TC's Touch Pro fixes many of the problems with the Touch Diamond and adds a superb keyboard. It remains neat and compact, while battery life is improved (if still not perfect).
HTC's long-awaited Touch Diamond looked like a great Windows Mobile device on paper, but in practice it disappointed on several counts. In particular, the iPhone-like TouchFLO 3D user interface felt slow and clunky, while the battery life was dreadful.Undaunted, HTC has now released a follow-up device, the Touch Pro. This is the logical successor to the still-superb TyTN II. But is the Touch Pro enough of an improvement on the Touch Diamond to be worthy of its illustrious predecessor?
Design
If you've never seen the Touch Diamond, then the very similar Touch Pro should impress you with its looks. Small and neat, it shares the same 51mm by 102mm footprint as the Touch Diamond and is barely larger than an ordinary candybar mobile phone. However, it packs a cutting-edge set of smartphone features.
HTC's Touch Pro takes the basic Touch Diamond idea and adds a keyboard and better battery life.
Central to these features for the business user is a full QWERTY keyboard, which slides out of the left long edge. This does make the Touch Pro slightly thicker than the Diamond (18mm compared to 11.3mm), but it still fits neatly enough in the hand. It's heavier than the Touch Diamond too — 165g compared to 110g.
The keyboard is one of the best sliding full-QWERTY examples we've seen. Of course it's small, with individual keys measuring just 7mm by 6mm. But the construction is superb and the layout very well designed.
The small size of the keys means that the ergonomics work best when the device is held in two hands and the tips of the thumbs are used. If you have large fingers you may struggle to type accurately, although we coped very well. There's a small amount of return on each key, which helps enormously; for us, the Touch Pro's keyboard is more responsive than the TyTN II's by some margin.
HTC has done a great job with the keyboard layout, too. There's a full row of number keys, so you don't need to use a Fn key combination — a huge benefit. HTC has found space for a set of cursor control keys in an inverted-T arrangement; PageUp and PageDown double up with the up and down keys via the Fn key.
The Enter and Shift keys and the space bar are double width, there are separate Caps, Tab, full-stop and comma keys, while the all-important @ symbol is a Fn key combination. Many of the number row's secondary functions are where you'd expect to find them on a standard keyboard — % with 5, & with 7, * with 8, ( with 9 and ) with 0. And there's still space for a shortcut to the Windows Mobile Comm Manger and the web browser. In short, this is the mobile device keyboard against which all others will henceforth be judged.
Unfortunately the same can't be said for the front controls. As with the Touch Diamond, the corners of the rectangle beneath the screen carry touch-sensitive icons for Home, Back, Call and End. In the middle is a large select button and around it, barely visible, are up, down, left and right arrows. The problem is that it's too easy, at first, to hit a corner button when you're aiming for an arrow. We had the same problem with the Touch Diamond and it's irritating until you become accurate, which takes some time.
Again as in the Touch Diamond, the area surrounding the select button also functions as an iPod-style touch wheel. You can use this in a number of ways — to zoom in and out of photos, for example. When you work out how to use this control, it can be very effective.
The screen, which measures 2.8in. across the diagonal, has a native resolution of 640x480 pixels. This is still rare in Windows Mobile devices, and is a joy to behold. As with other recent HTC handhelds, you can opt for large Start menu text, which is especially well rendered on the high-res display.
The Touch Pro has a shiny black fascia, just like the Touch Diamond. The backplate is cut in a similar diamond-like pattern that we don't like any more than we did before. At least in the Touch Pro the backplate is matte, making it more grippable and less fingerprint-prone.
The HTC Touch Pro ships in the same environmentally unfriendly plastic diamond-shaped packaging as the Touch Diamond. It comes with a UK AC adapter, a screen protector, a USB PC connectivity cable, a spare stylus, a headset and a slim envelope-style wallet. You also get a tiny printed quick-start guide and an equally tiny fold-out guide to the TouchFLO 3D system. The full user manual is on CD.
Features
The HTC Touch Pro runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional and is powered by the same 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A processor as the Touch Diamond.
Instead of the 4GB of internal flash storage that HTC chose for the Touch Diamond, there's a microSD card slot. We prefer this solution, as it allows for easy data swapping. There is 512MB of ROM and 288MB of RAM. After a hard reset, our review sample reported 275MB of free storage memory.
This is a well-connected device with HSDPA support providing 7.2Mbps connectivity, given suitable network coverage. Fall-back options are EDGE and GPRS. The phone is a quad-band GSM unit, making it a good fit for international travellers. Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) and Bluetooth (2.0 + EDR) are also integrated.
Interestingly there's also a TV-out feature. This is accessed via the same mini-USB connector used by the AC adapter, PC connectivity cable and headphones.
Like the Touch Diamond, the Pro has a GPS receiver and Google Maps preinstalled. Google Maps is not that accurate at locating you correctly — it consistently placed us a few hundred meters from our actual location during testing. You can choose between several third-party applications if you wish to add point-to-point navigation.
4%
2%
Nice phone, easy to use and great features
The good: Every thing is to love about, I downloaded Google maps works like a charm with built-in GPS. I installed Skype, works great in wifi range and hotspots also at hoe wifi in WPA-PSK setup.
The bad: Toch screen could be faster else fine. NOTE: If anyone having issues with Gmail emails disappearing in the next send/receive, then take a look at your setup. Set your Gmail account in POP3 and not IMAP as IMAP setup syncs the folders and if you have already downloaded emails in your PC then in the next send/receive the emails disappear from your Touchpro phone. IMAP is the default auto setup in this phone.