HTC Touch Pro2 review: Out with a pro

A bunch of video players

TheTouch Pro2 comes with the standard well known – and sadly underperforming - Windows Media Player. It only manages mp4 and 3gp and for DivX/XviD support you will need a third party application.

The HTC Touch Pro2 however has a nice additional video player, the same as but it only supports the video/audio codecs available to Windows Mobile in the first place. To enjoy a wider range of video options on the Pro (DiVX or XViD for example), you will probably need to purchase a dedicated video player with additional codec support.

Playing video on the Pro

We resorted to the well-known Core player for that purpose and as usual it did a great job.

The HTC Touch Pro2 is pretty good at full-screen video playback - we played an XviD-encoded DVD rip for PC playback and, luckily, there were no skipped frames. Then we tried exactly the same DivX video samples as on the Diamond2 and we experienced the same problems. Playing back those VGA@30fps videos nearly half the frames were dropped, while those at 24fps played just fine. That however is a DivX-specific issue and as XviD encoding is more popular anyway, it doesn’t seem a big deal.

The Core player

As you might have guessed, videos looked excellent on the Pro2 WVGA display.

It was high five, now it’s just poor three

The HTC Touch Pro2 has a 3 megapixel auto focus camera (the Diamond2 has 5 megapixel one) producing photos with a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. The camera offers an intuitive user interface and shoots in landscape mode.

It lacks a dedicated camera key AGAIN so, in order to take a picture you can just touch the virtual key, the camera focuses on the frame center and takes the shot automatically.

The Touch Pro2 camera also lacks a LED flash, but our team is not super keen on LED flashes anyway so we don't count this as a serious flaw.

Interface and features

The Touch Pro2 viewfinder is free of any overlaying controls by default but you can display those by touching the dedicated key under the “capture” button.

In terms of camera features, the HTC Touch Pro has the usual and offers the standard self-timer, white balance presets, ISO settings (up to ISO800), 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 settings for contacts' images.

The HTC Touch Pro2 camera options

Probably the biggest letdown with the camera is the lack of geotagging, and it’s beyond us why they left that out much like with the HTC Touch HD. 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 Pro2 you can shoot macro images easily without needing to change modes. However focusing in close-up is rather hard and is somewhat 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 Touch Pro2 stitches the images together automatically.

The downside here is that in Panorama mode each individual image is shot at roughly 480 x 480 pixels and the images are quite badly stitched together. 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

We were really impressed with the HTC Touch Diamond2 photos taken with its 5 megapixel snapper. We expected something similar with the Touch Pro2 camera samples, but at last we are completely confused.

The picture quality can't even be called satisfying – the image detail is around normal but the colors are not even close to reality, the sharpening is extreme at some places (look at the mountain on the first sample), add the purple fringing and missing detail in the sky. As far as we are concerned those are quite poor camera samples. We really hope HTC will have those fixed ia a firmware upgrade soon.

Camera samples

Video

The Touch Pro2 video capturing capabilities are not impressive at all – VGA recording at 15 fps. Given the video capabilities of many modern phones and bearing in mind the powerful Pro2 CPU, we really expected more, just like we did with the Diamond2.

But what we didn't expect at all is the video quality – it's well below the decent line, the detail is levels below normal, the colors are not accurate at some places and sometimes the picture is just blurred. The biggest problem of course is the low frame rate, and it’s really not what we’ve come to expect in such a high-end device.

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

Touch Pro2 camcorder interface

Here is a sample VGA video (1.5MB) produced by the Touch Pro2.