AT&T gets a Touch Pro2 to call its own, as the best business smartphone around comes to Big Blue. Did Windows Mobile 6.5 make this phone even better? Find out in our HTC Tilt 2 review.
Review summary of the HTC Tilt 2:
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 Like the other phones we've seen based on the HTC Touch Pro2 design, the HTC Tilt 2 on AT&T is Windows Mobile at its best. For business users, the phone packs calling features that put it leagues beyond the competition, with conference calls that sound great and innovative in-call screens that put relevant info about your contacts at your fingertips. All around, the phone does a very nice job, and HTC's TouchFLO 3D interface is an improvement in every way over the standard Windows Mobile 6.5 design. Unfortunately, we encountered some serious problems and bugs while using the HTC Tilt 2. The interface lagged behind better versions of this same phone, and some annoying bugs caused notifications to fire endlessly, or caused applications to crash frequently. The Web browsers had response issues that made them tedious and almost unusable. Though we usually like TouchFLO 3D, on AT&T's Tilt 2, it seems that some of our favorite features, like GPS navigation or video playback, were hidden while the tabbed menus were overloaded with redundant choices. Plus, compared to other new WinMo 6.5 smartphones, the HTC Tilt 2 lacks important features, and you'll have to do a lot of digging and downloading to add, for instance, an IM client or the Microsoft MyPhone service we liked on the Samsung Intrepid. On its own, the HTC Tilt 2 is an impressive phone, and it's our favorite full-QWERTY phone on AT&T's lineup, but compared to the versions you'll find on other carriers, it doesn't measure up. Release: October 2009. Price: $300.
Pros: Excellent keyboard. Great calling features, especially for business users. Windows Mobile 6.5 adds Mobile Marketplace (app store) support.
Cons: Device was buggy and unreliable in our tests. Some features buried, some menus redundant. No IM client or MyPhone service on board.
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Full HTC Tilt 2 Review:
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Design – Very Good
The HTC Tilt 2 is not the direct successor to the AT&T Tilt since the HTC Fuze came in between. It's more accurate to say the HTC Tilt 2 comes from the HTC Touch Pro2 family, since it's nearly identical to the other Touch Pro2 models we've seen. The design is the same: it's a large, rather heavy QWERTY slider phone with a dominating, high-resolution touchscreen up front and a superb keyboard hidden underneath. The interface is the same: the HTC Tilt 2 uses HTC's TouchFLO 3D interface design on top of Windows Mobile to add graphical flair and a convenient, tabbed front page menu that's much more finger friendly than standard WinMo. The main difference for the HTC Tilt 2 is the inclusion of Windows Mobile 6.5, since it was released after the new Mobile OS update was launched. For better or worse, though, you'll hardly notice WinMo 6.5, except for a new Start menu and the addition of the Marketplace, an app store for WinMo phones.
Unfortunately, the HTC Tilt 2 doesn't compare favorably to the other HTC Touch Pro2 models we've seen. Like other Windows Mobile 6.5 phones we've reviewed, the HTC Tilt 2 could be buggy at times, causing random headaches (keyboard stops working, notifications don't stop buzzing, screens overlap as apps fail to close). The Marketplace is a welcome addition, but the new Start menu is a mess. There are already 2 other app menus on the phone, one for AT&T's apps and one you can customize, so the Start menu, with its static, staggered layout, just confounded things for us.
Even with its flaws, the HTC Tilt 2 is the best full-QWERTY phone on AT&T's lineup. The TouchFLO 3D interface, even with bugs, is still more convenient and much more modern than the interface you'll find on either the Nokia E71x or the BlackBerry Bold 9000. None of our issues stopped us from accomplishing our tasks, and if Windows Mobile 6.5 is a letdown, it doesn't matter, because HTC was already covering up the OS.
Calling - Excellent
Hands-down, the HTC Tilt 2 has the best call management we've seen on any cell phone, and we think HTC's ideas will set the pace for business smartphones to come. When you make a call with Tilt 2, the phone aggregates useful information about your caller into a tabbed menu at the bottom of the screen. You can access address book info, calendar events that include your caller, and even recent messages from that contact. Everything about the calling features on the Tilt 2 was easy and intuitive, from dialing to managing conference calls to engaging the top-notch spearkerphone. The phone has a high-quality duplex speakerphone with 2 microphones, and to activate a speaker call you simply place the phone face down during a call. Pick it up again and the speaker deactivates. It's genius, and it sounds great.
