HTC brings its flagship Windows Mobile business phone to Sprint's fast EV-DO network. Did it lose something in the translation? Find out in our Sprint Touch Pro2 review.
Review summary of the Sprint Touch Pro2:
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 The HTC Touch Pro2 is one of our favorite business phones, and it's definitely the best Windows Mobile phone money (a lot of money) can buy. But not this HTC Touch Pro2. Something has been lost in the translation to Sprint's fast EV-DO Rev. A network, and that something is reliability and responsiveness. The Sprint Touch Pro2 that we tested was a mess of buggy software, sluggish menus and unresponsive interface. The best features are still there, like the fantastic keyboard and the best-in-class business calling that puts important information about your callers at your fingertips during a call. But the additions that Sprint has made, like the Sprint Music Store and the Sprint TV streaming service, didn't work well on this phone, and all around it lagged behind the unlocked version and the model that T-Mobile is selling. If you're set on the HTC Touch Pro2, we'd recommend trying it on a different network. If you need a good business phone on Sprint, the carrier has plenty of compelling phones to choose from. Release: September 2009. Price: $350.
Pros: Best keyboard on a business smartphone. Excellent call features and call quality. Lots of extras for sports fans.
Cons: Lagging performance and bugs all around. Camera disappointing. Resistive touchscreen still imperfect while scrolling.
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Full Sprint Touch Pro2 Review:
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Design – Very Good
The HTC Touch Pro2 on Sprint is among the larger smartphones on the market, but with its excellent slide-out QWERTY keyboard and top-notch feature set, we didn't mind a little extra bulk. Still, this won't be the phone to drop in your pocket and go unless you have a tight belt on, or deep pockets (in more ways than one). We've seen two other versions of this phone so far, an unlocked international version and T-Mobile's version, and we're expecting every major U.S. carrier to offer some variation of this phone. For Sprint, the external design is mostly unchanged, though there is a cool looking array of pinholes on the back of the device that add some more color and texture. The TouchFLO 3D interface also gets a splash of color with some orange accents that make icons easier to read against the dark, contrasty background. This version of the phone looks great, it's probably our favorite of the bunch, but unfortunately the phone's performance didn't bear out our good impressions.
While the HSDPA versions of this phone were nimble and responsive, the CDMA version that Sprint is offering for their EV-DO Rev. A network had serious performance issues that popped up in the main menu screens and also in many of the onboard applications. The phone just didn't respond well to our touch input, whether we were using our fingers or the built-in stylus. Buttons wouldn't respond when pressed numerous times, and some applications opened with interface flaws and obvious bugs drawn on screen. We were very disappointed by these problems, as we initially loved the subtle improvements Sprint made to the interface design and we had high hopes for the extras Sprint bundled with the device. But when these didn't work properly, we were let down.
Calling – Very Good
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 making calls 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 always had solid reception on Sprint's EV-DO network in the greater Dallas metro area, and the phone kept up with every other Sprint phone we have on hand, registering full reception or only a bar shy of a full load. Battery life was similar to the T-Mobile version of the device, and way ahead of what Sprint promises. While Sprint guarantee only about 4 hours of talking time, we managed to pack almost 5.5 hours of talking into a single, sustained call. On standby, the phone still needed to be recharged every night, but we easily used the phone throughout our day without draining the battery, even with plenty of Web browsing and some light navigation thrown in.
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. On the Sprint Touch Pro2, this feature was very sluggish, though, as we waited for the phone to populate our list of a few hundred Facebook friends. A few times, the phone even crashed while we tried to link our contacts to our social network.
Messaging – Very Good
The keyboard on the HTC Touch Pro2 is the best we've ever used on a smartphone, and we like it more the more we use it for long e-mails and IM conversations. The keys are spaced wide apart, with a soft but responsive travel distance for each key. The keyboard has a full dedicated number row, and plenty of feature keys to jump quickly into the messaging functions that you'll be using most when the keyboard is open. You can even tilt the screen up a bit and lay the phone down on a desk, using it like a miniature laptop, or keep the screen flat to type in hand. Either way, the keyboard is a standout feature.
For messaging options, the Sprint Touch Pro2 comes with the bare minimum that we expect to find on a smartphone. 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.
For e-mail, the phone did a nice job digging up the presets for our various personal e-mail accounts, and as a Windows Mobile phone, it also did a great job handling our corporate Exchange server. Instant Messaging fans will be disappointed with this device, though. While the T-Mobile version came with support for Gtalk and even MySpace's chat client, the Sprint Touch Pro2 only uses a basic client for AOL, MSN and Yahoo. Of course, as a Windows Mobile phone, there are other options available for download, but we like when these features come free and pre-loaded onto the device.
Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good
For years we've been asking smartphone makers to improve their calendars, and on the Sprint Touch Pro2, 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., even better on this phone than on other versions of the Touch Pro2, thanks to some helpful color accents 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, HTC 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. JetCET also provides an easy printer option, so you can print those Office documents directly from the phone. Sprint also bundles the WorldCard Mobile business card scanner, which uses the Sprint Touch Pro2's camera to scan business cards into your address book. In our tests, the scanner and OCR software was about 75% accurate, but even though we had to make some minor corrections, it was still easier than entering contact info from scratch.
