At A Glance:

The HTC Touch Pro is a device with a slide-out keyboard. The device has been sniffed at as resembling a brick, and in truth it does resemble a brick and is rather heavy too.

In the box (prototype)
- Transceiver unit
- Battery (standard battery)
- Charger set
- Headset

Exterior
Brick jokes aside, the back of the device which is also the battery cover has a bevelled surface. This might resemble the Diamond device but it does make the keyboard wobble when placed on a flat surface for typing.

The front of the phone is simply the screen with a touch sensitive buttons and a circular touchpad to navigate around. The manual was not supplied with the device so it was not possible to determine if

Buttons/Screen
The screen is a large 2.8-inch one with around 300, 000 pixels on it. It supports 65K of colours, but the screen is quite difficult to read in the sunlight. It is quite hard to navigate around with thumbs and fingers as the response is rather bad. Of course, one can always use the attached stylus, but that really went out of the window about a decade ago.

The keyboard slides out and is a full QWERTY keyboard. This time around, the backspace key is included on the keyboard which does make it a little better for the user who wants to go back a page.

Hardware
The HTC Touch Pro uses a 528 MHz Qualcomm CPU. There is 288 MBs of RAM and 512 MBs of Flash. The device is mostly in black with a toggle button on the left side of the phone. The power button is on the top of the phone and a USB port which doubles as a charger port at the bottom of the device.

The remaining keys are the touch-sensitive keys found below the screen, together with the circular navigation pad.

Software
The device runs Windows Mobile 6.1 as an OS and comes with the mobile version of Microsoft office, comprising Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications.

TouchFLO 3D makes an appearance in this device. TouchFLO 3D is apparently an upgrade of the TouchFLO interface seen on the Touch and the Touch Cruise.

Camera/Video
We have a 3MP camera on the back of the device and a smaller VGA camera at the top of the screen for video calls. Apparently there is also a light sensor that turns off the screen when you hold it up to your face.

The response of the viewfinder window is a little slow, just like in all Windows Mobile devices, where there is a slight delay between a moving object and what is shown on the device’s screen. The easiest way to see this is to aim the device at a movie running on TV or a computer.

Connectivity
The HTC Touch Pro has two sets of network support capabilities. The first set is the GSM Tri-band (900/1800/1900 MHz) support, and the second is the (UMTS 900/2100 MHz) support for 3G/UMTS connections.

The SIM card goes into a slot barely blocked by the battery, so you musty remove the battery before sliding the SIM in. 512MB memory card is come with the device and the microSD text is plain for all to see when the battery cover is open. Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi connectivity are standard features for this device.

Games
In addition to the usual complement of Windows Mobile games, the Touch Pro has a game called Teeter, which makes use of the built-in accelerometer to get you to balance a ball-bearing into a green-coloured hole. This one is very addictive.

Editor’s Opinion
This is a curious device. On one hand, it is heavy and shaped like a brick. On the other, it has many great features built into it that other Windows Mobile devices do not have.

Conclusion: For the moment, this looks to be one of the better Windows Mobile devices on sale.

• Tags : HTC Touch Pro