HTC Touch Pro review: Heavyweight pro

The camera is a step ahead too

The HTC Touch Pro has a 3 megapixel auto focus camera producing photos with a maximum resolution of 2048x1536 pixels. It offers an intuitive user interface and shoots in landscape mode.

It lacks a dedicated camera key so, in order to pre-focus before you snap a picture with the Pro, you simply tap the touch-sensitive D-pad. Once focus is locked, you can take the picture by pressing the confirm button of the D-pad.

The Touch Pro camera packs a LED flash, but having in mind its power it isn't making that much of a difference.

Interface and features

The Touch Pro viewfinder is free of any overlaying controls by default but you can display those by touching the display once, while in camera mode.

In terms of camera features, the HTC Touch Pro is regularly equipped and offers the standard self-timer, white balance presets, as well as color effects, and a viewfinder gridline. You can shoot images with the front-facing video-call camera too and there's some nice custom resolution setting for contacts' images.

The HTC Touch Pro camera options

Probably the biggest letdown, when it comes to features, is that the camera lacks geotagging. Why that's left out is beyond us. Nevertheless, we have found a free third-party fix for that, but we'll discuss it in the Tweaks & Modding chapter of this review.

With the Touch Pro you can shoot macro images easily without changing modes or anything. However focusing in close-ups is rather hard and is more of a hit-or-miss - sometimes the Touch Pro focuses correctly, while other times it's way off.

There is also a panorama mode that offers on-screen framing guidance. After all the individual shots for the panorama are taken, the Pro stitches the images automatically. The downside here is that in Panorama mode each individual image is shot at roughly 480 x 480 pixels. Plus, images are badly stitched. Obviously the Panorama mode is only ok if you intend to show your images on the handset display exclusively (which is exactly 480 pixels wide) with no further zooming.

Image quality

Luckily, the HTC Touch Pro doesn't have the fishy layer of plastic over its camera lens like the Diamond. That's the right thing to do for HTC and picture quality has improved quite notably. Contrast and the resolved detail are also at a decent level and, as a whole, the performance is above average for a 3MP shooter

HTC Touch Pro • HTC Touch Diamond

HTC Touch Pro • HTC Touch Diamond

Check out some more photo samples from the Touch Pro.

HTC Touch Pro sample camera photos

The LED flash is useless even when the subject is a meter away

Video

The Touch Pro video capturing capabilities are not impressive by any means. All you get is CIF recording (352 x 288 pixel) at 30fps in MPEG4 format. It's not that bad: after all the VideoCD standard uses that resolution, but it's nowhere near what you would expect in a high-end smart device.

The interface of the camcorder resembles that of the still camera. You can only adjust white balance, the resolution and brightness and finally add some color effects.

Pro camcorder interface

Here is a sample video for you to check out.

Connectivity

The Touch Pro offers excellent connectivity options - HSDPA 7.2Mpbs, Wi-Fi and stereo Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR are all on board.

The Touch Pro has quad-band GSM and dual-band HSDPA support, however it will have two localized versions to cover markets world-wide.

USB 2.0 support is also present of course and every time you plug in the USB cable the Touch Pro prompts selecting between ActiveSync and USB Mass Storage connection.

The convenient USB connection prompt

Finally, the Touch Pro packs a memory card slot, which proves quite comfortable for quickly transferring large amounts of data to or from it.