HTC sends over their biggest, baddest Windows Mobile phone from Europe, with dual mics and advanced business calling features. Check out our HTC Touch Pro 2 review.
Review summary of the HTC Touch Pro 2:
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 With its silky, smooth keyboard, best-in-class business calling features and solid performance all around, the HTC Touch Pro 2 is the best Windows Mobile smartphone we've seen. It's big, but that extra size and weight also comes with a large slide-out QWERTY and an extra-large battery, along with just about every other feature you could imagine. Multimedia fans will be disappointed by the lackluster player and poor hardware support, especially the missing headphone jack and internal memory. But business users could hardly do better. HTC has crafted a dazzling interface and managed to keep the high resolution screen very responsive to touch input, as well as stylus use. U.S. buyers might want to wait for an American version with U.S. 3G band support, but zealous importers and buyers in this phone's target market should snatch this one up without fear. Release: June 2009. Price: $650.
Pros: Excellent keyboard. Great calling features, including a top-notch business speakrphone and great call management.
Cons: Missing some important software, like IM client and turn-by-turn GPS navigation. Multimedia features still playing catch-up to the competition.
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Full HTC Touch Pro 2 Review:
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Editor's note: HTC recently sent us a couple of their unlocked European phones for review, the HTC Touch Diamond 2 and this phone, the HTC Touch Pro 2. These phones work on AT&T and T-Mobile's GSM and EDGE networks, but don't have the proper radio bands for U.S. 3G access.
Design – Very Good
The HTC Touch Pro 2 is a very large phone, dwarfing most other smartphones we've seen recently. It isn't just the dazzling 3.6-inch, WVGA (480 by 800 pixel) resolution screen that makes the phone so big. The slide-out keyboard also adds considerable thickness, and the phone is fairly heavy, too. If you keep this phone in your trousers, wear a belt. It's much larger than the HTC Touch Diamond 2 we saw recently, though it doesn't add much additional functionality beyond that keyboard and the extra-large battery, though that may be enough to justify the extra heft. Besides the keyboard, the phone is quite similar to the Touch Diamond 2, with few buttons or ports, and a zoom bar beneath the display. The touch sensitive zoom area lets you expand or contract Web pages and photos, but we wish it also worked on e-mail and in other area of the phone.
The HTC Touch Pro 2 uses HTC's TouchFLO 3D interface, an overlay that sinks its claws deep into Windows Mobile 6.1 to keep the nasty, desktop-like business OS buried as much as possible. In more advanced tasks, like file management, you'll see the WinMo interface, but mostly you'll be playing with HTC's own design, and it's a night-and-day improvement over Microsoft's aging touchscreen OS. On the HTC Touch Pro 2, TouchFLO 3D was remarkably responsive, though the phone uses resistive touchscreen technology. Resistive screens are better for stylus work, and even though the TouchFLO interface has been designed to be finger-friendly, as responsive as it was we often had an easier time breaking out the stylus, or poking at the phone with the sharp tip of our fingernail. While navigating the main screen and most of included apps you'll never need to break out the stylus, but it's there when you want a slightly improved response.
Calling - Excellent
The HTC Touch Pro 2 seems built for business calling, which is refreshing, since calling features have mostly been ignored on recent smartphones. We used the phone on AT&T's network in the Dallas metro area, and calls over the GSM connections sounded great. Reception was also solid; the phone usually filled 4 out of 5 bars of service in our test run. One of the most innovative calling features on the HTC Touch Pro 2 is the duplex speakerphone. The Touch Pro 2 uses dual-microphones, which act to cancel some background noise and also helps with speakerphone conversations, so that callers can comfortably talk over each other without cutting out. Best of all, to initiate a speakerphone call, just turn the phone face down on your desk and the phone activates the loud, clear speaker on the back of the device.
Besides the unique speakerphone features, the HTC Touch Pro 2 also has the best call management we've seen on a phone. In-call screens are clear and useful, offering up useful information about your caller like contact information, calendar events and recent messages. Conference calling gets its own, easy to use interface, and managing a multi-party call has never been easier. The phone is missing voice dialing, which is a serious omission for drivers. But this phone seems more suited for use behind a desk rather than at the wheel.
The HTC Touch Pro 2 gets some rudimentary Facebook support as well, and though it doesn't go nearly as far as the Palm Pre's Synergy feature, it's still worth mentioning. You can link an existing contact to a Facebook friend, and the HTC Touch Pro 2 will download their Facebook profile picture and their birthday. We wish it would grab more information, but it was a nice way to add pictures for remote friends in our address book.
