In our HTC Touch Pro review, we slide open Sprint's newest in the Touch family. It's like an HTC Touch Diamond with a full-QWERTY keyboard, but is a keyboard all the touchscreen phone needed to pull ahead?
Review summary of the HTC Touch Pro (Sprint):
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_it00.jpg) Our Sprint contract is up soon, and we were thinking about buying the HTC Touch Pro as an upgrade to our Palm Treo 755p, but after using the phone for a little while, we're going to hold off. HTC has some great design ideas, and a week ago we would have claimed that a QWERTY keyboard is all the HTC Touch Diamond needs to be a killer phone. That would have been true, if this phone performed as well as the Touch Diamond we reviewed. Instead, it was unresponsive, felt buggy at times, and needed some serious polish. We've seen this from HTC before, and the company has a history of releasing updates that dramatically improve their device performance. But until we're sure this will be the case with the HTC Touch Pro on Sprint, we would recommend that buyers know what they are getting into. Without these usability issues, the phone still has the highest-resolution screen on the U.S. market, and a snazzy, useful interface that manages to bring most of our favorite features to the surface so we don't have to submerge ourselves in the Windows Mobile pool. If HTC and Sprint could just iron out the kinks, we would be ready to take the plunge. Release: October 2008. Price: $400.
Pros: Large keyboard. Fast networking. Interface looks dazzling on VGA screen. Opera browser one of the best for phones. Good camera. Great productivity apps built-in.
Cons: Phone felt unresponsive. Interface lagged, system sometimes didn't respond to buttons, overall disappointing performance. Needs more messaging, media options.
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Full HTC Touch Pro (Sprint) Review:
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Hardware design - Good
The HTC Touch Pro on Sprint seems to be the exact same phone as the HTC Touch Diamond, a phone we recently reviewed and liked very much. Tack on a slide-out keyboard, and you've got yourself the HTC Touch Pro instead (Apple, please take note). Unfortunately, this didn't solve many of the problems that we had with the HTC Touch Diamond, and the HTC Touch Pro lags behind the Touch Diamond in performance. In fact, many of the old problems we've had with HTC QWERTY-slider phones (like the AT&T Tilt, for instance) and Windows Mobile phones rear their ugly head once again.
The TouchFLO 3D interface looks exactly the same as it did on the HTC Touch Diamond, but it just didn't react as quickly to our touch. Some times, slight movements of our finger to the left or right chose the wrong tab in the TouchFLO Today screen. Sometimes, our taps did nothing at all, or we were too impatient to wait for the application to slowly open. Sometimes pressing the back arrow key quit a program, sometimes the "OK" or "X" button in the upper-right corner would work, or sometimes neither of these, nor the "End" key, could get an app to quit, and we had to press the home key instead.
The phone lacks the wealth of dedicated buttons that you'll find on the Sprint Mogul by HTC, and there wasn't even a button to activate the camera, let alone a half-step button for auto focus. Other dedicated keys are hidden beneath, on the keyboard. There are keys for the Comm Manager and the Opera Browser hidden as functions amongst the keyboard, but that means you have to open the HTC Touch Pro to press these keys, so you might as well dig through menus.
Of all the issues we had with the HTC Touch Pro's buttons, though, we hated nothing so much as the so-called navigation button. The center button is a "select" button, a scroll wheel and a 4-way button. Unfortunately, "select" is about all it's good for. The scroll wheel was nice for zooming in and out on pics and Web pages. It wasn't responsive, but it was a nice bonus. We wish the wheel could have been used everywhere, because the 4-way controls are an abysmal failure. It's difficult to know where to press on the lipped crater of the center button, and we often found the HTC Touch Pro choosing one of the keys to the left or right of the button, all of which (Send, End, Back and Home) are disastrous when you only want to move the cursor around. When we tried up and down, we had better luck, but it still didn't work every time. Of course, there's a nice pulsing light around the center button, so maybe that makes up for the wonky controls.
The screen is still superlative, at a dazzling VGA, 640 by 480 pixel resolution. It looks great, and the TouchFLO 3D interface is a snazzy, hi-def overlay on top of Windows Mobile. You don't have to dig into the WinMo 6.1 OS to play music, browser the internet, check the weather or even read text messages. We think HTC stopped a step to far, and they could have skinned the entire OS to avoid the aging Windows Mobile interface completely. Still, HTC's TouchFLO 3D is the best looking UI on any Windows Mobile phone by far.
