The Network gets HTC's thick business slider, but is it enough to steal corporate America away from the competition? Find out in our Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 review.
Review summary of the Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2:
 |
|
Scoreboard » Features » Side-by-side » Gallery » |
 The Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 is a great business phone, and it instantly leaps to the top of Verizon's business lineup. However, like the Sprint version of the same phone, it has plenty of annoying, though not fatal, bugs that keep us from recommending it outright. If you're sticking with Verizon Wireless and you need a business phone, there isn't a better choice, as the Touch Pro2 has the best calling and contacts handling and the tightest integration with your Office workflow of any models available. It's a much better business phone than the Motorola Droid, which has Android's deep customization (and fun) options and faster performance, but lacks the business savvy and deep, reliable Exchange support you get with Windows Mobile. Unfortunately, Verizon Wireless hasn't announced plans to upgrade this phone to Windows Mobile 6.5, which would bring support for Microsoft's smart MyPhone service and a preloaded Marketplace app, in addition to other touch friendly improvements. In the end, if you're shopping for a Touch Pro2, this isn't the best available (try the T-Mobile version), though it is the cheapest up front. Even with its flaws, the Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 is the best business smartphone on The Network. Release: September 2009. Price: $200.
Pros: Great keyboard. Solid calling features. HTC's fancy interface hides most of the worst parts of Windows Mobile 6.1.
Cons: Buggy all over, with performance problems. Multimedia and Web browsing features still not up to par. No clear upgrade path to Windows Mobile 6.5.
| Poor |
Mediocre |
Good |
76%
VERY GOOD |
Excellent |
|
|
|
Full Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 Review:
|
Look and Feel – Very Good
The HTC Touch Pro2 on Verizon Wireless is fairly nondescript on the outside, except for the stylized map drawn onto the battery plate around back. The phone is large and dense, but considering its business heritage and top notch features, like the duplex speakerphone on the back of the device, we can forgive some bulk. Still, we wish it were a bit thinner and lighter. The interface design is great for a Windows Phone, HTC's classy TouchFLO 3D with its tabbed interface and ultra polished look. But the interface lacks color and comes across a little too serious. There are fewer customization options than we'd like, and ever so often we got lost and found ourselves in the land of Windows Mobile 6.1. That's another knock against this phone, as more recent models, like AT&T's Tilt 2 get an update to Windows Mobile 6.5, which brings with it Microsoft's MyPhone service and, more importantly, the Windows Mobile Marketplace. You can still navigate to Microsoft's Marketplace page and download the store to your device, but we wonder how many buyers will find the store easily, and how many will miss the chance to fill in some gaping holes in the feature set.
The Verizon Touch Pro2 has one of the best keyboards we've ever used, like all of the Touch Pro2 models (to compare all the Touch Pro2 devices, click here). Keys were soft and well spaced, and it was easy to type for long periods on this device. There aren't many dedicated keys for features. You get a key to jump right into the messaging menu (a WinMo 6.1 holdover), a shortcut for the Comm Manager to control the phone's radios and a star key you can assign yourself. There's no shutter button for the camera, no shortcut to instantly start a new e-mail or text message. All of the keyboards on the Touch Pro2 models are slightly different, and we like the AT&T Tilt 2 keyboard the best, while the Verizon model comes in behind the pack.
The Verizon Touch Pro2 also uses a very high resolution screen. It's a 3.6-inch display showing 800 by 480 pixels, packing more pixels than most other smartphones. The screen looked fantastic, especially with the dark and moody HTC TouchFLO 3D interface. It was also plenty responsive, especially for a resistive touchscreen. You can break out the holstered stylus if you like, but you won't need to, as the Touch Pro2 is nice and responsive to finger input, and for the most part the HTC interface is designed to be touched.
Calling and Contacts – 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.
The Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 is the only version of this device to support visual voicemail. The feature didn't look so polished on this phone, but it still worked well and let us pick and choose which messages we wanted to hear without having to dial into Veirzon's service.
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 got a consistent 3-4 bars of service on Verizon Wireless' network in the greater Dallas area, which is consistent with other Verizon Wireless phones we're testing. Battery life was similar to the T-Mobile and Sprint versions of the device, and it managed to exceed our expectations. While Verizon guarantees only about 5 hours of talking time, we managed to pack almost 5.5 hours of talking into a single, sustained call. You'll want to charge the phone during the day, though, especially if you use Direct Push e-mail or check your messages constantly.
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 Verizon Wireless 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.
Business – Very Good
As a business device, the HTC Touch Pro2 on Verizon Wireless does a great job with the essentials. The calendar app looks very polished, and you can run through your schedule from the home screen tab without diving in too far. The scheduling screen itself was bare bones, a textual holdover from the WinMo interface, but it got the job done. For Office document handling, the Verizon Touch Pro2 comes with the full Office Mobile suite, which is the best suite for viewing PowerPoint decks or creating and editing Word and Excel documents. Paired with the phone's excellent keyboard, the device makes a surprisingly competent mobile office. The Motorola Droid on Verizon Wireless doesn't hold a candle to the powerful business Office tools and corporate e-mail handling on the Verizon Touch Pro2, and the keyboard on the Droid is one of the worst we've used on a QWERTY slider, while the HTC device gets the best keyboard around.