Messaging and Keyboard– Very Good
For messaging, the HTC Touch Pro 2 does a great job handling e-mail. Text messaging should have worked better, but our review unit gave us some trouble, and messages seemed to disappear as we jumped from reading recently received messages on the Home screen to following the conversation in the threaded messaging view. The phone will automatically search your contact list as you type a name into the recipient field, when everything worked properly, it was a great experience, well-organized and easy to follow. E-mail was even better. You can read the first paragraph of an e-mail on the Home screen view, or you can search for e-mails quickly in the plain old Inbox view. We had to break out the stylus a few times to dig deeper into our Inbox folders, since HTC hasn't blessed these advanced e-mail features with their TouchFLO 3D interface. Instant messaging fans will be out of luck on this imported version of the HTC Touch Pro 2, as the phone doesn't ship with any onboard IM software. There are plenty of 3rd party options available, though, and we suspect that when T-Mobile launches their recently-announced version of this device, it will have better IM support.
We can't praise the keyboard on the HTC Touch Pro 2 enough. The wide, soft QWERTY was perhaps the best full keyboard we've seen on a smartphone to date, even edging out current favorites like the Nokia E71x and the RIM BlackBerry Bold. The phone gets a full 5-row keyboard, with a number row and arrow keys in an inverted-T. While the number keys didn't have much room with the screen extended and tilted up, without the tilt we had plenty of space, and we enjoyed typing on the HTC Touch Pro 2. You can also type on the onscreen keyboard, and HTC has the best software QWERTY in the business. On the onscreen keys, you can hold down a letter to activate its corresponding symbol. This is one of our favorite mobile keyboard innovations, and we're vexed as to why HTC would use the feature on the software keyboard, but not on the real hardware keys.
Scheduling and Productivity – 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 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. Otherwise, there weren't a lot of extras for productivity apps. We did appreciate the amazingly simple Internet Sharing app, which let us tether the phone to our laptop for connecting to the Net. On the Touch Pro 2, you can enable tethering from a pop-up menu when you connect a USB cable, which couldn't be simpler. Unfortunately, our test unit was not equipped with U.S. 3G bands, and browsing over a shared EDGE connection was prohibitively slow.
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.
In terms of hardware, HTC has only recently started adding standard, 3.5mm headphone ports to their phones, but the HTC Touch Pro 2 uses an all-in-one miniUSB, headphone and charging port. The phone ships with a pair of mediocre earbuds, but no adapter, though these are readily available elsewhere. 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
The HTC Touch Pro 2 ships with Opera Mobile for Web browsing, and this is a great choice, much better than the standard Internet Explorer. Even over a slower EDGE connection, Web browsing was fast and page layout was mostly flawless. The zoom bar just below the screen was very useful and provided smooth zooming to read text up close. We wish that Opera Mobile let us open more than 3 tabs at once, but this didn't cause much trouble. We were happy enough with fast page rendering and near-perfect layout on all the pages we tried, especially our own homepage. The HTC Touch Pro 2 doesn't use Flash Lite, which is especially disappointing since we've seen much more basic, cheaper phones from HTC, like the HTC Ozone on Verizon Wireless, that do use the streaming multimedia technology. As a consolation, the Touch Pro 2 does come with a dedicated YouTube viewer, so at least we could get some of our streaming video needs satisfied.
Camera - Good
The camera on the HTC Touch Pro 2 was pretty good, with a nice feature set, but it didn't live up to the high standard set by the 5-megapixel shooter on the HTC Touch Diamond 2. The HTC Touch Pro 2 does get the touch focus feature that we're seeing on many touchscreen cameraphones these days, including the iPhone 3GS, and it's a great, useful feature that helped us create some interesting shots with a nice depth of field perspective. The Touch Pro 2 doesn't adjust light balance based on the focal point, though, so some of our backlit shots still came out too dark. Self portraits were difficult to shoot with the HTC Touch Pro 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. The phone is also capable of VGA video recording, and our videos also looked pretty good. Certainly not as good as a dedicated camcorder with real lens stabilizers, but better than most cameraphones we see. Check out our image samples below.
Light Cycle close up
Center Focus shot
Touch Focus shot, off center
Fireworks
Self Portrait
GPS - Good
For location-based services, the HTC Touch Pro 2 only ships with Google Maps. It's a nice version of the popular mapping software, but it doesn't take the place of a dedicated, turn-by-turn navigation app. The Touch Pro 2 also comes with QuickGPS, a program that pre-loads satellite data for a quick GPS fix. In our tests, the HTC Touch Pro 2 found us quickly, and Google Maps did a nice job reporting our position and loading new maps as we searched the grid, even over the slower EDGE connection. There are third-party GPS apps available for Windows Mobile, but we wish the Touch Pro 2 came with some other options on board.
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