HTC Touch Pro review

When the HTC Touch Diamond appeared we were wowed on paper but not in practice. The small size and good looks of HTC's 3D TouchFLO were both very alluring and we liked them in the flesh as much as we'd anticipated.

But battery life was a real downer, we weren't delighted with the front controls and weren't fans of the lack of flash memory support despite the 4GB of built in storage.

Hot on the heels of the Touch Diamond comes the HTC Touch Pro. Does it fix the problems? Mostly. And it adds a nice, er, touch of its own.

In size terms the HTC Touch Pro is the same height and width as the Touch Diamond. At 102mm tall and 51mm wide it is considerably smaller than other Windows Mobile Professional devices, but at 18mm thick it is a a little overweight. It feels OK in the hand, though, and the fatness is there thanks to that nice touch we mentioned - a Qwerty keypad which slides down from below the screen.

When you slide the keyboard out the screen pops into wide format and offers a set of eight large shortcut icons to email, messages, Web bookmarks, Web search, calendar, tasks, notes and contacts. Many of these are apps you'll want to use the keyboard with.

The keyboard itself is small. We found using fingertips the best option when tapping away and those with larger digits might find things a fiddle, but the individual keys are well constructed and deliver a solid return so you know you've hit a key.

HTC has thought carefully about what it needs to provide on the keyboard. A full number row is here, as are Fn key shortcuts to things like the Comm Manager where you can turn the built in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and off and switch the SIM off too. There is even an inverted T of cursor controls with embedded Page-Up and Page-Down keys. In short, this is one of the best - if not the best - mini Qwerty keyboards we've seen.

On the other hand the dodgy front controls are still here. Underneath the screen a flat panel offers Windows Mobile Home, Back, Call and End features as well as a D-pad with large central select button. A white pulsing glow emanates from this when you are charging the Touch Diamond, incidentally.

It takes a while to get accustomed to the flat panel. At first you can easily press something inadvertently because key areas aren't clearly defined. The directional movement area outside the select button doubles as an iPod style controller. Run a finger round it to zoom in on images, for example. Once you've got the hang of it, this is great.

Ditto TouchFLO 3D. which offers various screen sweeping and swiping options to move around elements of the Touch Diamond. It is neatly implement and makes a great visual change from the usual Windows Mobile look and feel. You do get underneath it and into Windows Mobile proper fairly quickly, but as an overlay it works nicely.

The screen is relatively large at 2.8 inches, and its 640x480 pixel resolution means it is sharp and clear. Web browsing in particular is a treat and this is also in part due to the fact that, like the Touch Diamond, Opera Mini is used instead of Internet Explorer.

Battery life has gone up a notch. A 1340mAh cell replaces the weedy 900 mAh battery on the Touch Diamond. But it still isn't great. We managed to get two days from it before recharging was necessary, but really with so much multimedia potential here we'd have liked longer life.

The diamond-cut design to the backplate remains albeit in matte now instead of gloss. We still don't like it visually, though it is less of a fingerprint magnet this time around. HTC has ditched the 4GB of internal memory in favour of a more usual microSD card slot accessible if you remove the backplate. There is 512MB of ROM and 288MB of RAM built in to get you started.

The Touch Pro is an HSDPA device reaching speeds of 7.2Mbps where the network allows. Among the software extras is a YouTube app for viewing videos. A front facing camera caters for video calling, while the main camera on the back of the device shoots stills at 3.2 megapixels.

A GPS antenna is built in as is Google Maps, and you can add third party software for point to point navigation. There is also a TV-out option via the mini USB jack, though HTC does not provide a cable for this. The headphones too are a disappointment as they share the USB connector. It is a pity HTC could not have found space for a 3.5mm jack especially because there is an FM tuner to bolster your own music selections.

Still, overall, the Touch Pro a much better device than the Touch Diamond and one of the best Windows Mobile devices we've ever seen.