HTC Touch Pro2 Review
HTC has been seriously the little (now big) engine that could. Does anyone even remember what the T-Mobile Pocket PC (Wallaby) looked like? Now the number one Windows Mobile manufacturer in the world, they show no signs of stopping — they even added Android to their portfolio. But let’s be honest, you’re here to check out the much-awaited update to the viciously popular HTC Touch Pro, the HTC Touch Pro2. So let’s get to steppin’, hit the jump and find out what we really think of the TP2.
Design:
Design is always going to be subjective, right? But you can most of the time appreciate a phone’s industrial design even if it’s not something you’d drop a wad of cash on. The Touch Pro2 is probably one of the sexiest Windows Mobile devices we’ve ever seen. Rounded edges, chrome bezel, huge screen, minimalistic buttons — all great things. What’s even more exciting, however, is that the design is completely functional. There’s not one single thing the designers did that gets in the way of real usability and let’s face it, this device is really the high-end corporate user’s dream device, so there shouldn’t be any complaints in this department.
Hardware / Keyboard:
It’s really exciting to watch newer products being released but it’s a little bit more exciting to see evolutions of previous handsets morph into something else. HTC told us that people really missed not having the tilting screen of the HTC TyTN II so they incorporated that back in. Additionally, people thought the HTC Touch Pro was a little too small and cramped, so they practically made the Touch Pro2 a HTC Touch HD with slide-out QWERTY. And oh man, what a slide-out QWERTY it is. Shaquille O’Neal himself (also a very happy TweetGenius user, might we add) would have zero problems typing on this thing. The keys are very, very spacious and have a great feel to them. It’s a plastic feel which is totally fine (even if they are really made out of aluminum), because it’s a quality feel. Something Palm should learn a thing or two from.
On a different note, have we mentioned how absolutely incredible HTC’s new soft keyboard is? Anyone using an HTC Magic or who has installed a non-Google build on their Android device (not a Google version) will know what we’re talking about. It’s almost as good as the iPhone’s keyboard and this is coming from using it on a resistive screen. Really top notch stuff here.
Screen:
If there was a such thing as the world’s greatest, the Touch Pro2’s screen would surely be in the running. It probably wouldn’t win, though. It’s really something HTC has no control over, but the fact that this is a resistive screen as opposed to a capacitive screen is a major strike against it. Really, they can’t do anything about it since Windows Mobile practically makes you use a fingernail to hit menu options. Once you accept the screen is resistive, though, it’s a damn good one. Unlike the Touch Pro where the screen wasn’t as responsive as everyone wished, the Touch Pro2’s screen is incredibly sensitive and responsive — paging through screens, sliding through TouchFLO menus and the like are all smooth as butter.
The actual resolution of the display is 800×480 and it’s a whopping 3.6″ measured diagonally. In addition to being highly responsive, it’s vivid, bright, clear and crisp.
TouchFLO 3D:
We have touched on TouchFLO 3D in many different sections of this review as you have read and will read below. But, to focus on just TouchFLO 3D, a lot has been added since the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro. For starters, it’s finally landscape! If that wasn’t enough, HTC has gone ahead and built upon the Touch HD’s TF3D by adding in a Stocks page, revamped Weather page and a new Calendar page. All extremely welcome additions.
Phone:
What good is a phone if the phone doesn’t work? While voice calling in very old versions of Windows Mobile was a pain in the ass, Windows Mobile 6/6.1 has made it bearable. Luckily HTC’s TouchFLO interface makes it rather enjoyable. Anyone who has used a recent HTC device knows this pretty well, but on the software side, everything is cleanly laid out. Your recent call log is integrated with the dialpad, and you have the option to flip between a standard voice call and a video call. Don’t get excited; that’s for international users only because it’s a carrier-supported feature.
As far as the hardware goes, calls we made and received came through loud and clear. Literally. The ear speaker on the TP2 is a little bit higher than you’d anticipate but you get used to it very quickly and it proved to work without any issues. Volume on the in ear speaker was sufficient enough to provide audible call quality on the streets of New York City and our callers could hear us quite well, too.
Messaging:
HTC has excelled at making Windows Mobile a more-usable platform. What in the hell would the world look like without it? What’s more interesting with the latest version of TouchFLO is the messaging integration. In addition to having phone calling, you’ve now got access to your entire communication history with all of your contacts. Once you click on a specific contact, you’re able to see all the recent calls, all recent emails, all recent text messages, and even Facebook updates all in a neat and clean interface. It’s rather remarkable.
Integration of these features isn’t just skin deep either — you can even click on a contact’s thumbnail image in an email and start a conference call that way as an example. Really cool stuff that’s incredibly useful.