Interface design - Very good
Again, we love the TouchFLO 3D interface, but only when it reacts smoothly. On the HTC Touch Diamond on Sprint that we tested, this was the case, but our HTC Touch Pro was much less responsive. Also, as we mentioned, some old issues crop up. The phone has trouble keeping up if you switch quickly from landscape to portrait mode. The screen will sometimes get stuck on the landscape menu, which is only a simple shortcuts page. We wish that HTC had designed a TouchFLO 3D interface to match the wider screen orientation, but instead all you get are 8 shortcut icons, including two for messaging (one text, one e-mail) and two for the Web browser (one for bookmarks, one for "Web Search"), plus tasks and notes. There must have been better ideas for this page, and we would like to see a more useful, and much more customizable selection.
There are a few things that we like. We like that HTC understands that pecking at tiny icons with your finger is frustrating, if not impossible. So, when you get a notification, you tap the notification bar and a new window pops up with larger icons on it. Of course, Google is using a drop-down window for notifications, and it works beautifully, but let's take baby steps here. We like that the Start menu and the Task Manager are larger, and more touch friendly. Of course, the Task Manager just highlights the biggest problem of Windows Mobile, that it leaves applications running. We have no idea how to quit some apps. With no "Exit" menu option, the "X" button didn't even quit the app, it just closed the window, and we could only quit through the Task Manager. So, it's good that the task manager has large buttons. There, problem solved.
Calling - Good
Calls on the HTC Touch Pro sounded pretty good, but we remember the HTC Touch Diamond sounding a little better. Callers reported voices that sounded a bit distant and mechanical, almost as if we were talking close to a speakerphone, when no speakerphone was engaged (we double-checked). The phone uses the same size battery as the HTC Touch Diamond, and we managed a call that was almost as long, just under 5.25 hours. So, we only lost about 15 minutes or so, though we wonder where the time went. Reception on the HTC Touch Pro was just as troubling as it was on the Touch Diamond. The phone lagged behind other Sprint phones by a bar or two.
Because it has a slide-out keyboard, the HTC Touch Pro can start searching your contacts list as soon as you start typing a name. We had weird issues with our contacts. Our own name disappeared in the transfer to the Touch Pro, though it was still on our Exchange server. Also, none of our assigned pictures came through properly. This could be an issue with our Exchange server, though, and we can't prove it was the phone's fault. Still, we had trouble with Exchange on our Touch Diamond, so it was curious that we had new issues with this phone.
The speaker-independent voice dialing on the HTC Touch Pro comes courtesy of Microsoft's Voice Commands. We prefer the Nuance-branded app that comes on most phones. The Microsoft Voice Commands didn't hear us right every time, and the commands were slightly different (you say "call" to call a contact, but have to say "dial" to speak the numbers). Conference calling was very easy and intuitive, with only a button press to connect multiple calls. The speakerphone was loud, but not quite as loud as we like, which is too loud for most people.
Messaging - Good
Messaging on the HTC Touch Pro was definitely improved by the slide-out keyboard. HTC went for broke with this keyboard, it's just enormous. The keys individually are fairly small, but the keyboard packs in five rows (instead of the normal 3-4), with plenty of dedicated controls and symbol keys. As we mentioned, we like our e-mail button up top, near the screen, but we can't complain about the HTC Touch Pro's comfortable, soft keyboard. Of course, someone should mention to HTC that when the hardware keyboard is open, there is no need to put the software keyboard on screen. So, we constantly found ourselves closing the onscreen keys.
For messaging options, the HTC Touch Pro is all business, but not more so than the HTC Touch Diamond. You get Exchange support, obviously, and also IM clients for AOL, MSN and Yahoo. No Google Talk, though, and if you want a different e-mail service, there aren't any presets, but the phone does a nice job figuring out the settings for you.
Scheduling and productivity - Very good
We couldn't imaging typing on the HTC Touch Diamond, and productivity and scheduling apps were greatly improved by the HTC Touch Pro's large keyboard. The phone gets the full complement of Windows Office Mobile apps, including OneNote, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. As a bonus, there's even a helpful printing utility and some other useful apps, like a business card reader. We found WorldCard to be useful for transcribing business cards on the phone. It wasn't perfect, but it saved us plenty of typing.
For scheduling, the HTC Touch Pro sees no improvements over the standard Windows Mobile calendar. Actually, that's a misstatement, as Windows Mobile Standard (the non-touchscreen version) has a better Today screen that brings up calendar appointments in a larger, more convenient bubble. In any case, synchronizing our appointments went smoothly, and the keyboard helped us enter new meeting times and dates. Surprisingly, we were stymied by the lousy navigation key. It is very difficult to switch fields with a poor navigation key, and this made scheduling appointments, which requires constant field-switching, more difficult. Often, we lost our progress by accidentally hitting, well, anything other than up or down. Every other selection is fatal to the task at hand.
