HTC Touch Pro2 Review

Software:

A brand new feature is to be found in your contacts. The interface looks great and quite out of character of typical Windows based phones. Names are showed in large fields with a single, small picture next to each one. You can scroll the list, pick out the first letter or search any name. Adding new contacts reveals huge “most used details” boxes that let you use your fingers comfortably. Another novelty feature is that you can link any phone contact to their relevant Facebook profiles when you assign your contact a picture. You´ll have to fall back on the stylus In case you need to see all available information fields (and there are many on Windows Mobile devices), because that gets you to the standard interface of the device.



Clicking onto a contact makes a pleasing information screen spring up on the screen, but that´s just the first of all tabs. The next one shows you all exchanged messages in a threaded messaging style, the emails you´ve sent to one another as well as more details on received/dialed calls. Basically, all communication can be easily accessed in one place, which comes in handy indeed. This is somewhat reminiscent of the software found on Palm devices.

HTC Touch Pro2 delivers the very same onscreen keyboard as the Diamond2 – you can either use a landscape or vertical (checkerboard) QWERTY layout, with the latter being by far the easier to type away with your bare fingers.



Unfortunately, there are cases when you don´t have a choice and will have to get back to the standard Windows Mobile 6.1 interface, which as we have been saying all over again, is far from being the most good looking thing on the planet. To help ease the pain, HTC has increased the number of customized menus that pop up when clicking software buttons.

The HTC Pro2 sports a 3-megapixel autofocus camera without flash. It´s fairly pleasing to work with, you start it, click the shutter and it does its job. There are several available options that pertain to taking pictures – white balance, brightness and ISO and the only interesting one is to define the object it’s supposed to focus through pressing against the display. It´s a shame picture quality of even outdoor snapshots is truly mediocre. We cannot really say video capture is any better as well, compression is virtually terrible and sound volume is low and muffled.




As we mentioned already, the audio player looks really nice in spite of the fact the Touch Pro2 can hardly be defined as a multimedia device. Unlike the Diamond2, sound through the loudspeaker is much better, but the earphone set that comes with the phone is below par yet again. We do recommend that all music buffs shell out for a converter from miniUSB to standard 3.5mm jack.



The HTC Pro2 supports MP4 H.264 and H.263, so we threw several video files at the integrated player. Playback of content with resolution of 800x480 pixels at even lower bitrates like 500 kbps is sluggish and stuttering, so such videos can be considered unplayable for all practical purposes. On the other hand videos with resolutions like 640x384 run smoothly and picture is really nice even at heavier bitrates such as, say, 1000 kbps. Third party video players like CorePlayer allow you to watch DivX and Xvid content without any issues.

The HTC Diamond2 doesn’t come brimming with preloaded software, but Windows Mobile 6.1 features loads of apps anyway. You will almost immediately take notice of the Teeter game, Google Maps and QuickGPS that helps pinpoint satellites fast, RSS Hub, Adobe Reader LE and of course, Office Mobile.