HTC Touch Pro2 (T-Mobile) Review

T-mobile now has a first-rate business phone under its umbrella - the HTC Touch Pro2. It hosts a Windows Mobile 6.1 OS and is arguably the best among the ones which run this OS. The pros outweigh the cons. Let us have a closer look.

HTC Touch Pro2 Design, Styling and Call-features

 

With dimensions of 4.6 x 2.3 x 0.7 inches and weighing 6.3 ounces, the Touch Pro2 has a significant size. But it is accompanied by a solid built and great looks. The handset features a soft-touch finish on the back for extra texture. The main screen of the phone sports a big 3.6 inch display and an 800 x 480 pixel touch panel. The screen slides sideways and tilts up for better visibility while sitting like a small laptop on your desk. The QWERTY keyboard on the phone is broad and spacious, one of the most convenient in the market.


The HTC Touch Pro2 has really good voice quality and the voice is pretty crisp and audible. The level of noise cancellation is a tad high but it does block most of the background noise. A conveniently loud speaker-phone with an easily reachable mute button on the top of the phone translates into a handy feature. The vibrating alert is strong.

The phone functioned well with a Platronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. One can even trigger the built-in voice-dialing function using the Bluetooth headset.

The mobile has six and a half hours of 3G talk-time which is fairly competitive.

TouchFLO 3D

Windows Mobile 6.1 is fast getting outdated. So, a good chunk of the user interface has been rewritten by HTC. The phone has a cool range of home screens that one can sweep across so that it opens up the contact book, e-mail, YouTube and music. The other screens such as the program menu, address book, calendar, camera application, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and e-mail setup have a much better look-and-feel as compared to other phone using the standard user interface of the Windows Mobile. If SMS, e-mail, calendar, Web Browser, camera, music and weather is all you need, you will never want the stylus that is placed into the corner of the mobile. It is this ornamented interface from HTC that actually wins the day.
Though user interface of the HTC Touch Pro2 might appear to be the most amazing aspect of the phone, it is a very useful business communicator. It is loaded with many small other-than-ordinary features that make is so user friendly. For example, when there is a new mail in your inbox, one button is all it would take to make a call to the sender of the e-mail. From the contact book, you can see details of the calls and SMS for that particular contact. The phone even integrates into the address book the Facebook details of a contact.
For entering data into the phone, you have two options the on-screen chic keyboard or the comfortably broad physical keyboard on the phone. The phone screen does not rotate automatically when you turn the phone but it does so when you slide the keyboard out.

I's a pleasant experience browsing through the web from this phone which comes with the Opera Mobile 9.7 browser. T-mobile’s 3G speed is fairly good with web-pages getting downloaded at 750 kbps. Also, the GPS program from TeleNav is a part of the phone.

The Touch Pro2 has applications like Office Excel, PowerPoint, Word, PDF reader, Google Maps and IM clients for Yahoo, GTalk, AIM, MSN and MySpace IM. The 528 MHz processor and a 225 MB memory take all these applications into its stride with ease and a microSD slot that is capable of taking 16GB cards gives enough space to add more applications.

HTC Touch Pro2: Complains

Though the HTC part of the user interface of the Touch Pro2 is a work of art, the phone takes a beating when it comes to playing media. It takes a rigid 4-inch long dongle to be able to use standard headphones. For some reason, the dongle sports a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, a non-standard 2.5 mm back and two USB ports on it. Instead, one would prefer using Bluetooth stereo headphones.
The phone comes with two built-in media players – a music player that can be started directly from the TouchFLO 3D home screen discussed earlier, and the standard Windows Media Player which is needed for playing videos. The phone can handle MP3, AAC and WMA audio files very well. However, when it comes to playing videos of 640 x 480 pixels, the phone disappoints. It is easy to use YouTube from the custom-built application from HTC but the video pauses for buffering during playback which is not a very pleasant experience.



The 3.2 mega-pixel auto-focus camera took surprisingly great pictures. However, the video recording of 640 x 480 pixels at 20 frames per second was not of a good quality.

The reason Windows Mobile user interface has a bad name is that it presents tiny little interface elements which need you to use a stylus. This is exactly what happens when you go beyond the comforts of HTC’s applications. Thus, using the extended features on the mobile gives an annoying feeling at times.
The phone adds to the confusion when you learn that you have two sets of media players, Web browsers, calendars and settings screens. It is hard to generate a liking for such things when you are looking for unified, uniform interfaces with simplicity of use.

HTC Touch Pro2 Review Conclusion

The Touch Pro2 is an ace business communicator and one of the best among Windows Mobile phones. It has many corporate-centric features that would keep the mobile professional happy. HTC has decorated the Windows Mobile in a very refined and elegant way. Apart from the business communication features, the mobile has a variety of diversions for life after 5 pm. However, when it comes to prodding down to the intricacies, you are staring at an outdated, bothersome and stylus-dependent interface.