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In December, The Tech Herald reviewed the HTC Touch Pro from Verizon. Unlike recent reviews, this phone was different. Classified as a Smartphone, the HTC Touch Pro comes loaded with Windows Mobile Professional 6.1. While there are several Windows Mobile devices on the market, the HTC Touch Pro is interesting to say the least, with both positive and negative traits.
Review: HTC Touch Pro from Verizon
The standout feature on the HTC Touch Pro is the interface. You will use a stylus to navigate the menus and most of the operation, but the touch screen will work quite well using your finger. The backlight screen is brightly lit, and honestly beautiful to look at. The QWERTY keyboard slides out for access, and while the key placement is awkward, there is nothing wrong with it that isn’t solved by regular usage.
The phone itself is lightweight, thanks to a smooth plastic finish, and fits nicely in a pocket or the palm of your hand. This is in contrast to the offerings from AT&T and Sprint. During testing, the one thing that was constant is that depending how the phone was handled, the slide mechanism used to access the keyboard would move constantly. Not a major drawback, but something that was worth noting in a review.
Call quality was clear; there were no dropped calls or performance issues. The calls were tested using Bluetooth, speakerphone, and voice dial.
The HTC Touch Pro is aimed at business users. The offerings are decent when you consider this is a phone after all. As it runs Windows Mobile, you will have access to Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They were as expected, functional with no bugs. Yet, if you have ever attempted to author a Word document on a phone, or edit a PowerPoint presentation, then you know what you can expect.
Adobe Reader LE opened quickly, but takes some getting used to. However, there were no issues when it came to accessing various document formats.
The Outlook application offers near instant email delivery and automatic sync for calendar, tasks, and contact data. Direct Push is to thank for this, but without access to Exchange Server, you can still use IMAP, POP and HTML formatting on email actually works.
Browsing on the HTC Touch Pro was nothing spectacular, but thanks to Opera there was better rendering than some of the devices reviewed by The Tech Herald in the past. Browsing speeds on the HTC Touch Pro, however, were impressive. The pages loaded quickly with little lag.
The browser allows pan and zoom when accessing a website, so you can read all of the content clearly. The pan and zoom functions work like those on the BlackBerry Storm, where a single or double tap of the screen will initiate the feature. Using the built-in Wi-Fi instead of the EV-DO Rev. A offered little improvements to surfing speed, and during testing it would drop the connection to the wireless network.
The phone supports GPA/A-GPS, this means that VZ Navigator users will have no problems using the HTC Touch Pro to move through the streets. However, while the GPS/A-GPS abilities are supported, you will need to pay about $10.00 USD a month for access to VZ Navigator.
Past reviews for Verizon devices have always mentioned VCast, the music offering from Verizon. VCast was missing on the HTC Touch Pro; it is a business device after all.
You can use Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, if you load your own MP3, WMA, AAC, WMV, or MPEG-4 files.
However, the 3.2-megapixel camera produced some great photos during a visit to Conseco to see the Pacers play.
As you can see, the images taken during the visit are clear, and sharp. The image below came out with a cool blur effect caused by the camera capturing the motion of the people around Ray when he was having his face painted.
Memory usage on the device is high. The more pictures you take, the more documents you edit or games you download and store, the more the device will need basic memory. However, the sad part is that the HTC Touch Pro only had 192MB Ram and 512MB ROM. During this test, we took advantage of a 16GB microSD card from SanDisk to boost the performance.
This lack of memory likely produced some of the issues that occurred during testing. At random times during testing, the device would lag, horribly. There were quirks with some of the applications, Word for example, that would lead to a phone reset. Every so often the shortcut buttons would stop working. This was frustrating, but by the time you read this review, there is a good chance most of the bugs will have been worked out and addressed in an update to the device.
Another issue happened during the browser testing, Opera would just stop working. It would sometimes launch slowly, but every once in a while during various testing and simple coffee shop browsing, Opera would lockup. Adding credibility to the lack of memory leading to some of these issues, once the 16GB microSD card was used, most of the applications worked better with games, music, images, and other things stored elsewhere.
The battery life was less than expected. With normal usage, it lasted about 3 hours, one less than the baseline of 4 hours that is advertised. However, to be fair, this phone was put to the test and used constantly from the time the battery was fully charged until the phone turned off due to lack of power.
The HTC Touch Pro is a decent business phone. However, considering the cost of $349.99 USD after a $70.00 USD mail-in rebate, the $29.99 USD Smartphone plan for Email and Web access, plus $9.99 USD a month for VZ Navigator, it is too expensive when you consider the other balanced offerings from Verizon.
Without knocking the phone completely, the HTC Touch Pro is a classy phone. It looks nice, feels good in your hand when you use it, and offers a good deal of features for a business user.
Yet, the total cost, the bugs, and the fact that other phones from Verizon are far better suited for business without Windows Mobile, would make this device a second or third option when selecting a new device for business users. Home users would be better suited by the Dare or Titanium Voyager over this device.
Final Score: 2.5 / 5.0
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