Speakerphone / Conference calling:
This is one of the big selling points of the new Touch Pro2 — the speakerphone and Straight Talk. The brilliant part of HTC’s heavily-customized TouchFLO interface is what they’ve been able to do with conference calling. You can literally just hit 4, or even 5 numbers or contacts, and instantly, the Touch Pro2 will transform from a phone, to a mobile conference room and conference all parties together. You’ll also get options to individually drop certain parties from the call while it’s in progress. But, look, what good is some bad ass conference calling software without some business-grade speakerphone action? As soon as you flip the handset over so the screen is face down on your desk (or whatever surface really), the call will instantly change over to speakerphone. Ok, cool, we guess. Most speakerphones suck and you can barely hear them. Not here, though. Besides being super loud and clear for you to listen to, the Touch Pro2 has got dual microphones. One for noise-cancelling and one to actually pickup your voice for uh, talking. This makes for an absolutely wonderful conference calling experience — it’s the best we’ve ever used on a mobile phone. Plus, if that wasn’t enough, there’s a dedicated mute button right in the middle of the speaker so you can hurl insults and nasty words at your boss while he’s talking. While muted, of course.
Battery life:
The TouchPro2 ships with a large 1500mAh battery and it’s pretty good. HTC quotes talk time over a UMTS connection at a whopping six and half hours. Unfortunately, since our review unit is a Euro-spec unit, we weren’t able to participate in sexy 3G-calling voice tests. Their quoted EDGE talk times are listed at about eight and half hours, and we can pretty much say those numbers are incredibly close to being accurate.
On EDGE and Wi-Fi, our unit constantly got us through a full day of work. This included heavy email using a Microsoft Exchange Server with ActiveSync configured, a ton of web browsing using Opera and Skyfire, staying logged into IM with BeeJive for Windows Mobile, and some light to medium voice calling. On 3G, however, we’re pretty sure our battery life would have been reduced by at least 35%, let’s say. That’s an estimate, but a pretty conservative one. To make two paragraphs short: the Touch Pro2 has very good battery life but your usage patterns will obviously vary, thus your battery will as well.
Connectivity:
It’s pretty much a standard nowadays for any high-end device; quad-band GSM/EDGE, tri-band UMTS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 or higher and GPS. Unfortunately, the Touch Pro2 we reviewed didn’t have three UMTS bands, just two. These are the 900/2100MHz UMTS/HSPA bands that are incompatible with North America’s 3G bands. Since 3G is such a standard feature in today’s world, we couldn’t enjoy the TP2 as much as we’d have liked to. Don’t fret, though — when you get your own Touch Pro2 you’ll be pleased as punch with all the connectivity options loaded in here.
Minor annoyances:
There’s a few things that aren’t quite perfect here. The camera, while being a decent 3.2 megapixel sensor, didn’t get upgraded like the Touch Diamond2 did. We would have loved for a 5 megapixel shooter in here. Additionally HTC has removed the flash module. Handset makers don’t get it twisted — leave the motherloving flash in your phones.
This isn’t much of an annoyance since the hardware works quite well, but in fairness we figured we should point out that the Touch Pro2 actually runs more of the less the same internal hardware as the original Touch Pro did. It’s not a bad thing like we said, but anyone hoping for a major spec bump, you won’t really find it here.
Lastly, there isn’t a directional pad anymore on the front of the device. This isn’t the worst thing to happen, but it was really nice having that on the front part of the Touch Pro to make navigating a little bit easier. The trade off is that the screen is obviously larger which does help when using touch selections as opposed to hardware keys.
Conclusion:
It’s pretty apparent that there will be an HTC Touch Pro2 in your own carrier’s flavor pretty soon. In the U.S. alone, just from leaked photos and information floating around, T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon will all get their own version of the device. What’s even better is that they will all be roughly the same. The keyboards won’t range from usable to world’s dumbest configuration (cough, Touch Pro, cough) and we have a feeling the physical exterior will be pretty close to the stock HTC units as well.
This is an incredibly interesting summer, though. You’ve got this device, the Nokia N97, the Palm Pre, the iPhone 3G S, the Google G2, and a bunch more handsets to choose from. How will you make up your mind? Form factors are pretty similar with the aforementioned devices. Most have a physical QWERTY slide-out or flip up, and all have on screen keyboards except for the Palm Pre. We can’t say that one OS is better than the other for your taste and usage, but we can confidently recommend the Touch Pro2 as the best Windows Mobile device in the world. That might not make your decision any easier, but as long as you’re considering a Windows Mobile phone, the Touch Pro2 is going to be the reigning champ for a long, long time. Or at least until HTC releases the Touch Pro3.
Regardless of what phone you end up choosing, one thing is 100% certain, folks. It’s going to be a hot summer.
I really want to see this for Verizon. Anyone know of any estimated releases? I am hoping in the next month or so.
nobody knows when it will be released, but probably sometime before the end of 2009…
DOES ANYONE KNOW THE REALEASE DATE FOR THE TOUCH PRO2 IN THE USA? SPECIFICALLY COLORADO? TMOBILE BETTER RELEASE IT SOON!!
