HTC Touch Pro2 Review – Excellant On Messaging And Multimedia

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Great huge touch screen, spacious keyboard, call conference management feature is excellent while in conferences.

Thumbs Down:

No 3.5 mm phone jack, expensive, bad camera.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM
Band: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone design: Slider
Caller ID: Yes
Other features:  GPS, Accelerometer, JAVA, HSDPA, EDGE, GPRS

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

3.6 inch display of the HTC Touch Pro2 gives resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. It has a 3.2 mega pixel camera at the back. Downloadable content on the phone is screensavers, games, ring tones, themes, wallpapers, audio files.

Video formats recognized are – WMV (Windows Media Video), 3gp and MPEG-4.
Audio formats recognized are – eAAC+, MIDI, WMA, AMR, QCP, WAV, AAC, MP3 and AAC. Operating System is Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. There is no 3.5 mm jack for music but HTC does bundle an adapter along. 1500 mAh Lithium ion battery has talk time of about seven hours and standby time of about 14.5 days

Razzle Dazzle:

HTC Touch Pro2 is available in the unlocked version as well as from T-Mobile. There are differences between the two devices’ exteriors. The T-Mobile version has a mocha color in the back and doesn’t have tapered edges or the smoother curves of the unlocked version. The unlocked version is round shaped and has a chrome accent. We liked the European version better but then it is a matter of personal preferences and you might like the T-Mobile version.

Inside Dope:

HTC touch 2 has given us great phones in the past and they have been super hits in the market too. They have great touch screen, good music player, camera and lots of other features that you look in a camera. The design of HTC phones is almost more or less the same (except for the HTC Snap) but we never get enough of those sleek sexy devices. We found this to be one of the best phones ever from HTC but all this also comes at a slightly higher price.

The phone is 4.57 inches tall, 0.68 inch deep, 2.33 inch wide and weighs about 6.6 ounces. The phone is comfortable to hold in hand and the slider layout is awesome but it makes the phone a bit thick.

The display WVGA touch screen 3.6 inch big and has a 480×800-pixel resolution, 65k color. The display size is awesome and you will get what you expect which is great video quality for playing games and videos. The screen is bright and vibrant, great for viewing text and photographs. The bigger display screen would also serve you better while browsing on web. A smaller screen needs more scroll which can be a pain in the neck at times.

Beneath the display is a full QWERTY keyboard and you can tilt the display up after sliding it so as to give you a laptop like feel. but we wished a smoother slider than this, you need to push the upper half of the screen, it is not as smooth as we saw in N97. You can keep this phone on your table and work on it just like a lap top.

The screen is resistive and not capacitive so this is a bit of disappointment. Resistive touch screen need touches through stylus and you need to touch the screen harder or else it won’t register. On the other hand, with the capacitive touch screen you can view photos just by flicking your fingers on the screen. For features like HTC’s TouchFlo 3D interface you don’t have to use a stylus, you can tap your finger or flick through the lists.

iPhone was one of the first devices to make capacitive touch screens famous. It has become popular around the world so naturally every one is using it. N97 which has the same set of features and it is the same price range also has a resistive touch screen.

There is a scroll bar at the bottom of the screen which lets you zoom in and out of the pages by rolling your finger on the bar. We have been fans of this zoom bar since long time.

With the HTC’s TouchFlo 3D interface you get tabs for stock quotes and calendar just like HTC Touch Diamond2. In addition to that T-Mobile has added a tab of MyFaves on the today screen and it is there along with the time and date. MyFaves tab contain shortcut to you favorite applications. You can’t remove it from the screen (and we don’t want to do that either since it is very helpful). Other than that you can remove and add tabs that you want with TouchFlo. Other than this you can change appearance of the home screen and also put shortcuts of desired applications that you want on the home screen.

We have seen lots of smart phones land in our test centers and have rarely seen such a spacious and easy to type keyboard. The front half of the phone which is the display slides out and you can tilt it upwards to use the phone just like a computer. The keyboard of the computer is quite spacious; we had no trouble typing on these buttons. There were a few mis hits initially but that was probably because we were new to the keyboard. Once you get used to it, you will realize that this is the most comfortable keyboard to type upon ever. There are five rows of keyboard, the numeric keys at the top rather than along with the alphabetical keys that we are used to with some of the QWERTY boards. Along with this you also get a virtual keyboard for both portrait and landscape mode we think you will be using this physical keyboard more due to better ergonomics.

The phone also has an accelerometer which automatically changes from portrait to landscape mode when you hold the phone sideways. Transitions were fast but sometimes it took awhile.

There are a few buttons below the display like home key, end and talk keys, back button, and home key. On the sides of the phone, there is a power button on the top, reset button, volume rocker, port for mini-USB at the bottom; it is a proprietary port for headset jack and AC adapter. There is also a compartment for stylus. Finally we were happy to see microSD card slot making an appearance on the sides of the phone. Mostly it is located below the battery cover or sometimes below the battery (which is even worse) so you have to go digging in to change cards or remove them. The card slot on the side is rare with mobile phones and we don’t know why this is done.

The back of the camera has a mute button, camera and speakers. The phone comes with AC adapter for charging the battery, wired headset, USB cord, carrying case, audio cable, reference manual and software disc.

