Design
HTC walks a fine line with the design of this update when compared to last year's Touch Pro. The body of the Touch Pro2 is almost too large and too heavy, but its sleek metal design saves it from looking industrial or unattractive. The underside of the Touch Pro2 is constructed from stiff plastic with a metal look, and a prominent external speaker adding a pleasing texture. HTC includes a 3-megapixel camera, which is pretty standard, but also a call mute button underneath the camera's lens, an unorthodox touch but a master-stroke you'll discover more on later when we discuss conference calling.
One of the major selling points for the Touch Pro2 is the welcomed return of the sliding and tilting screen over a full-QWERTY keyboard, a combination HTC employed in 2007 with the TyTN II, but left out of last year's Touch Pro. The system is also similar to Nokia's N97 with the difference being that Nokia's phone snaps its screen into a locked position whereas the Touch Pro2 has you tilting the screen manually. This can be handy if you need to tilt the screen to a more subtle angle to cope with glare from overhead lighting.
The Touch Pro2's 3.6-inch touchscreen display seems enormous, even though it's marginally smaller than the 3.8-inch display on the HTC Touch HD. The screen's impressive WVGA resolution is sharp and clear, showing off the clean graphics of HTC's excellent TouchFLO 3D user interface. By default our review unit was set to auto-adjust backlight, which is great for power-saving, but we found the screen hard to read at lower brightness levels (particularly under direct sunlight), so we set the screen to a fixed brightness to compensate. The Touch Pro2 comes with a stylus in case you have difficulty using the screen, but in our experience this stylus will probably go unused.
The exterior of the handset is mostly devoid of sockets and switches. The same socket is used for recharging and headphones on the base of the phone, there's a volume rocker on the left side and a power button on top that you'll also use regularly to set the phone to standby mode. Like the Touch Diamond2, the Touch Pro2 has a nifty zoom panel under the screen, used to zoom in on web pages or in the photo gallery.
Features
Where do we start? This phone has everything and then some. HSDPA, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, Bluetooth and USB connectivity — everything a business professional could expect in a smartphone. Plus Microsoft Mobile Office suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote) an Adobe PDF reader, data encryption and VPN access. It also includes TV-out capabilities making it possible to conduct PowerPoint presentations from the handset, or watch YouTube clips on an external display.
But these features all exist on other smartphones, so how about we take a look at something new. HTC has included a new conference calling feature that it says is easier to use than conference calling on fixed line handsets. To be honest, we're not too au fait with fixed line conference calling, but we can attest to how simple it is to set up a call with several parties on the Touch Pro2. To begin a conference call you simply toggle the feature inside an active call then select the people you want to add from your address book. You can also initiate a conference call from within an email received by several recipients by selecting the feature in the message and checking the boxes for the people you want to speak to.
Another common calling task HTC has simplified is activating the speakerphone. Whereas before you might have had to take the phone from your ear and drilled into a menu of calling options to select speaker, with the Touch Pro2 you simply place the phone on a flat surface with the screen facing down. The speakerphone activates immediately and will continue until you pick the phone up again, at which time it automatically disengages. There's also the mute button we described at the beginning of this review, which is used to silence the audio of a call while the speaker is active.
Performance
To justify its $1500 price tag you'd expect flawless performance from the HTC Touch Pro2, and for the most part we've experienced this. Call quality is loud and clear, messaging and email is decent, thanks to the awesome keyboard, and overall performance of the platform is mostly good. Same as with the Touch Diamond2, you do have to keep an eye on the memory and make sure you are closing apps you are not using to maintain the maximum performance from this handset. If you're using the phone correctly you should find almost no lag when switching menus while using the TouchFLO interface, and only short pauses when executing programs. Battery life is similar to the Touch Diamond2's results of a day or two between recharging.
One area we did experience some issues was in regards to network reception. We had the benefit of testing the Touch Pro2 with both Vodafone and Telstra SIMs and experienced reception drop-outs on Vodafone. This is quite a common occurrence, and not entirely the fault of the phone, but what did concern us was that the phone didn't automatically re-establish a connection when we found coverage again. Instead we were forced to go into the Communications Manager and manual reset our connection, a job most phones do without your input. Hopefully this is an issue that is sorted out before the Touch Pro2 reaches stores.
We've focused this phone review on the business side, but we shouldn't totally neglect some of the fun things it's capable of too. The handset's 3-megapixel camera is decent, without being outstanding, and takes photos with passable focus but with poor colour reproduction and loads of grain. The huge screen makes it a decent media player, but as with all HTC products it lacks decent media syncing software to make the job of creating a library of media manageable.
Overall
The question with this latest HTC isn't whether it can do what you want it to do; it can, with a few tricks up its sleeve to spare. The real question is whether you're prepared to pay $1500 for the privilege. To put this in perspective, $1500 could also buy an Asus EeePC 1000H netbook and an unlocked 8GB iPhone 3G. Or it could buy you a Nokia N97 and several thousand Tim Tams (your choice). The fact is the Touch Pro2 is considerably more expensive than most smartphones and the additional features won't appeal to the masses. If you would regularly use the conference calling feature then this smartphone has no peer. HTC has confirmed that the Touch Pro2 will be upgradeable to Windows Mobile 6.5 when it's released in a few months, which is another bonus; access to the Microsoft applications market adds value to a handset already packed with features.
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