The Touch Diamond and Touch Pro are undoubtedly game-changers in Windows Mobile land. Soon, VGA resolution will be standard, most phones will utilize accelerometers, and having some sort of Windows Mobile interface replacement will be expected. The Touch Pro is the business device that many have been waiting for. It's got a stellar spec sheet, a beautiful design, and a generous hardware keyboard offering.

Design

The front view of the Touch Pro is identical to the beautiful Touch Diamond, and on the back, it is similar, but it’s not shiny and the diamond pattern has a smaller relief. The main difference between the two is visible from every other angle. Pro has a “waist” of 0.7”, meanwhile, Diamond measures at only 0.5”. This definitely wouldn’t bother you when holding the “fatty” in your hand, but the contrast becomes apparent when you carry it in your pocket. In addition, you’ll feel the weight, which has been increased by 50%.

As we’ve already mentioned, Pro’s face is a copy of Diamond’s and similarly to it, it is a fingerprint magnet. You’ll have to be constantly cleaning it so it looks good and to be able to see the display when you are outside. If it’s kept clean, the screen remains usable even in the brightest sunlight. However, it will be a lot easier to read black symbols on a white background, compared to the opposite combination (TouchFLO 3D interface). Typically for a Windows Mobile phone, only 65k colors are supported and you can easily see that when reproducing pictures or video, it’s not always done smoothly.

The buttons below are flat, but are easy to press with a good tactile feedback. Only the D-pad’s directions are troublesome and hard to operate due to their smaller size. Interestingly, its backlight takes the role of a system LED. When you have a missed call or message for example, the light indicates it with a circular movement. This looks good and suits the overall design of the phone, but is hard to notice during the day in contrast to the classical orange LED.

We have nothing bad to say about the power button (top), unlike the volume control, which is located on the upper half of the left side and when pressed, moves the slider lightly. The annoying process happens due to the fact that the slider is very sensitive and can be pushed opened no matter where you apply pressure. Our review unit had an irritating (not loud) sound coming from the spring, which was in contrast with the quality make.

Sliding the Pro open reveals the hardware QWERTY with five rows. Since there are a lot of buttons, they are smaller compared to previous models like the Tilt and the Wing and are tightly jammed but still very user-friendly. Because there are five instead of four rows, the manufacturer has decided to arrange the buttons as on a computer keyboard. Therefore, the question mark (?) for example, will be combined with the slash (/), which on the other hand, will be located on the right of the letter M. You’ll find the exclamation mark in the very beginning of the numeric row (1), and the brackets (9 and 0), at its end. This helps for easier navigation when looking for a specific symbol and we only have one small short remark: in computer keyboards, these symbols are accessed via the Shift, as opposed to FN (it’s only needed for the ones located on letter buttons) and that’s why you’ll need some time to get used to it.

The only connector is miniUSB port, which is used for computer connection, headphones/handsfree and charging, is located on the bottom. The slot of the stylus, which is of medium length and is not telescopic, is located in the lower right corner. As in Touch Diamond, pulling the stylus out will power the display on and when putting it back in, a magnet will assist it into place.

As we’ve mentioned above, the piano black on the back has been replaced by a rubber-coated finish, which is not that attractive but on the other hand, it doesn’t get dirty as fast as the glossy surface and helps for a better grip. On this side, we find the LED flash next to the camera lens.

Display

HTC Touch Pro flaunts a 2.8" 65K-color screen of VGA resolution. Thanks to the unmatched pixel-to-inch ratio, the Touch Pro has truly great picture quality. Here's the quick math: HTC TyTN II has the same sized screen, featuring only a quarter of the Touch Pro's (or Diamond's for that matter) pixels - where there are exactly 307,200 of them. This makes the new HTC releases one of the best WinMo devices in terms of picture quality. Those are even comparable to some of the best displays on the market, which was hard to imagine not so long ago.

Many would make a case of the Diamond's 65K-color support "only". But hey, there aren't really that many cases when the difference between 65K and 16M colors is visible to the naked eye. However the problem with the sunlight legibility still stands. The HTC Touch Pro by far isn't the best device to have with you in the bright sun. There is a slight improvement over the TyTN II but the result is still far from impressive.

Another potential problem with the Touch Pro (judging by our Diamond experience) is the display's proneness to scratches. As already mentioned, you can get around this by using the screen protector. The QWERTY keyboard slides out from the left side. The sliding mechanism itself isn't the best around, a rustling metallic sound produced every time it locks in an open position. Upon opening the keypad the screen automatically rotates to landscape orientation.

