Jenneth Orantia07 December 2008, 9:00 AM
It's not as supermodel-sexy as the Touch Diamond, but the Pro makes up for its thicker waist with a full QWERTY keyboard, faster performance, and beefier battery.
It's not as supermodel-sexy as the Touch Diamond, but the Pro makes up for its thicker waist with a full QWERTY keyboard, faster performance and a beefier battery.
A quick survey of HTC's smartphone history shows there's one pattern you can almost always rely on: any time it launches a touchscreen-operated phone, it follows it up with a revamped model offering a slideout keyboard a few months down the track. Such is the case with the HTC Touch Pro, an off-shoot of the HTC Touch Diamond, whose main claim to fame is that it adds a five-row QWERTY keyboard to the existing Diamond design.
Design
The Touch Pro doesn't deviate much from the Touch Diamond's striking good looks. It has the same mirrored front and diamond cut patterned back, only its corners are curvier and the glossy backplate has been replaced with a soft rubberised finish – a nice touch (pardon the pun) if you detest fingerprint marks on your phone. It's also a lot thicker and heavier than the Diamond due to the keyboard, adding a considerable 6.7 millimetres to its waistline and weighing a portly 165g.
Still, the rest of its footprint is compact, so the Touch Pro doesn't give off the impression of a chunky or unwieldy phone, and overall it feels every bit the part of a premium high-end smartphone. The 2.8in display is fairly standard, but the crisp 480 x 640 VGA resolution is anything but, making it the most high-res screen currently available on a smartphone. Below it is a conventional five-way controller, but sitting just on top of it is unique touch-sensitive scrollwheel that lets you zoom in and out of photos and web sites by rotating your finger over it in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction.
User interface
Like its other touchscreen counterparts, the Touch Pro runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, and as is HTC's typical modus operandi, the company has taken great pains to make the operating system look, feel and run better than it does in its natural state.
Windows Mobile veterans won't even recognise the main Today screen as it's been completely skinned with HTC's beautifully-designed TouchFLO 3D front-end. An animated desktop-style flip clock takes centre-stage in the default view, and a running a finger along the row of icons on the bottom presents a host of other features and functions that you can access without leaving the main screen, including photo caller ID thumbnails, text messages and email, music and photos, weather and a program launcher. When sliding the keyboard down, it flips the display into landscape mode and displays shortcuts to eight commonly-used features and functions.
HTC has also taken the liberty of enhancing other parts of the operating system to make it easier to use without a stylus. You can scroll through most screens by sliding your finger up or down the display (much more convenient than trying to use the skinny scrollbars on the side), text is larger in most (but not all) applications and settings, and the software keyboards and phone dialler have been overhauled to be more finger-friendly. The enhancements aren't consistently across the board, though, and after enjoying all the flashy HTC improvements, it can be a let-down when you're dumped back at the standard Windows Mobile interface.
Keyboard
One of our biggest qualms with the Touch Diamond was the finnicky text input. The software keyboard took up three-quarters of the screen, and it made it difficult to see the context of what you were writing in text messages, emails and Word documents. The addition of a full QWERTY keyboard to the Touch Pro therefore makes a lot of sense – especially for prolific texters.
The five-row keyboard is a delight to use, with raised tops on each key and just the right amount of tactile feedback, although a bit of spacing around each key wouldn't have gone astray. A soft white backlight lets you write in the dark (if that's your thing), and there are indicator lights above the keyboard area for caps lock and function lock. If you're coming from an HTC TyTN II, the dedicated number row will be a godsend, but you'll miss a couple of things from your old device: the display doesn't tilt forward, and the keyboard is missing Start menu, OK and soft keys.
Features
It's safe to say that the HTC Touch Pro is one of the most full-featured smartphones on the market. On the hardware side, it packs every flavour of wireless imaginable: quad-band GSM, 7.2Mbit/s HSDPA, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR and A-GPS, although the lack of navigation software (the preloaded Google Maps doesn't really count) is a let-down given the Touch Pro's hefty asking price. It's inherited the same 3.2-megapixel camera from the Touch Diamond for photo stills and video, only this time round HTC has added a flash for capturing photos in low lighting.
Much ado was made about the Touch Diamond's lack of memory expansion – it came with 4GB of internal flash storage, but the inability to add more was considered by many to be a deal-breaker. This has been fixed in the Touch Pro by adding a microSD slot, accessible by popping the back cover off – thankfully you don't have to remove the battery, so you can hotswap cards at will. This supplements the 512MB of internal storage. Our 16GB SanDisk microSD card was fully recognised by the system.
What hasn't been rectified is the annoying HTC ExtUSB multi-connector – one of our biggest bugbears on HTC smartphones. Rather than use a separate jack for charging, syncing and connecting a headset, it uses a single ExtUSB port (similar and compatible with miniUSB but with 11 pins) – a design choice that saves on space, but also means that you can't listen to music on your headphones while you're charging or syncing the phone. The Touch Pro also offers TV out functionality using an optional cable, and this too connects via the ExtUSB port.
In addition to the standard Windows Mobile software for authoring Office docs, accessing push and pull email, chatting on Messenger and playing multimedia, HTC has loaded the Touch Pro with a few choice extras. Opera Browser 9.5 Mobile is the standout application, providing 'almost-as-good-as-an-iPhone' web browsing, and the dedicated YouTube client is a lot slicker and easier to navigate than the online mobile version.
Performance
We've gone on about the Touch Diamond's fidgety text input and lack of memory expansion, but the biggest criticism it received was its sluggish performance – a factor almost exclusively due to the high-overhead TouchFLO 3D interface running in the background. The Touch Pro features the same 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A processor that the Diamond used, but RAM has been bumped up to a healthy 288MB. HTC has also fine-tuned TouchFLO 3D to consume less resources, and the end result is a smartphone that's noticeably zippier than its predecessor.
It isn't completely without hiccups, though. We experienced a few random soft resets during testing, as well as the occasional system pauses when running multiple programs.
The puny 900mAh battery of the Diamond has also been up-sized to 1340mAh on the Touch Pro, and you can expect around two days of moderate use before it needs a top-up. The official figures for the Touch Pro's run-time are 6.3 hours talk time and 462 hours of standby.
Conclusion
Smartphones have long been advocated as laptop replacements, but the Touch Pro – with its excellent keyboard, high-resolution display, multiple wireless options, excellent desktop-class browser and full set of productivity software – marks the first time we'd ever actually consider leaving the notebook at home in favour of a mobile.