HTC Touch Pro review: Heavyweight pro

Windows Mobile wars are at their fiercest and a truce is nowhere in sight with new recruits marching to battle as we speak. HTC Touch Pro is adding some heavy firepower to the Touch Diamond campaign for domination of the WinMo realm. The new pro by HTC is a true all-rounder, with multimedia and navigation just part of its ammo, and has every premise of becoming the most complete Windows-powered device to date. Armed and dangerous it is, but will it get a license to kill?

HTC Touch Pro official photos

Having already seen this phone doesn't make us any less excited to take it out for a spin. Yes, you will hear us call the Diamond and the Touch Pro twins and there will be déjà-vu aplenty in this article. After all, it's the same platform and design.

Key features

• 2.8" 65K-color touchscreen VGA display
• Five row full QWERTY slide-out keyboard of brilliant ergonomics
• TouchFLO 3D Home screen and gesture controls
• Wi-Fi
• Qualcomm MSM7201A 528 Mhz CPU and 288 MB DDR SDRAM
• Dedicated graphics chip (64MB RAM reserved for graphics)
• HSDPA 7.2Mbps
• Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS
• microSD memory expansion
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• 3.15 MP auto focus camera
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
• Active magnetic stylus
• Touch-sensitive scroll wheel
• Standard miniUSB port and Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP
• TV out
• Teeter game aboard
• Cool YouTube client
• Excellent video playback performance
• MS Office Mobile document editor
• Opera 9.5 web browser

Main disadvantages:

• Rather bulky and heavy
• Fingerprint-prone front panel
• Average sunlight legibility
• No standard 3.5mm audio jack
• Back panel design hurts usability
• Limited scroll wheel usage
• No adequate storage memory out of the box

HTC Touch Pro is armed to the very last one of them QWERTY teeth, almost every worth having mobile phone feature on its list. So much so, that a viable alternative is hard to find on the current market. The arch enemy however is just a quick look ahead.

HTC Touch Pro

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 spec sheet is almost identical to the one of Touch Pro. In addition they run on the same Windows Mobile Professional 6.1 OS. Now, add the fact that it's HTC that actually manufactures the X1 super phone, and you've got quite a clone war shaping up.

If you aren't dying to have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, the options are quite clear. The HTC Touch Diamond (the Touch Pro keyboardless and much slimmer twin) and the Samsung i900 Omnia have been around struggling for the upper hand over the past three months. You can check out our comparison article or the dedicated reviews of the Omnia and the Diamond.

Now take your time, we'll be back to the looks and feel of the HTC Touch Pro after the jump.