There seems to be an engineering design problem with the HTC Touch Pro 2 in that my loudspeaker started giving a very creaky sound just after just a few days. Very inconvenient since the HTC policy in Europe seems to be not to replace the machine even if problems occurs so soon after purchase. No, I have to hand it over for estimated 10 working days for repairs. Ridiculous policy.
Does anyone else have the same problems?
i just blew my wad all ova BGR aho
July 22nd for which carrier?
Ahhh… the HTC Touch Pro 2 running windows mobile. What a beauty! I have the first version and love this phone and all of the features. From everything that I have read and talk to others about windows mobile 6.5 really shines on this phone and the new keyboard looks really good too. Can’t wait to get it in my hands!
Sprint version has both a cdma & gsm modem. It will work in europe/asia with a sim card. Apparently it has been disabled for US GSM/UMTS/HSDPA frequencies.
This should be a great phone!
When is this coming to Sprint? Will SERO owners be able to update?
We are so in the same boat. Test driving Pre and really hoping that Pro2 comes out before my 30 days is over or even much much sooner because my HTC Touch is slowing dying on me now. So is it 7/22 for Sprint????
Is No 3G support bad? I read at the end it does not have 3G for US. Can someone explain this to me? Will you still be able to use it? I was thinking of buying one now (International version?) and using it in the US now. They are available on ebay.
July 22nd US release date?! Uhhh… where are the sources for this… and is it legit???
I called Sprint yesterday and the phone monkey said that she had a sheet that said 3rd quarter, and when I said “It *is* now officially 3rd quarter!” she said she had no more specifics (so in other words, *late* in 3rd quarter).
well, late 3rd quarter would be fine with me, considering there are only like 10 weeks left in 3rd quarter.
I just want to see more leaked internal info, other than the roadmap we saw months ago.
I was at a T-Mobile store this morning and the girl that works there had the Touch Pro 2 for T-Mobile. Sweet looking phone. About the same size and weight of the original Tilt from AT&T. (It tilts also). Super responsive. I am an AT&T customer and was in there asking about the My Touch 3G and she also had one. She asked if I was an Android fan or win Mo fan. I asked why she asked and she then pulled the TP2 out. She said it will go on sale the same date as the M Touch 3g in stores August 12. Sorry if this is old news. I didn’t read all the post and have not read up on te latest updates for this phone. I had the AT&T Fuze and replaced it with a Samsung Eternity, (it’s ok, but I miss my AT&T Fuze.). Oh well. Anyone know if AT&T wil get the TP2?
Sort of has the same brownish color of the HTC shadow (1st shadow not 2nd). I took two pics of it but don’t know if I can upload them here.
Rob
When is this thing coming out? Im ready to buy it.
Does this phone have IR? Realtors use IR to open lock boxes.
it sound will be at tmobile on august 12, right.?
@ V: No, this phone will not have IR, and as far as I know, IR won’t be available on any smartphone in the future. Literally. That technology is dead to manufacturers.
Therefore, Supra was idiotic (as usual) for going to IR, rather than just going straight to Bluetooth. This is why Supra has introduced the keyfob, which in my opinion completely defeats the purpose of only carrying one device.
Y the hell is everybody talkn about the TP3 when TP2 hasn’t even made it 6 months yet?
i’m hearing 9/3 release date for sprint. I want to know if they put a scroll wheel on the tp2? I love that feature on my Mogul.
I would like to know one thing. I have seen in many places about the specs, that the TP2 will have WM7. Right now the only one that is stock is WM6.1 . From all the info on all the posts and web sites, WM7 won’t officially be out until April 2010. The TP2 will be coming to Sprint Sept 3, 2009. That’s a difference of 7 months. This is something that I’m sure everyone would like the answer to.
@ gd761: I think the only ones claiming that this will be upgradeable to WM7 are those that don’t know what they’re talking about. Of course, you will be able to upgrade via custom ROM, but aside from that, I don’t believe there has been any official announcement from HTC or any carrier. Based on recent launch timeframes, the next round of HTC device launches will occur only 4-5 months after WM7’s release.
Good In-depth article.
I have one quetion related to security. Can I dessignate certain area within phone internal memory or external card, where I can keep sensitive information and that’s password protected (e.g. a file with bank account details) or some contacts/notes in password protected area (this feature used to come in earlier Palm products). I don’t want to keep a password on the phone as a whole, as it is a hassle to type the password every time, I have to use it.
Also how dooes security work if I use an external microSD 8GB card ( I am assuming that such a card would work with this phone)? In case, I loose my phone, Can somebody just read all the data on the card or is there a way to secure it?
Just picked up my T-mobile TouchPro 2. I have to say it’s impressive! I have fat fingers and the screen is more responsive than the TouchPro and is much easier to move navigate around. In addition, the unit is GPS! Works great with Google mobile maps.