Besides the basics, there are a few other nice features thrown in. The Verizon Touch Pro2 doesn't get the easy Internet Sharing app, but it can still connect to your laptop for a tethered modem connection using VZ Access Manager, a buggy piece of software that does manage a fast connection, when it works properly. The phone also comes with WorldCard, a business card scanning app. WorldCard transcribed with an accuracy level around 60-70%, which is still better than typing all that info by hand.
Multimedia - Good
With some help from HTC's design, the Verizon Touch Pro2 is a surprisingly competent multimedia device. The phone still does a poor job finding your music and importing it from the microSD card, not included. But this is par for the course on Windows Mobile phones. Once you have your tunes loaded, you can play them from the simple player on the home screen, and HTC makes it easy to create playlists and manage your library. There's even a 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom of the phone, so you can plug in your own earbuds for music on the go. As a nice bonus, that great speakerphone doubles as a very good music speaker.
For video playback, the Verizon Touch Pro2 was able to handle all of the video files we threw its way. These all loaded in the inferior Windows Media Player, but once a video is playing full screen on that great, high resolution display, you won't need to touch the WMP controls anyway, so this wasn't much of a problem. The Touch Pro2 doesn't come with any of Verizon Wireless' V Cast services for streaming music or videos, and it doesn't have access to the V Cast Music Store. These aren't high quality options, but they are alternatives to sideloading your own content nonetheless, and they can provide fast entertainment in a pinch, so some buyers might miss having these extra features onboard.
Camera and Photos - Good
The camera on the Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 was not very good. Images were loaded with noise and a foggy haze, whether we were shooting indoors or out. Indoors, we got terrible color noise that made pictures useless, especially without any built in flash. Outside, wider landscape shots and self portraits looked okay on a sunny day, but close ups fell apart as our stylish, blurry background fell into a fuzzy mess. The camera relies on the touchscreen for its interface, which is nice for touch focus, but not so much for the shutter button. We like tapping on our subject to aim the camera, but for self portraits, lining up our finger before we turned the screen away from us was a hassle. Check out our image samples below.
By the Pool
Red Flower
Palm Fronds
Palm Fibers
Self Portrait Indoors
Traveling – Very Good
For travelers, the HTC Touch Pro2 is among a rare breed of Verizon Wireless phones. While Verizon's network technology doesn't usually help travelers in Europe, the Verizon Touch Pro2 also uses HSDPA for 3G networking, in addition to Verizon's EV-DO Rev. A. The radio bands are limited, so you won't be able to hop on AT&T's 3G network, but the device should work in most of Europe where they use the 2100 band for 3G service.
If your travels are more local, the Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 also comes with VZ Navigator onboard. VZ Navigator works pretty well, and the phone had no trouble finding us quickly for a first location fix. The interface leaves something to be desired, and it lags behind almost every other popular offering, including the TeleNav options found on the other 3 major carriers, or third party apps like ALK's CoPilot Live, which we enjoyed on the HTC HD2. If you're considering a Droid, Motorola's phone doesn't have the robust radio bands of the Touch Pro2, but it does use Google Maps for free turn-by-turn navigation, while VZ Navigator requires a subscription.
If you're curious about the weather where you're headed, nobody does weather better than HTC. The phone has great animated graphics for different weather conditions, and a dedicated tab on the home screen to keep track of multiple cities at once, with a 5-day forecast for each. As a cool bonus, the weather app also populates the calendar for the next 5 days, so when you're viewing upcoming appointments you automatically get a forecast for that day to help you prepare.
Staying Informed – Very Good
Web browsing is still a weakness of the Windows Mobile platform, though it's still ahead of BlackBerry in this regard. The Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 ships with Opera Mobile as its main browser, and for the most part Opera is a fine browsing experience. You don't get pinch and zoom gestures like you do on the multi-touch Verizon Droid Eris, but you do get the great zoom bar beneath the screen that lets you slide your finger to zoom in and out in the Web browser. The Opera browser did a fine job on our favorite pages, including our own site and the New York Times homepage, which rendered in its full desktop version. Google Reader didn't fare so well, and it was difficult to control Google's RSS reader in the Touch Pro2's browser. There is an RSS reader onboard to help manage your feeds, but it doesn't link up with Google's reader, so it's tough to keep track of which stories you've already read and which are new, especially if you switch back and forth between your desktop and the phone.
Odds and Ends
The HTC Touch Pro2 is a buggy device, and the phone's performance seems to take a hit. Sometimes we'd open an app at the new screen would only draw halfway, leaving our former task exposed beneath. Sometimes while charging, the phone would enter a strange restart loop where it kept turning off and on of its own accord, until we pulled the battery and restarted the device. Overall, performance could be sluggish, especially with a few apps open. While the task manager helps to close multiple apps, we can't help but think this phone is underpowered for the slick interface on top of Windows Mobile.
|
|
|
|
|
|
_pt00.jpg)
_pt00.jpg)
_pt00.jpg)
_pt00.jpg)
|
Archive