The Sprint Touch Pro2 ships with the great Internet Sharing app, which is our favorite way to tether your laptop to your smartphone for a mobile Internet connection. You just activate Internet Sharing on the phone, plug it into your Windows laptop and your connected, no other settings or extra apps to deal with on the desktop side. In our speed tests, we were disappointed that the Sprint Touch Pro2 only gave us download speeds just under 1 Mbps, and uploads never even hit 100 Kbps. Still, we've seen great results from other tethered modems on Sprint's EV-DO Rev. A network, especially HTC's Sprint Mogul, so it could have just been network congestion on this busy Labor Day weekend.
Multimedia - Good
Multimedia should have been a much bigger draw for the Sprint Touch Pro2, but while the basic multimedia features were all solid, as we expected, the additions that Sprint has made were less impressive. The Sprint Touch Pro2 gets access to the Sprint Music Store, but instead of using its own app for fast access to the store, like we see on most Verizon Wireless V Cast Music Store phones, the Sprint Touch Pro2 uses the Web browser. This is problematic because the Opera browser on the Touch Pro2 suffers more than most applications from the lag and unresponsiveness we found on Sprint's version of this device.
Even worse was the Sprint TV app. We expected low quality from the streaming clips on the video service, but we didn't expect the complete lack of controls that we found. While trying to watch an entire episode of "Monk" on Sprint TV, we couldn't pause or rewind the show at all. If we wanted to stop playing, we had to start over again at the beginning of the segment. Throw in an unresponsive interface and a lack of compelling programming, and the Sprint TV service loses any advantage it might have over the competition.
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.
Thankfully, Sprint has pressured HTC into offering a 3.5mm headphone jack on the Sprint Touch Pro2. Unlike other versions of this phone (and almost every other HTC smartphone on the market), which use a semi-proprietary USB port for audio, sync and charging, the Sprint Touch Pro2 gets its own headphone port right next to the USB connector. That's a nice change of heart from HTC, but it's long overdue. We wish the phone would also come with some internal memory, as the phone's size seems to suggest there's room inside for some extra storage (and a single car garage), but instead you have to buy your own microSD card to fill the phone's slot, which is under the battery cover. The Sprint Touch Pro2 can accept microSD cards up to 16GB capacity.
Web browsing – Very Good
The Sprint Touch Pro2 uses the Opera browser for most Internet tasks, though occasionally users might want to search the Programs list for the Internet Explorer 6 Web browser, since the latter uses Flash Lite. Still, the Opera browser did a fine job with some Flash content, opening YouTube videos in their own player, where they looked better than the inline videos that IE6 provided.
As we mentioned, the Opera browser on the Sprint Touch Pro2 suffers more than most programs from the performance issues that plagued this device. We'd tap links numerous times, with the stylus or our finger, before the phone would react. Scrolling through pages also seemed sluggish. The Opera browser renders pages nicely, coming close to their desktop version, but not exactly. We still prefer the browser on other new smartphone platforms, like the WebOS browser on the Palm Pre or the Google Android browser on the T-Mobile myTouch 3G. These came closer to a real desktop look, and also were more capable at handling mobile pages.
Camera - Good
The camera on the Sprint Touch Pro2 was a real disappointment, especially considering the advanced features on board. The 3.2-megapixel shooter already comes in at a resolution lower than we'd prefer. The slimmer and decided less "Pro" HTC Touch Diamond 2 uses a 5-megapixel camera, after all, so why not this model? Like the Touch Diamond 2, the Sprint Touch Pro2 uses touch focus, so you can tap on a section of the screen and the camera is supposed to focus on that spot. In our tests, it didn't really work well. In areas that were well-lit, the camera would still focus on the background. At other times, like during our sunrise shooting tests, the camera might have focused on the foreground subject, but didn't adjust light levels or white balance properly for the tapped area, so they remained obscured by the brighter backlight. Overall, we wish the Sprint Touch Pro2 would use a dedicated shutter button, as well as touch focus. Self portraits were a pain to line up, as we had to position our fingers before we turned the touchscreen away from ourselves to take the shot. Video recording was also disappointing on this device, and somewhat confusing. It wasn't just the low-quality recording that stymied our attempts. The phone also uses multiple video formats, including MPEG4 and H.264 compression, but each of these has different resolution limits, and you might find yourself with a much smaller video just because you changed a different setting under a different menu. Check out our image samples below.
Self Portrait
Sunflowers
Road Muddy When Wet
Sunrise. Cart in lower right is touch focus subject
GPS – Very Good
The Sprint Touch Pro2 gets navigation help from Sprint Navigator. This is a very nice version of the turn-by-turn app, but unfortunately the navigation program also suffered problems due to the phone's performance issues. The Touch Pro2 took longer to get it's first GPS fix than other versions of the same phone, too long for our tastes. We also encountered frequent problems with the interface, where pieces of the main menu or other apps would remain on screen, hiding necessary parts of the navigation app, like the next turn icons at the top. Still, Sprint Navigator did a great job tracking us on our trips. We especially like the turn meter, which fills up as you approach a turn, a feature we hadn't seen on many other TeleNav apps. We also like that Sprint Navigator gets its own pane on the TouchFLO 3D menu, though we wish it were more capable. We'd like to be able to see a map or get point-of-interest information from the menu screen, without having to jump into the Sprint Navigator app every time.
Price and availability
The Sprint Touch Pro2 is available for $350 with a contract agreement and mail-in rebates.
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