T-Mobile gets the best Windows Mobile phone on the market in HTC's latest high-end über-business phone. Find out what the fuss is about in our HTC Touch Pro2 review.
Review summary of the HTC Touch Pro2:
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 When the HTC Touch Pro2 hit the scene, it instantly became the best business smartphone on T-Mobile's lineup, and one of the best business smartphones you can buy. For the hefty starting price, it better be (for our analysis of the real cost of owning a smartphone, click here). But the HTC Touch Pro2 on T-Mobile proves its worth with solid hardware, including our favorite QWERTY keyboard and advanced features all around. The phone excels at calling in ways that business users will certainly appreciate. It will help you make great-sounding calls, with easy conference calling and a best-in-class speakerphone. Even better, it will help organize the information you need to access quickly during that important call. It's not a fun phone, though it is packed with multimedia and fun features. But it lacks the customization options of a Google Android phone like the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, the social network synergy of the Palm Pre or the multimedia prowess of the Apple iPhone 3GS. Still, it trumps those devices with superlative call management as well as better scheduling and productivity features, and it's still easy going enough to play music and videos or casually surf the Web. In other words, the HTC Touch Pro2 takes the best of Window Mobile and hides the rest behind a snazzy and responsive interface that keeps things professional. Release: August 2009. Price: $350.
Pros: Best keyboard on a business smartphone. Excellent call features and call quality. Solid performer all around.
Cons: IM client was buggy. Camera disappointing. Resistive touchscreen still imperfect while scrolling. Dueling Web browsers confusing for users.
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Full HTC Touch Pro2 Review:
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Design – Very Good
Like the older T-Mobile Wing, the HTC phone that this phone replaces on T-Mobile's lineup, the HTC Touch Pro2 is a thick QWERTY slider with a full touchscreen up front. But that's where the similarities end, and the HTC Touch Pro2 is a testament to how far HTC has pushed Windows Mobile in the 2 years since we reviewed the Wing. The Touch Pro2 is a dense, heavy phone, and it will weigh down a light pair of pants in a front pocket. Still, the phone is packed with features, including a high-resolution screen that pushes 800 by 480 pixels, the highest resolution you'll find on a U.S. carrier. Even though it's a resistive touchscreen, better suited to the pressure from a stylus, the HTC Touch Pro2 was among the more responsive Windows Mobile phone's we've seen, even with HTC's stylish TouchFLO 3D interface covering up most of the WinMo 6.1 dreck beneath.
We reviewed the unlocked European version of this phone, and the T-Mobile edition is mostly unchanged, except for a new coat of paint and some basic style differences. The phone retains the zoom bar we've seen on other recent HTC devices, like the HTC Touch Diamond 2, and it's an effective tool on this phone, but we wish it was usable everywhere, and not just in select applications. It worked on photos and in the Opera Mobile Web browser, but not in the Internet Explorer 6 browser, or other applications where a close-up look would have been helpful.
Calling - Excellent
Hands-down, the HTC Touch Pro2 has the best call management we've seen on any cell phone, and we think it will set the pace for business smartphones to come. When you make a call with Touch Pro2, 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 Touch Pro2 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. We found good reception on T-Moble's 3G network in the Dallas metro area, at least as good as other 3G T-Mobile phones we're currently testing. Battery life lagged behind the European version a bit because that phone didn't have access to a U.S. 3G network, which drains the battery a bit quicker, but we still managed a call that lasted more than 5 hours.
The HTC Touch Pro2 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 Touch Pro2 is one of the best we've used on a phone. The Symbian S60 Nokia Surge on AT&T is a close second, but the Touch Pro2 is a much more capable and loaded device with a wide keyboard and an intelligent layout. You'll feel comfortable typing documents on this phone, let alone long e-mails and text messages. We like the keyboard shortcuts for messaging, Web browsing and the Comm Manager, which lets you toggle Wi-Fi and data networks quickly.
