HTC Touch Pro review: Heavyweight pro

Web browser

The HTC Touch Pro is equipped with the latest version of the Opera browser, which makes the Internet Explorer Mobile redundant. The Opera 9.5 browser is extensively touch-optimized and seems heavily inspired by the iPhone Safari browser. However, it's such a new piece of software that the public beta has only been available for a few weeks and the release version seems far ahead. That alone should tell you that the web browser is in for some early development bugs.

GSMArena.com on HTC Touch Pro (Opera 9.5)

The VGA display snatches a point again in the web browsing department. When the browser loads the full website preview, the minute text still remains recognizable.

While it fails to deliver the same level of usability as the Safari browser, the Opera 9.5 makes up for it by throwing in a few features that totally lack on the iPhone, such as text copy/paste, Flash support (Flash Lite 3 on the Touch Pro) and a download manager.

By default, when you zoom in the browser wraps the text, so the content fits the screen width.

Wrapping text to fit • opening a review image on GSMArena.com

And a few words about the Opera 9.5 interface. By default web pages are opened fullscreen free of any overlaying controls. A tap on the bottom right corner however brings up the available controls.

First, you've got the address bar at the very top. At the bottom of the screen there is a row of icons that can take you back, take you to bookmarks, bring up the tab switcher, the home page or the browser settings.

Opera 9.5 controls revealed • the bookmarks manager • some of the available browser options

There is one drawback we've noticed on the Pro implementation and the reason probably lies in the early development stage of the Opera 9.5.

So here it goes - at times trying to pan a web page makes the web browser just zoom in or out without any logical reason. That behavior can be a real bugger and we hope they fix it in some of the next software updates. With time this can get really annoying and some users end up downloading the Opera Mini instead, which is proved to perform much better on the Diamond.

Organizer

Windows Mobile offers several time-management features and all of them are a breeze to synchronize with MS Outlook. As of Windows Mobile 6.0, the Calendar allows browsing the events to come. It offers daily, weekly and monthly view. You can have the week start on either Monday or Sunday. You can also hide weekends from the Calendar if you use it for business strictly.

The Windows Mobile Calendar

The To-Do list allows you to add tasks and assign them priority. The Notes also come in handy, as you can either type or directly write the text down on the screen. The Voice recorder and Calculator go without saying.

To-Do list • The Notes app allows handwriting too, as well as QWERTY input • the good old calculator is back

The Alarm clock has three alarm slots. Each Alarm can have its own repeat pattern. Unfortunately, due to the little customization options in the default Alarms application, we suggest you check out some free third-party alternatives.

Your office in your hand

Among the other WM core applications is the Office Mobile package featuring support for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. With the latest version of the Office Mobile, you also get the OneNote application.

Office Mobile allows viewing and editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files

Once again, the VGA display of the Touch Pro proves superior in fitting documents contents.

Thanks to the Adobe Reader LE, there is also support for viewing PDF documents. We are pleased with the performance of the Pro in this area, as opening and handling PDF documents is usually rather slow on handhelds.

Opening PDF documents with Adobe Reader LE

Another application is the rather handy Search software, capable of searching throughout the whole file system and applications. You can set filters, so that the application searches only in the places you need.

The system-wide Search application