The HTC Touch Pro2 is the latest touchscreen marvel from HTC, a company that's currently bathing in the glory of a good run of fantastic handsets.
The last couple of Windows Mobile devices from HTC have been straightforward updates of its premier models – the style-conscious Diamond2 and now the business-centred HTC Touch Pro2 with its slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
HTC has been impressively consistent in moving its handsets forward, with ongoing improvements to its rather nifty TouchFLO 3D interface and other innovations.
The Pro2 is considerably larger and heavier than its predecessor, but it also has a bigger and better tilting touch screen as well as a much improved interface, and a new conference call facility which HTC has named 'Straight Talk'.
It's most definitely not cheap though– HTC clearly sees this as a high-end business device and for the most part, it lives up to its promises, delivering on messaging, connectivity, internet use and media playback, though as usual with HTC, the 3.2 megapixel camera leaves much to be desired.
Make no mistake, this is a brick of a handset at 116x59x17mm and a whopping 179g.
Shy and retiring it is not, and if it's subtlety you're after, you'd be advised to look elsewhere. It has a more stylish look than its blocky predecessor though, with its silvered, bevelled sides, which makes the bulk a little easier to take.
Weight
It's a heavy phone, and it's not the smallest, either
The screen sits flush with the casing, the smoothness of the front broken only by the only very slightly raised profiles of the four hard keys along the bottom of the screen: call start and stop/home, back and Windows.
The sides seem wilfully lacking in accoutrements with just a volume rocker on the left side, reset slot and stylus on the right, power button on top and USB 2.0 power/headphone socket on the bottom.
Around the back is the 3.2 megapixel camera lens, microphone and large Straight Talk speaker for conference calls, plus a mute button. The back panel feels a little flimsy incidentally, and didn't always click easily back into place after we'd opened it.
Keyboard
The Touch Pro2's QWERTY keyboard slides out to the left with a satisfying thunk to reveal a fully specified five lines of keys. It comes very close to what you'd get on a standard computer keyboard.
Typing
They on-screen keyboard compliments one of the best slide-outs we've seen
The keys are well spaced, stand slightly proud of the base and they're backlit too. Each is slightly rounded and made of an extremely tactile rubberised plastic.
In practise it's very easy to use with the thumbs and it's even just about big enough to rest it on a desktop and use your fingers just like a proper grown-up keyboard.
And if you do decide to use it this way, the Touch Pro2 has a little trick up its sleeve – you can lift up the screen to an angle of about 45 degrees, which makes it easier to view if you're not holding it in your hands
Tilt
The screen tilts so you can put the phone on a desk and type on the keyboard
It's so good that you'll have little need to use the onscreen keyboard, which isn't too shabby either – a little snug in portrait mode perhaps, but still perfectly usable, though the extended landscape version is better, even though it's pretty much made redundant by the hard keyboard.
Calls
Call quality seemed good on the Touch Pro2; clear and crisp, plus you can get a fair level of volume out of it.
The phone interface is well laid out too, with big number buttons, and it will suggest alternative phone numbers as you tap, so if you've called a number before, you'll only ever need to tap in the first few digits in future.
It's designed with conference calls in mind and there's an easy interface option to set up multi-party calls from the phone layout. You'll need to set it up with your network first though.
Once your call is set up, you can put the phone face down on a desk to reveal the large, loud, noise-cancelling Straight Talk speaker on the back. There's also a useful mute button which glows red or green to indicate whether or not it's in use.
The Pro2's luxuriously large 3.6-inch touchscreen (that's 79x47mm by the way) offers a resolution of 480x800 pixels.
It's bright, sharp and clear, with all the usual Windows Mobile options for dimming and limiting backlight to save on battery life.
With all that screen acreage on display, it's useful that it comes with a neat little leather-look pouch, though this bulks it out more, and there's no clip for attaching it to a belt.
Flip
The accelerometer flips the screen when you tilt it to landscape
Sensitivity is just about right (which is just as well, since there's no way to adjust it) and it had very few problems distinguishing between a press and a swipe
Interface
The TouchFLO 3D interface, which sits on top on the Windows 6.1 Professional operating system, seems to be getting better with each new release from HTC.
The familiar icons are all present and correct, with the menu bar at the bottom of the screen which you can brush through to find your preferred function.
Pixel
The resolution of 480x800 is higher than most other touchscreens
You can also brush across the entire home screen to access each of the functions in turn. Windows Mobile 6.1 is buried even deeper than previously since pressing the Start button now brings up a shortcuts screen with large, thumb-friendly buttons to which you can add up to 30 of your favourite apps.
There's also an iPhone-style scrolling menu with large icons which can be easily accessed with the thumb – so no need to fiddle with the stylus.
Sad to say that HTC still hasn't cracked the camera issue on its smart phones – they always seem a little underspecced and underperforming.
This one sports 3.2 megapixels, with a maximum resolution of 2048x1216 megapixels, but there's no flash, no self-portrait mirror and not a great deal in the way of extra features.
Camera
It's a fairly basic one, and falls behind many of its rivals in this respect
It has autofocus, a 2x digital zoom, some colour effects, a panorama setting, ten-second timer and touch focus, which allows you to set the central focus of the frame by touching the screen.
The panorama stitching was easy to do but the stitching tended to be a bit wobbly, and the touch focus option didn't really seem to make much difference. In good light pics are fair, though edges aren't as sharp as we'd like, and colours aren't as properly rendered as they should be. In less than good light it's even worse – a disappointment really
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