HTC - Touch Pro review
small format PDA with sliding keyboard
Review date: 21 January, 2009. Review by: Sandra Vogel
The Touch Pro is small and neat like the Touch Diamond, measuring just 102mm tall and 51mm wide. It is fairly weighty at 165g and it is thick at 18mm. Those two latter dimensions can be put down to the fact that the Touch Pro has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
The keyboard is undoubtedly a star of the show and one of the best of its type we have seen. The keys are relatively small, but taken as a whole the construction is excellent. A separate number row is welcome, as are cursor controls, while separate full stop and comma keys are handy too.
Slide the keyboard away and you are left with the Touch Diamond's front controls which are, sadly, not up to the main keyboard's high standard. The front controls reside on a flat panel and our main problem is with the central select button and its directional movement controls. The latter are not clearly marked and, because the whole area is flat, hitting the spot you want accurately can be a bit of a challenge at first.
The area around the select button doubles up as an iPod style touch wheel. You can run a finger round it to zoom in and out of photos, scroll and perform other functions. It is something we rather like.
The screen is a plus point. 640 x 480 pixels are crammed into a space measuring 2.8 inches across diagonal corners, and the screen is sharp and bright.
One of the big problems with the HTC Touch Diamond was its lack of a microSD card slot for expanding the 4GB internal memory. Our review sample of the Touch Pro had more than 250MB of free internal storage and a microSD card slot for adding more.
This is a 3G device supporting download speeds up to 7.2Mbps. It has a front camera for two-way video calling and a main camera capable of 3.2 megapixels. It has autofocus and an LED flash. Wi-Fi is here and there is a GPS antenna too. An interesting extra is the TV out feature, but sadly HTC doesn't provide the cable you need to take advantage of it.
TouchFLO, with its sweeping and swiping controls, seems to work more smoothly than it did on the Touch Diamond, and this smartphone benefits from some pre-installed extras such as an FM radio, Google Maps, YouTube client and the Opera Web browser. And yes, battery life is a big improvement on the Touch Diamond too.
Verdict
It is expensive, but the Touch Pro is everything the Touch Diamond should have been and more. If you have the money and are small-fingered enough to cope with the keyboard, then it is definitely worth considering.
Company: HTC
Contact: 01202 552936
