The HTC Touch Pro Review
HTC is known for its Touch Diamond that beat the iPhone at its market entry, but lost out on performance. The phone that fascinated everyone by its looks, disappointed most people by its sluggishness. The TyTN II launched later by HTC made a good attempt at salvaging the lost glory. Now, with HTCs latest phone, the Touch Pro, one hopes that the restoration will be complete.
The Pro shares many features with its earlier sibling the Diamond which is seen in its 102 x 51 mm dimensions. At 18.05 mm thick, it is thicker than the Diamond and still slim enough to be pocketed. The black beauty is the most elegant phone one will see in the market. The screen and the button panel blends well and there are no buttons jutting out, giving the phone a smooth appearance. The 2.8 inch display is flat, large and beautiful. Below the screen are the home, back, start and end keys that sit on a single curved panel and the five-way navigation button is a nice round ring encircling the central OK button which is kind-off of smooth and shallow.
The Pro is a slider phone, and the full QWERTY keyboard is so classy that one may prefer to type on it rather than the TouchFLO’s virtual touchscreen keyboard. There is a dedicated row for numbers and the keys are large enough to enable easy typing. This is one of the best features of the Pro, something that the Diamond is lacking.
Just like the Diamond, the Pro is powered by a Qualcomm, 528 MHz processor and operates on Windows Mobile 6.1. Connectivity is achieved by HSDPA at 7.2 Mbps, GSM, Quad-band, GPS, GPRS and EDGE, and no stone seems to be left unturned. It can talk to other devices using EDR enabled Bluetooth 2.0 for faster data transfers. It also has a 3.2 megapixel camera and an FM tuner. The Diamond also shares all these features.
The Pro is not lacking as far as applications are concerned. The user can work on Office Mobile applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint; read PDF documents, listen to and edit MP3s, ZIP documents, subscribe to RSS feeds, write emails, manage photo contact lists and watch YouTube videos.
The TouchFLO 3D user interface is very impressive and allows the user to conveniently flip through the various tasks effortlessly. The home screen shows the time as numbers impressively flipping away. A summary of missed calls, reminders, call history and appointments are pleasingly displayed. As soon as the keyboard is pulled out, the screen displays shortcuts for SMS, browser, email, memos, bookmarks and contacts. The user can flip through the contact list in the form of pictures of friends and frequently called people. It is also easy to flip through photos and music files by genre, album or artist. Message text is animated just like that of a PowerPoint presentation and can be flipped through by swiping the finger and replied to by tapping on the message.
One can also send and receive emails using Outlook, or access web-based accounts such as Google. The TouchFLO interface makes interacting with the Pro fun, as most of the display is animated. One can browse the internet on the Opera 9.5 browser, and navigate smoothly using the panning and zooming abilities by using the fingertips. The accelerometer function enables webpages to be viewed in landscape mode just by tilting the phone.
How does the Pro compare to the Diamond? The Pro is much more responsive than the Diamond. The performance is much superior. The quality of calls is good and videos play more smoothly. But at 512MB it has a very poor memory capacity as compared the 4 GB of the Diamond. The memory can be expanded by means of a microSD card, which the Diamond lacks. The Pro has a comparatively powerful 1,340 mAh Li-Ion battery as compared to the 900mAh of the Diamond. Also, as mentioned earlier, the Pro is thicker than the Diamond. Apart from these features the Diamond and the Pro share most other features.
Price wise, the Pro is much costlier at 515 pounds (incl. of VAT) or a dollar equivalent of $824, unless locked with a good carrier scheme and data plan. Inspite of performing well with multimedia, the Pro lacks a 3.5 mm audio jack which enables one to connect to good stereo headphones. The speaker phone also sounds very thin and the internal memory is not large enough. From an overall perspective, for those who can digest the high price tag, the HTC Touch Pro is one of the classiest phones in the market that combines killing looks with amazing performance.