Calling is revamped to provide more options. You can call people from you e-mail contacts, you can just select them from the “to” field that it there in the e-mail software. Conference call feature has also been brought in many changes; there is a dedicated virtual button on the dialing for call conference. Once in a call, you can get private with a single caller and block the rest and then again you can release the privacy feature so you get connected to the whole party. There is a mute button on the back of the phone and placing the handset flat on the surface will automatically start the speakerphone.

Other features of the phone that are worth mentioning are speed dial, quad-band world roaming, smart dialing, three-way calling, voice commands, proximity sensor and multimedia and text messaging. You can put unlimited entries on the phone for contacts as long as you are not out of space memory on the phone. A single entry can take work and home address, multiple numbers, birthdays, e-mail, etc.

You can link up a photo to a contact that you have clicked using the camera at the back so that the image of the person flashes when he calls you. Other than that you can give a unique ring tone to an individual so you will know who is calling just by the sound of the ring. Making groups within your phone book is also supported.

The phone is 3G capable and T-Mobile has 3G rolled out in 130 cities to date. It plans to add about 100 more cities in 2009. You won’t be waiting much as the speed is as fast as 1 MBPS.

GPS is ubiquitous on smart phones these days and it seems a phone like this without a GPS would be a deal breaker in these days. HTC Touch Pro2 has an assisted and integrated GPS which uses a combination of cellular tower triangulation and GPS satellites for finding your position. There is also a feature called QuickGPS which quickly downloads maps about your location from the internet.

HTC Touch Pro2 is currently on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional device operating system. HTC has promised that it will give upgrade Windows Mobile 6.5 when it is available, though we are still waiting for an official confirmation from T-Mobile.

HTC Touch Pro2 comes installed with Microsoft Office Mobile Suite which lets you edit Excel and Word documents and you can also view power point presentations. It also has Direct Push technology from Microsoft which gives you real time delivery of e-mails and also synchronizes with  Outlook calendar, tasks, contacts automatically. There is also support for POP3 and IMAP accounts which delivers your email directly to your inbox from various e-mail clients. There is a wizard for setting up these accounts which will make things a lot easier for you. We have tested this wizard in the past just like last time it synced our account instantly. The phone comes pre-installed with IM clients like Gtalk, AOL, Yahoo, Windows Live.

Other applications on the phone include ZIP manager, calculator, Adobe Reader LE, voice recorder, notepad, WorldCard Mobile business card scanner and Jetcet Presenter 5. For browsing there is Internet Explorer Mobile (which is pretty bad inspite of the claimed improvements) and there is Opera.

There is a task manager which lets you keep a track on the memory being consumed by the applications. If your mobile phone is running slow you can refer to this and then close the app which is hogging the memory.

We were disappointed to see a 3.2 mega pixel camera used in the phone rather than a 5 MP one. We are not getting greedy; a 5 MP camera is justified for the price it is offered. HTC Touch Diamond2 had a 5 MP camera so why downgrade? Photo quality was pretty bad considering this is a 3.2 MP rated camera and the pictures looked washed out. There was also a bit of shutter lag which means we had to hold the phone for a bit after the photos were snapped or else the photos got damaged.

Music of HTC phones has been good and this one too lived up to our expectations. the formats accepted are eAAC+, MIDI, WMA, AMR, QCP, WAV, AAC, MP3 and AAC. For video the formats recognized are WMV and MPEG-4. The video quality for this phone is awesome due to the WVGA screen and huge display. The phone comes with 512MB ROM and 255MB RAM and you can expand it further with the microSD cards. Once again we will thank HTC for giving us a card slot on the sides of the phone.

There is no 3.5 mm jack on the phone but the HTC has bundled in adapter for taking in your favorite set of head phones. We are glad the adapter was given but the setup will struggle when put the phone in your pocket along with the unit and the adapter. HTC has meanwhile promised us to include 3.5 mm jacks in all future products.

We tested the phone for call quality it was one of the best. We could hear what others were saying and our friends could also hear us clearly while on the call. There were no dropped calls and no background noise was absorbed on to the phone. But the speaker phone was very disappointing, lots of background noise was attracted which made it difficult for the other party to hear properly. The sound was also cut a lot of times while on calls.

Bluetooth calls were great on this device, we tested it with quite a lot wireless headsets and all the sets worked fine. We also tested the device for 3G network and it worked quite fast. T-Mobile’s 3G network took about 10-20 seconds to load websites. We also watched a few videos on YouTube and the sound was well synced with the video. But it does take a little while to buffer and load. Built in GPS was also quite fast in finding our locations.

The mobile phone is powered by 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7200A processor, we did face some lag with running applications and this isn’t the fastest of phones when it comes to speed. The accelerometer also took a lot of time for transitions even though there were not much applications running in the background, whereas sometimes it changed modes very quickly.

HTC Touch 2 has a 1,500mAh lithium ion battery which gives you a rated talk time of about seven hours and standby time of about 14.5 days.

Nitty Gritty:

HTC Touch 2 comes at a heavy price and is sure to burn a hole in your pocket but we think the price is justified considering the features it offers. Buy this phone if you want one of the coolest smart phones around and if you have a big wallet.