HTC Touch Pro2 review - full hands-on review

The Touch Pro2 is HTC’s range-topping smartphone, following on from the impressive but slightly flawed Touch Pro. We’ve had one for the past few weeks now, and it’s turning out to be a really impressive handset.

It features a larger screen than the original Touch Pro, measuring in at 3.6 inches. It’s a great display for watching movie clips on or viewing photographs, thanks to faultless colour reproduction and high brightness levels. It also offers a VGA resolution – with a pixel count of 480 x 800 – and images are considerably sharper than they are on rival handsets such as Apple’s iPhone or HTC’s own Magic.

Although the Touch Pro2 runs Windows Mobile 6.1, the clunky operating system is well hidden beneath HTC’s own TouchFLO 3D software, creating an intuitive finger-friendly environment. You may still need to use a stylus deeper within the menu, but most of the time it’s redundant. Along with a custom home screen – from which you can flick to either side for messaging, photographs, weather info, settings and your contacts, HTC has also implemented a custom start menu – with big icons for your favourite applications.

The onscreen keypad is easy to use and features good text correction software, and is more than accurate enough for text messages or general use. Haptic feedback – with the onscreen buttons gently vibrating to let you know your actions have registered – is a welcome inclusion.

The slide-down QWERTY keyboard is one of the best aspects of the Touch Pro2, and is one of the best we’ve seen, taking full advantage of the phone’s bigger-than-average design. The keys all feature large spacing and it’s easy to type out long emails and documents. A dedicated row of numeric keys also makes it easier to enter data without having to resort to pressing the function key.

Ambient backlighting is in place and lights up the keypad for use in darker conditions.  As with older HTC handsets, the screen also tilts upwards when the keypad is open, letting you angle it towards you when used on a desk, or offering a slighlty better balance when used in the hand.

The keyboard and screen result in a major downside when it comes to bulk, however. From head-on, it’s nearly identical in size to Apple’s iPhone, but it’s considerably thicker and the weight of 179g is far from ideal. That said, part of the weight goes towards the excellent build quality, with robust materials and a sturdy sliding mechanism for the keypad. 

Connectivity is excellent, with 3G/HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth all in place. So is GPS, letting you use the Touch Pro2 as a sat-nav device. In a step up from the original Touch Pro, battery life is also vastly improved, with the larger 1500mAh unit providing a respectable life of around three and a half days under moderate use. Disappointingly for those wanting to use it as a media device, internal memory is limited to 288MB of RAM, although storage space can be increased via microSD card.

Overall, the Touch Pro2 is a great smartphone for business users. The sheer size of it will put off casual users, but it’s all-round abilities, great screen and strong battery life make it a formidable handset.

For more information, visit HTC.