For messaging options, T-Mobile has loaded the phone with plenty of interesting features. Of course, as a Windows Mobile phone, the HTC Touch Pro2 does a fine job with corporate e-mail accounts, and it also had presets for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Gmail. If none of those fit the bill, you can also let the device download presets for your favorite service, or configure it manually. For Instant Messaging fans, the HTC Touch Pro2 comes with a surprising sample of IM clients. There's a single IM app from Oz that can handle AOL, Yahoo, Gtalk and even MySpace IM, which we rarely see on a phone, but it's a welcome addition. There's also a separate app for Windows Live messaging. Unfortunately, the Oz app gave us lots of trouble on our review unit, and it wouldn't log into any of our IM communities. We've seen this app work on other WinMo phones, so hopefully our trouble is an isolated incident.
Finally, for basic text messaging, the HTC Touch Pro2 uses a threaded messaging setup, so you can see all of your text messages as a conversation, like an IM chat. Even better looking is the main screen message view, which lets you flip through recent messages and watch as they fly on and off the screen under your fingertip. It's a slick shortcut, and there's a similar view for e-mails that lets you check the opening paragraphs of a letter before you dive in.
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. Besides those apps, T-Mobile has also bundled the JetCET presenter app to help display PowerPoint slide presentations from the phone, and the HTC Touch Pro2 has TV Out capabilities, though you'll need to buy an extra cable for that. There's also a Handango InHand app, but when we tried to open it we got an error saying our handset wasn't supported. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.
The HTC Touch Pro2 from T-Mobile ships with the great Internet Sharing app, but tethered modem support is a touchy subject with T-Mobile. Officially, T-Mobile doesn't support tethering your phone to your laptop for an Internet connection. It does work, but we wouldn't recommend it. T-Mobile won't spell out the consequences for using this apparently unauthorized app on their network, but it's clear they feel that tethering your laptop is a violation of your contract agreement. It's a confusing situation, and we hope T-Mobile finds a comfortable way to offer tethered modem support to their 3G customers.
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.
Like all recent HTC devices, including the more personable T-Mobile myTouch 3G, the HTC Touch Pro2 lacks a standard, 3.5mm headphone jack. We've heard that future HTC devices will finally get this oft-requested port, 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
The HTC Touch Pro2 uses 2 different Web browser, and both of them are actually pretty good. All shortcuts on the phone, from the dedicated Web browser key on the keyboard to shortcut links on the TouchFLO 3D menu, lead to the new Internet Explorer 6 mobile browser. 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. Inexplicably, Internet Explorer couldn't take advantage of the phone's zoom bar, just beneath the screen, and zooming in and out of large pages was a hassle with this browser. Also, though it's an improvement from the last version of IE, it still wasn't perfect, and some complicated pages lacked all of their framed features.
Opera Mobile is a better choice, and with the zoom bar to help out, it was a much better browsing experience. Neither browser measures up to the best recent WebKit browsers we've seen, like the WebOS browser on the Palm Pre or Apple's Safari browser, but Windows Mobile has started to vindicate itself in this area. 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 was the most disappointing feature on the HTC Touch Pro2. 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 Touch Pro2 were very disappointing. Outdoors, under good lighting conditions, images looked pretty good. A landscape shot we took at dusk lacked fine detail, but these pics would be fine for simple online sharing among social networks. Under our studio lights, the camera produced images that looked washed out and fuzzy. We had to check to make sure the lens was clean, which it was, unfortunately. 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.
Self Portrait
Dusk Landscape, Moon is touch focal point
Still Life, Nectarine is touch focal point
Still Life, Toy is touch focal point
GPS Navigation – Very Good
The HTC Touch Pro2 on T-Mobile uses TeleNav for turn-by-turn GPS navigation. The GPS app also gets some help from the QuickGPS app, which preloads satellite position information, thus helping the phone get a fix much faster. In our tests, we found the Touch Pro2 to be a fine navigation device. TeleNav does a nice job with turn-by-turn navigation, and the maps and directions looked great on the phone's high-resolution screen. With T-Mobile's fast networking, maps loaded very quickly, and TeleNav did a nice job warning us about upcoming turns, and remapping our route when traveled off course.
Price and availability
The HTC Touch Pro2 is available from T-Mobile for $350 with a contract agreement.
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