Hands-on with HTC's new smartphones

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	Home / Cell phones / Business smartphones / CTIA Fall 2008

	Hands-on with HTC's new smartphones	By Sindre Lia, 15 September 2008

Check out our hands-on previews of HTC's new smartphones that will be released for Sprint's network soon.

HTC Touch Pro

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The HTC Touch Pro is basically the HTC Touch Diamond with a slide out keyboard, and that might be enough to make this the most anticipated Windows Mobile handset to hit the market in a long time. The Touch Pro has a fantastic display, a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen, and the company has made great strides in making the TouchFLO 3D interface as responsive as the iPhone's UI. Where the interface is pure HTC, they've succeeded, though underneath lurks Windows Mobile 6.1. Still, in our hands on tests, when we slid our finger around the horizontal toolbar, the icons followed our fingers perfectly, and the phone seemed snappy in various functions opening and closing apps or reorienting the screen from portrait to landscape.

Even better, with the large, 5-row, full-QWERTY keyboard hiding underneath, this phone is one of the first on the market to combine a truly responsive, compelling all-touch interface with the hardware keyboard option. It even gets a high-end, 3.2-megapixel camera with auto focus, and did we mention that VGA screen? Definitely what we like to see on a portable device. We're looking forward to getting our hands on one for a longer test drive. Release: September 2008. Price: $900.

HTC Touch Diamond (Sprint)

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For whatever else we might say about the HTC Touch Diamond on Sprint, we can finally declare that HTC has gotten the responsive touch interface to feel right. It isn't perfect, no phone is, but the TouchFLO 3D interface that HTC has set atop Windows Mobile 6.1 is unique and delightful, and best of all it's a useful business interface. Multimedia is something of a letdown, a surprise on a phone with 4GB of internal memory and a VGA screen. The onscreen keyboard, too, needs some work on an evolutionary scale, much as the HTC Touch evolved into this Touch Diamond. Most important to us, though, is that HTC hasn't skimped on hardware, and the phone packs power where it counts, especially in the fast networking and Web browsing, the aforementioned dazzling display and the loads of features, including Wi-Fi, GPS navigation and everything we'd expect from a super-smartphone. Release: September 2008. Price: $350.

Pros: Sparkling, responsive interface with useful shortcut features. VGA screen. Fast networking helps the speedy Web browser. 4GB internal storage.

Cons: Keyboard is still a pain to use, which makes messaging and productivity apps more difficult. Reception problems hurt data-intensive services, like video streaming.