, you will find the HTC Touch Pro employs the 3D TouchFlo user interface. The toolbar at the bottom allows scrolling from left to right and launching applications with one touch. We like that you can scroll by swiping your finger and it works great with animated 3D effect. You can also change the home screen and customize it with background image and adding items on the Today screen.

The HTC Touch Pro features inbuilt accelerometer that rotates the display on tilting the phone. It works only in some applications including Web browsing, videos, and pictures, but does not work for email, calendar and document when the smartphone is closed. There was a noticeable delay during screen orientation while testing. The G-sensor utility inside the Settings menu allows adjusting the screen calibration.

You can slide the HTC Touch Pro to the right side for accessing the full QWERTY keyboard and this will rotate the screen to landscape mode. In this mode, you will get new menu layout consisting of Contacts, Notes, Tasks, Calendar, Web search, Bookmarks, Messages, and Email instead of HTC 3D TouchFlo interface. The sliding mechanism is sturdy enough to withstand multiple times of opening and closing.

The QWERTY keyboard has large buttons with matte finish and non-slip texture. However, they are little stiff to press and there is a bit lag to register our command through keyboard. We could continuously type with it for messages and emails while testing. We like that HTC has also included on onscreen compact and full QWERTY keyboard, transcriber, and block recognizer.

The navigation array is located beneath the display and includes directional keypad with middle select button, Talk key, Home shortcut, back key, and End button. You can also use the keypad to zoom in/out of the pages. The power button is located on the top, while the volume rocker is on the left side. The camera lens is on the back and the micro-SD card slot is located behind the battery cover. The reset hole and mini-USB port for headphone are on the bottom. We are disappointed that there is no 3.5mm headset jack, but the HTC Touch Pro ships with an audio adapter to attach the same. In addition to it, there is no dedicated camera button on the smartphone.

The HTC Touch Pro can store the contacts in its phonebook limited to available memory and the SIM card can store additional 250 contacts. Each entry can save multiple phone numbers, home addresses, work addresses, a birthday, email addresses, IM screen name, and so forth. The contacts can be organized into caller groups and you can pair them with one ring-tone and a photo for caller ID.

The basic feature set includes text and multimedia messages, speed dial, voice command and dialing, and a speakerphone. The advanced highlights are GPS, 3G support, EV-DO Rev. A Network support, stereo Bluetooth, Opera Mobile HTML Web browser 9.5, and Wi-Fi. The onboard Bluetooth 2.0 supports dial-up networking, file sharing, hands-free kits, stereo and mono Bluetooth headsets. You can also use the HTC Touch Pro as a modem for your computer, but you have to sign up with Sprint Power Vision Modem Plan for $39.99 per month for 40MB or $49.99 per month for unlimited.

The HTC Touch Pro comes with Microsoft Office Mobile Suite and ClearVue Presentation 5 Pro for creating, editing and viewing the PowerPoint presentations. We like that the Windows Mobile smartphone also provides video-out capabilities. The other preloaded applications are Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, a task manager, a notepad, a voice recorder, Jetcet Print 5 for connecting with a printer, a Zip Manager, and Adobe Reader LE. The Opera Web browser 9.5 features bookmarks, pan and zoom pages, tabbed browsing and so forth.

The Microsoft Direct Push Technology provides real-time mail deliver and auto-sync with Outlook contacts, emails, tasks, and calendar through Exchange Server. The advanced messaging features include threaded text messaging in chat view, HTML formatting emails and access to POP3/IMAP4/SMTP email accounts. The pre-installed messengers are Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and AIM.

The Windows Mobile Player 10 Mobile supports WMV, MPEG4, WMA, WAV, MP3, AAC, and more file formats. Like Touch Diamond, the HTC Touch Pro also has streaming media program, YouTube app, and MP3 Trimmer that allows cutting and trimming MP3 files for using them as ring-tones. There is no micro-SD card slot on the HTC Touch Diamond, but the Touch Pro has the same for external storage.

The Sprint has also included its multimedia services within the HTC Touch Pro as a part of Sprint Power Vision Pack that includes Sprint Music Store and Sprint TV. However, you have to pay additionally according to its plan from $15 to $25 per month. The Sprint TV allows accessing various channels including Sprint Exclusive Entertainment, Comedy Centray, and CNN. You can also listen to live talk radio and streaming music from MTV Mobile, VH1 Mobile, and Sirius. The music track download costs $0.99 per song and $5.94 for six tracks.

The 3.2-megapixel camera features 4x digital zoom and video-recording. Its image editing options are quite similar to that on HTC Touch Diamond. The overall picture quality is below average for a 3.2-megapixel camera. The pictures looked dull with flat and gray colors. The video quality was overall average.

We made few calls through dual-band based the HTC Touch Pro via Sprint for testing. The overall call quality was good. We received a bit muffled, but good sound at our end with some background noise and distortion. The callers received good sound at their end. The speakerphone calls were of good quality. It remained same for the Bluetooth headset calls also.

The HTC Touch Pro performed sluggish occasionally while testing. It took some time while registered our commands through QWERTY keyboard and there was noticeable delay for screen orientation. The Web browsing over Opera 9.5 was good. The Sprint TV failed to launch occasionally, but finally it worked. The TV playback quality was good and we also enjoyed the YouTube clips through its inbuilt applications. The music playback quality on the speakers and included headset was of average quality. It was quite annoying to pair a 3.5mm headset jack with included adapter. However, we received fantastic sound through it. We will prefer the HTC to include 3.5mm headset jack for better user experience.

The HTC Touch Pro runs on the 1340mAH lithium ion battery that has a life of 3.75 hours of talk time. Its digital SAR is 0.908 watts per kilogram in accordance with the FCC radiation tests.

Nitty Gritty:

If you can overcome the occasional sluggish performance, then HTC Touch Pro is a better Windows Mobile smartphone to buy.