Call quality on the phone was also very good. Our callers sounded clean and clear, and our callers had no trouble understanding us. Reception could have been better. We were usually stuck in the middle of the phone's signal range, around 3 bars or so. Sometimes, our calls didn't go through, even when signal looked strong, but this only happened a few times in our test period. Battery life was good, on par with what HTC promises. Cutting down on background activity, we managed to get more than 6 hours of talk time from the HTC Tilt 2. But with every feature up and running, the phone didn't last a full day without needing to be charged.
The HTC Tilt 2 gets some basic Facebook support in the address book. It doesn't go nearly as far as the full synchronization in the Palm Pre, but you can pull pictures and birthdates from your Facebook account and link them to your contact list. We'd like to see e-mail addresses and more personal info added to that feature.
Messaging and Keyboard – Very Good
The keyboard on the HTC Tilt 2 is one of the best we've used on a phone. The Symbian S60 Nokia Surge is a close second, but the Tilt 2 is a much more capable and loaded device with a wide keyboard and an intelligent layout. Unlike the other versions of this device, AT&T arranges the numbers in a sort of grid, leaving the top row dedicated to symbols. There are also loads of dedicated function keys that let you jump quickly into features like text messaging or e-mail, the Web browser or the wireless manager. There's even a button to toggle XT9 text correction, which is an unusual, but not unwelcome choice.
For messaging options, AT&T has loaded the phone with plenty of interesting features, though there are a few things missing. Of course, as a Windows Mobile phone, the HTC Tilt 2 does a fine job with corporate e-mail accounts, and you can also let the device download presets for your favorite service, or configure it manually. For Instant messaging, though, the HTC Tilt 2 comes up empty. While the T-Mobile Touch Pro2 came loaded with clients, incuding IM for Gtalk and even MySpace, AT&T has left IM off the phone out-of-box completely.
The HTC Tilt 2 does come with the Windows Mobile Facebook app, and it worked pretty well on the device. We'd like to see Facebook integration go much deeper, though. And, we'd also like to see Twitter and perhaps MySpace support built into the device as well.
For basic text messaging, the HTC Tilt 2 uses a threaded messaging setup, so you can see all of your text messages as a conversation, like an IM chat. Text messaging looks good on the new Windows Mobile 6.5 system, with some improved design. If you download the Microsoft MyPhone service to your device, you can even backup text messages to Microsoft's MyPhone site.
Business – Very Good
For years we've been asking smartphone makers to improve their calendars, and HTC has finally made some slick, useful improvements to the basic scheduling app on Windows Mobile. The full calendar on the HTC Touch Pro 2 sits on top with the TouchFLO 3D home screen, and it looks great. There are even cool transitions when you zoom in and out of a day's events. Otherwise, in terms of capabilities, WinMo didn't need any more help, and the calendar app is completely capable of handling all our scheduling needs. The scheduling feature still looks barren, even with the WinMo update, but it's highly functional.
The HTC Touch Pro 2 also comes with the full Office Mobile suite, including a remote desktop client. You can create and edit Office documents on the go, and users who need to do some serious Word document editing will be happy with the HTC Touch Pro 2's superlative keyboard. Besides those apps, AT&T has also bundled the JetCET presenter app to help display PowerPoint slide presentations from the phone, and the HTC Tilt 2 has TV Out capabilities, though you'll need to buy an extra cable for that. There are also a few other business news and travel related apps on the device, too, including MSN Money and a special edition of MobiTV just for business users.
The HTC Tilt 2 from AT&T ships with the great Internet Sharing app, but tethered modem support was a bit of a letdown on the HTC Tilt 2. The app didn't work in our first few tries, and once we managed to connect to our laptop, the connection was very slow. We never topped 500Kbps, which isn't half the speed we'd expect from this phone. It's still much faster than dialup, but we've seen much faster devices around.
