Windows Phone Thoughts: No Job for Amateurs - HTC's Touch Pro2 Reviewed

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Thursday, August 20, 2009

No Job for Amateurs - HTC's Touch Pro2 Reviewed

Posted by Doug Raeburn in "Pocket PC Hardware" @ 07:00 AM

Performance

You'd expect great performance from a high end phone like the Touch Pro2, and it definitely didn't disappoint. Using AT&T as my carrier, reception was excellent, with 4 bars available almost everywhere. I found the sound of incoming calls to be clear, as did the folks to whom I was talking.

The dual speaker, dual microphone speaker phone was a welcome addition. I used it for a conference call at work and it performed admirably. I compared it to my Touch Diamond1, my Samsung Jack and an iPhone and the Touch Pro2 was clearly superior to all of them. Setting up calls can be especially easy if all of the participants are in your Contacts list. The Touch Pro2 includes "Straight Talk" software that allows you to queue up all of the participants prior to starting a conference call and then dialing each of them in rapid succession. You can talk to one of the participants in private with the others on hold and you can disconnect from individual participants without ending the call. In reading some reviews of the T-Mobile version of the Touch Pro2, I found some complaints that the conference call software on that phone limited the conference calls to 2 participants. I had no such trouble on the reviewed phone, as I had 4 participants, including myself, on a single call. If you use your speakerphone often, you'd certainly be happy with the Touch Pro2 in that regard.

This phone isn't a US-spec phone and as such can only use AT&T's slower EDGE network as opposed to its faster 3G network. While data performance was noticeably slower, it was satisfactory nonetheless.

Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS all performed as expected.

I didn't have the phone long enough to do extensive battery testing. My impression is that the battery life is marginally better than that of the Touch Diamond1. Of course, using the EDGE data network on the Touch Pro2 vs. the 3G network on the Touch Diamond1 would give the Touch Pro2 an advantage in power consumption. I'd still probably make a spare battery one of my first purchases after getting the phone itself.

Conclusions

There's much to like about the Touch Pro2. It provides quality construction, many useful design features and a concerted effort by HTC to provide the richest touch enabled environment currently available in a WinMo phone. The fundamental design of the OS prevented them from extending this environment to all aspects of the phone, but it's an impressive effort nonetheless.

To be honest, my "perfect" WinMo phone at this point would be the Touch Pro2's smaller sibling sans keyboard, the Touch Diamond2. I'd prefer the lighter weight and smaller size and, if I added TouchPal to replace the bundled onscreen keyboard, I'd find the input to be easy and effective, enough to make the physical keyboard a "nice to have" rather than a "must have". That's based on my preferences... your preferences may differ.

But if you're a big fan of hardware keyboards, the Touch Pro2 is in my opinion the phone to choose among current WinMo devices.

Doug Raeburn is a Data Architect specializing in Data Warehouse design. He lives in Lannon, WI.


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