The keyboard is brilliant, with great ergonomics. The five-row layout is a great help here and the keys are still big enough to handle comfortably. The press is solid and touch orientation is quite good so, in general, there is little reason to complain about the QWERTY keyboard.

Keyboard

The typing experience is second to Nokia E90 only but it's mainly because size does matter here and the Nokia monster has plenty of that. So, unless you don't care what your handset does to your pocket, the HTC Touch Pro is probably your best choice for a QWERTY device.

The backlighting is strong and even enough with little reasons to moan about it.

Music player

The Touch Pro has a good music player, which makes heavy use of album art. The music player is accessible straight from the TouchFLO home screen with a cool iPhone-like cover flow animation for you to pick an album.

Equalizer presets are available only when you have the headset plugged in. They are not part of the music player itself but of a separate application called Audio Booster. That setup allows you to make use of the presets when you watch videos or even when you listen to music on an alternative player.

Unfortunately, there is no 3.5mm audio jack on the Pro or on its headphones, so unless you get hold of a third-party adapter, you're stuck with the supplied headset, which - simply put - sucks. The headset does look good, but listening to music is not among its strengths - it's best left for making phone calls.

Camera

The HTC Touch Pro has a 3 megapixel auto focus camera producing photos with a maximum resolution of 2048x1536 pixels. It offers an intuitive user interface and shoots in landscape mode. It lacks a dedicated camera key so, in order to pre-focus before you snap a picture with the Pro, you simply tap the touch-sensitive D-pad. Once focus is locked, you can take the picture by pressing the confirm button of the D-pad. The Touch Pro camera packs a LED flash, but having in mind its power it isn't making that much of a difference.

The Touch Pro viewfinder is free of any overlaying controls by default but you can display those by touching the display once, while in camera mode. In terms of camera features, the HTC Touch Pro is regularly equipped and offers the standard self-timer, white balance presets, as well as color effects, and a viewfinder gridline. You can shoot images with the front-facing video-call camera too and there's some nice custom resolution setting for contacts' images.

Probably the biggest letdown, when it comes to features, is that the camera lacks geotagging. Why that's left out is beyond us. Nevertheless, we have found a free third-party fix for that, but we'll discuss it in the Tweaks & Modding chapter of this review. With the Touch Pro you can shoot macro images easily without changing modes or anything. However focusing in close-ups is rather hard and is more of a hit-or-miss - sometimes the Touch Pro focuses correctly, while other times it's way off.

There is also a panorama mode that offers on-screen framing guidance. After all the individual shots for the panorama are taken, the Pro stitches the images automatically. The downside here is that in Panorama mode each individual image is shot at roughly 480 x 480 pixels. Plus, images are badly stitched. Obviously the Panorama mode is only ok if you intend to show your images on the handset display exclusively (which is exactly 480 pixels wide) with no further zooming.

Image quality

Luckily, the HTC Touch Pro doesn't have the fishy layer of plastic over its camera lens like the Diamond. That's the right thing to do for HTC and picture quality has improved quite notably. Contrast and the resolved detail are also at a decent level and, as a whole, the performance is above average for a 3MP shooter

Video

The Touch Pro video capturing capabilities are not impressive by any means. All you get is CIF recording (352 x 288 pixel) at 30fps in MPEG4 format. It's not that bad: after all the VideoCD standard uses that resolution, but it's nowhere near what you would expect in a high-end smart device.

The interface of the camcorder resembles that of the still camera. You can only adjust white balance, the resolution and brightness and finally add some color effects.

Performance

As we’ve already mentioned, we are not happy with the fact that there is lag when navigating through the TouchFLO plug-in, and sometimes the phone performs inadequately. We believe that this will be fixed soon, but on the other hand HTC shouldn’t release products which are not finalized.

The overall sound quality during a talk is good although the incoming sound is below the necessary level. The sound in the speaker is moderately loud and the voices are muffled. Nevertheless, the collocutor will hear you very loud and clear, which is of utmost importance for a business phone.

HTC claims that Touch Pro’s battery should provide up to 7 hours of talk or 15 days in standby, which are excellent results!

Conclusion

HTC have taken the flack on the Diamond, learned from it and released a very solid, well performing device, the TouchFlo 3D works perfectly now and enhances the device greatly. Added to that, high quality hardware, a great slide out keyboard, lots of Ram and this device is a winner. Its a work horse with a lot of power and runs as smooth as silk. I cannot think of many negatives, it has all the features, good battery life, good camera, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS.