HTC Touch Pro2 review: Out with a pro

The multimedia is well equipped

The HTC Touch Pro2 offers a small amount of storage – about 300MB. This is barely sufficient and you’ll definitely find yourself needing a higher-capacity microSD card.

The WinMo file manager on the Pro2

The file manager is the standard Windows Mobile one and won’t surprise anyone.

The image gallery stands for excellence

The Touch Pro2 offers a nice thumbnail browser straight from the Photos and Videos tab on the Home screen. There's another thumbnail browser in the Album app available from the context menu on the Home screen or from the Programs menu.

Browsing images as thumbnails in the Albums application

The image is opened automatically in landscape mode and there is no option to rotate it to portrait view. Still that’s not a bad thing because it means the photos you take with the camera are always properly displayed. Once the image is opened, you can zoom in or out using the new touch-zoom bar or continue to the previous/next by sweeping a finger on the current one.

The old circular gesture is also available, but in most cases doesn’t work properly or completely and we think it found its place in the final software by accident. Anyway, if you try hard enough you might manage to make it zoom that way, but we think it’s a feature that should be removed in any future firmware updates.

Opening an image • context menu

Scrolling to the next image is smooth and instantaneous with a single sweep of the finger. And also zooming in and out is extra fast, as well. The Zoom bar comes quite handy for that purpose.

It's got to be said that the Touch Pro2 has a certain advantage over competing devices when it comes to image browsing since this is one of the applications where WVGA really makes a difference - the images look stunning on the high resolution screen.

iPod-style music player as usual

Just like the previous Pro, the Touch Pro2 has a good music player that makes excellent use of Album art. The music player is accessible straight from the TouchFLO home screen with a cool Apple-like Cover Flow animation for you to pick an album from.

The attractive music player runs directly from the home screen

In case you want to filter tracks by other criteria beside album, the Library shortcut will take you to the player backend where you can sort music by artist, genre, composer, purchased tracks or simply create custom playlists. The visual interface of the library is fluid and eerily reminiscent of iPhone's very own music player.

  

The music library: Now Playing tab • artists tab • albums tab • genres tab

Equalizer presets are available only when you have the headset plugged in. They are not part of the music player itself but of a separate application called Audio Booster. That setup allows you to make use of the presets when you watch videos or even when you listen to music on an alternative player.

The Audio Booster app is a system wide setting

Unfortunately, there is no 3.5mm audio jack on the Pro2 or on the headset, so unless you get hold of a third-party adapter, you're stuck with the supplied headphones. The headset looks decent enough, but listening to music is not among its strengths and is best left for making phone calls.

An interesting decision by HTC is also removing the FM radio software. Even more the FM hardware is still there – hidden in the phone. May be HTC wanted this to be a Diamond2 exclusive feature. Nevertheless of the reason there is a way to unlock the FM radio capabilities and we'll show you that later in the Tweaks and Modding section.

Decent audio quality

The audio quality of the HTC Touch Pro2 is only a tad worse than that on the Diamond2 which we rated as pretty good. It sports a decent frequency response, which only deviates from the +-1db level at the very end of the audible range.

The noise level, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk readings are pretty good, rivaling some dedicated music phones. The total harmonic and intermodulation distortion scores are also decent.

With the introduction of the Diamond2 and Pro2 HTC made a huge step forward in matching the dedicated music phones audio quality. Not so long ago the WinMo devices were known for their mediocre audio but luckily we got a "myth busted" on this one too.

HTC Touch Pro2 frequency response graph compared to the Diamond2 and the iPod Touch 2G

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.