Multimedia - Good
The music player on the HTC Touch Pro 2 is greatly improved over the standard Windows Mobile kit, but HTC has a long way to go still to catch up to the best multimedia smartphones, like the Palm Pre or the Apple iPhone 3GS. You can start playing music from the Home screen, and the TouchFLO 3D interface has an album cover view that tries to emulate Apple's CoverFlow feature, but we found the music player somewhat difficult to navigate, and the Library was frustrating at best, and unreliable at worst. One drawback of resistive touchscreens is the difficulty they have knowing if you're tapping an item or beginning a flicking motion to scroll through a long list. This meant that the phone would often start playing a song when we started browsing our long song list.
Video playback was good on the HTC Touch Pro 2, though we were annoyed that we had to jump through hoops to reformat our video files. We have yet to see a phone with a WVGA screen that can play videos at full, 800 by 480 pixel resolution. Regular VGA videos looked great on the phone's large display, and the tilting screen made this phone a nice desktop video player, when we needed to keep both hands free.
Though the HTC Tilt 2 is new enough to get the WinMo 6.5 update, it apparently didn't make the cut to get HTC's latest addition, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. A headphone jack would have made this a much more convenient phone for you to use with your own earbuds, but for now you'll have to use the included adapter, which features ports for 2.5mm, 3.5mm and even USB headphones, all on one dongle. The phone also doesn't come with much onboard storage, only a few hundred megabytes, so you'll want to invest in a large microSD card for music, videos and pictures, and the Touch Pro 2 can handle cards up to 16GB. The speaker on the HTC Touch Pro 2 worked very well for music, just as it did for calling. Music came through sounding clean and clear, though of course it lacked requisite bass.
Web browsing – Very Good
Nowhere did the HTC Tilt 2 give us more trouble than in the browsers. Both the standard Internet Explorer browser and the Opera Mobile browser gave us serious trouble, with an unresponsive screen that always took numerous taps to register a click on a Web link. It was a very strange issue, as finger scrolling was much more responsive. But when we wanted to click on a link, or when we wanted to tap the address bar to change our URL, the phone would require multiple taps, which was a seriously annoying issue.
The HTC Tilt 2 uses 2 different Web browser, and both of them are actually pretty good, besides the bugs we encountered. Still, neither could perfectly render a complicated page, like our own homepage. Both the Opera browser and Internet Explorer had trouble with our layout, though images and text both came through looking clean and sharp.
Forget what you've hated about IE on Windows Mobile phones in the past, this version is actually not bad. Pages looked clean and accurate, and it even managed to render some pages, like our Google Reader RSS page, better than the other browser, Opera Mobile. Internet Explorer can even handle Flash videos, and we watched videos on the HTC Tilt 2 directly from the desktop version of YouTube's homepage. Inexplicably, Internet Explorer couldn't take advantage of the phone's zoom bar, just beneath the screen, but the newest version of Mobile IE has a good, smooth zoom control slider.
Camera - Good
The camera was the most disappointing feature on the HTC Tilt 2. It uses a respectable, though somewhat underpowered 3.2-megapixel sensor, and features some advanced functions like touch focus. You can tap anywhere on the image and the camera will focus on that point. It's a nice feature, but the pictures we took with the Tilt 2 were very disappointing. Rainy weather kept our testing indoors, but even under our cool, bright studio lights, it was easy to find problems in the HTC Tilt 2's pictures. Colors were way off, and rendered drab and lifeless in our shots. Noise dominated our pics, especially our self portrait, which was also taken under good lighting. Self portraits were difficult to shoot with the HTC Tilt 2. The phone doesn't have a shutter button, so you have to ready your finger over the screen before a shot, then hope for the best. Also, without a mirror or backwards screen, we had trouble centering ourselves in the frame. Check out our image samples below.
Favorite Beer Bottle
eBay Shot
Self Portrait
GPS Navigation – Good
The HTC Tilt 2 on AT&T uses AT&T Navigator for turn-by-turn GPS navigation. The navigation app suffered a bit from the bugs and unresponsiveness we found in other apps on the device, but it still managed to get the job done, guiding us on our trek in and out of the Dallas metro area. Sometimes, entering an address or point-of-interest, the physical keyboard wouldn't work, but we could still type with the onscreen keys. Otherwise, the mapping app worked well. On a few tight turns, it wasn't able to feed us the next direction quickly enough, but the Tilt 2 did a nice job rerouting us when we found ourselves off course.
Price and availability
The HTC Tilt 2 is available now from AT&T for $300 with a $50 mail-in rebate and a contract agreement.
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