There's also an accelerometer that causes the screen to rotate automatically when you turn the Touch Pro in your hand. However, this only works in some applications. The device has a front-facing camera for video calling and a 3.2-megapixel main camera at the back. The latter sports a tiny LED flash and has an autofocus feature.
TouchFLO 3D is a visually impressive layer on top of Windows Mobile: fortunately, it runs quicker on the Touch Pro than it did on the Touch Diamond.
The TouchFLO 3D interface is undoubtedly the star of the show visually. The Windows Mobile Today screen has been replaced by a screen with a scrollbar of icons along its bottom edge. These variously give you a time display, access to contacts, messages, email, the web, camera, music, current weather, an application picker and settings. You can sweep the screen with a fingertip to move around within these choices and make selections.
TouchFLO works much better than it did on the Touch Diamond, and is rather impressive. Moving through pictures and album artwork is visually pleasing as you flick through them rolodex-style, for example. Inevitably, though, you'll need to use the Windows Mobile 6.1 interface for a lot of tasks.
HTC includes a raft of applications on top of the Windows Mobile bundle. Internet Explorer has been ousted in favour of Opera, which is a good move: Opera is smooth, displays data better and allows for tabbed browsing.
Among the other extras is an FM radio, Adobe Reader, an MP3 editor, an RSS reader and a Zip file manager. There's also a YouTube application that lets you download videos and then view them. This works remarkably smoothly. Also worth a mention is WorldCard Mobile which you can use to photograph business cards and then import their contents into the Contacts database.
Performance and battery life
Touch Pro is well ahead of the Touch Diamond as far as performance is concerned. TouchFLO 3D works better, and the well-designed keyboard is an absolute must for heavy email users or anyone needing to significant amounts of data entry.
Battery life is also greatly improved, thanks to the replacement of the Touch Diamond's 900mAh battery with a 1,340mAh unit in the Touch Pro. This still only kept us going for two days between charges, and heavy use of 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS would no doubt reduce this further. HTC says the Touch Pro is good for 419 minutes of GSM talk.
Conclusion
We are very impressed with the HTC Touch Pro, which 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). As far as the design is concerned, only the front-panel buttons give us cause for concern.
There are plenty of features packed in too. The TouchFLO 3D interface won't appeal to everyone, but you can always disable it and revert to the standard Windows Mobile UI if you wish.
6%
1%
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.