Multimedia - Good
The HTC Touch Pro features an improved media player over the standard Windows Media Player, with a more touch-friendly interface and a much better look. You can start and stop the music, with some good playback options, directly from the top level of the Today screen, but we wish HTC would have gone farther in offering support for browsing our libraries and playlists without having to dig into the menus. The album artwork displayed on the Today screen is a red herring. You can't flick it or browse album covers like you can on even the lowliest Apple iPod. But honestly, if HTC were taking the HTC Touch Pro and Touch Diamond seriously as music phones, they would have included a 3.5mm headphone jack so we could use our own cans. Even in terms of storage, Sprint's HTC Touch Diamond gets 4GB of internal space, but the HTC Touch Pro gets none, though Sprint includes a 1GB microSD card in the box, and the phone can accommodate cards up to 16GB.
For video, Sprint may be pushing its own Sprint TV service, but it was the YouTube player app that had our attention. Sprint TV looks okay on the HTC Touch Pro. We had some reception problems that kept us from getting a reliable data signal, so we couldn't play the streaming videos whenever we wanted. But as long as we were in Wi-Fi range we could play our favorites on YouTube. Well, not all our favorites, as some videos didn't show up when we searched, though they appeared on our desktops (try "1 2 3 party" and watch the first video).
Web browsing - Very good
The HTC Touch Pro benefits from the Opera browser, and Opera makes what could be the most serious competitor to Apple's excellent Safari browser on the Apple iPhone 3G. The Opera browser has gotten a nice facelift to match the HTC TouchFLO 3D interface, and we liked the full-screen view that it offered. We also liked being able to zoom in on a page by swirling our finger around the navigation button. We wish the zoom action were much smoother, but it was still a functional shortcut.
In our review of the HTC Touch Diamond, we ran a head-to-head test between that phone and the Apple iPhone 3G. The Touch Diamond won hands-down, so this time we tested against the T-Mobile G1, running Google's browser. Because our Morristown, New Jersey home office is lousy for both Sprint and T-Mobile coverage, we used our Wi-Fi network for browsing. The results were surprisingly close, but the T-Mobile G1 browser edged out the HTC Touch Pro every time, but only by a couple seconds.
GPS - Very good
The HTC Touch Pro uses Sprint Navigator for turn-by-turn directions, and it's a fine bit of software. The Touch Pro had trouble finding us in our office with its lack of a clear satellite view, but had no trouble on the open road. It tracked us quickly, and took advantage of Sprint's fast EV-DO Rev. A network to load up new maps in a hurry. We wish it could pan the map as we moved our finger around, but instead we were just dragging a wireframe box and waiting for the map to load. The Sprint Navigator software has traffic updates and re-routing, as well as a robust point of interest database.
Camera - Good
The 3-megapixel, auto focus camera on the HTC Touch Pro was actually not bad. In fact, under the right conditions, it was pretty good, and worth uploading pics, even if they may not have been print-worthy. Details could blur when light was anything but ideal, but under our studio lamps, the HTC Touch Pro did a fine job.
Street scene
Garden Center
In these first two scenes from the East Village in New York City, it was a cloudy day, so we can almost excuse the poor lighting in these pics. The sky was overexposed in both, but colors seemed fairly accurate for the light we were getting, and colors were pretty good (though the orange barrel in the first is glowing like a lightbulb). Details were lost in the Garden Center, though, as we could hardly distinguish between any of the leaves on the plants.
eBay shot
The HTC Touch Pro would make a fine phone for eBay enthusiasts. This phone captured more of the fine details in our action figure than most other cameraphones we've seen. Every number is visible, and even the fake fur on Snake Eyes' wolf is vivid.
Self portrait
Too bad the camera couldn't catch a sharp shot of this editor. In fact, the camera takes a few seconds to snap a picture, with a series of beeps and audible whirring noises as the focus latches on. It might have been in this delay that we lost the shot. We prefer a two-stage button for the camera, instead of a "Start" button that begins the whole focus-and-shoot procedure.
Panorama of clutter
The HTC Touch Pro can help line up panorama shots by displaying a ghost image of the previous shot on the side of the screen. The camera isn't as good at splicing these shots together, as this picture of our cluttered workspace reveals. Look at how the overhead desk light seems to split in two. Too bad, this would have been a very cool feature for a good cameraphone.
Price and availability
The HTC Touch Pro on Sprint is available now for $400 with a two-year contract agreement. A $100 mail-in rebate is given when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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