Smartphone, GPS & PDA Reviews and Articles

The scene of the PDA market can sometimes be highly confusing. On one side there is the mighty iPhone 3G where as to counter it are winmo devices like the Samsung Omnia i900, HTC’s Touch Diamond. Well these devices are good, but for a serious business user these devices almost mean nothing. Yes, nothing because they don’t come with any dedicated hardware keys. So all that big touchscreen real estate they talk about has to be shared with the virtual keyboard and in case you have big chubby fingers, then those devices are almost useless for you.

There are a few devices with external slide out keyboard coming to market in near future like Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X1 (designed for SE by HTC itself) and HTC’s very own Touch Pro.According to the official SE announcements, the X1 won’t be available anytime sooner than September this year, which in any case would be further delayed seeing the status of unstable firmware reports of X1 leaking out on internet. That puts HTC Touch Pro in commanding position as it is going to be launched this August by HTC and since the brand is quite popular and well known, we don’t expect them to delay any official launch. While we are waiting for the PDA to appear in our local stores, we present to you our HTC Touch Pro Review:
HTC Touch Pro is one heck of a kick-ass device. The hardware combination is absolutely amazing. Built with a Qualcomm 528 MHz, 288MB RAM, 512MB ROM and a 64MB dedicated Graphics chip, the device will function amaizingly fast, even when there are many applications running at the same time, since it has the same configuration as the HTC Touch Diamond we expect it to be as fast and powerful as HTC Diamond.

The phone measures 102 x 51 x 18 mm and weighs 165 g, a bit more than the HTC Diamond. The Pro is armed with a 2.8inches screen with VGA resolution, which is the same as HTC Touch Diamond. Comparing to HVGA resolution of iPhone and QVGA resolution of Omnia, the VGA resolution of Pro is going to be delight as it will allow more data to be displayed with crispier images.

And here is the bad news now: It has been officially confirmed by HTC that the devices would be available as quadband, with separate versions available for North American and rest of the world markets. That means if you own the European version of the HTC Pro and afterwards fly to the US, your $1000 piece of hi-tech gadget simply won’t work on their 850mhz band or even if it does with the custom Rom pack, but in that case won’t be able to use 3G frequencies there. A disappointing fact indeed as most phones these days offer seamless connectivity to all 3G and HSPA bands throughout world. Further to agonize, the North American version won’t be available anytime sooner than December this year.

Speaking of the HTC Touch Pro’s design.. it is simply superb, with a 5 row slide-out QWERTY keyboard, it looks just like the HTC Diamond, only that it’s a bit thicker. The keys are supposed to be quite big and give a nice feedback when pressed. The best part is that the numeric keys have dedicated buttons of their own much like the normal keyboards on computers. The interface is same as the one on HTC Diamond, with gorgeously made TouchFLO 3D taking the guard there. Navigation, searching, playing media, zooming-in and out of pictures is done through gesture based input.

The PDA is equipped with 3.2megapixel camera with AF and LED flash. Since it is a business oriented phone, so that could be one explanation why it has not been equipped with now-industry-standard-5megapixel camera. The back of the PDA is similar to HTC Touch Diamond with the HTC Diamond cut motif. For comparisons, Samsung’s Omnia is equipped with 5megapixel camera, Apple’s iPhone is with 2megapixel camera and the SE’s X1 would be having 3.2megapixel camera sensor. But there is also a second cam on the HTC Pro, a VGA one intended for Video telephony and 3g (Damn it, the developers didn’t forgot anything!).
The phone is so similar to Touch Diamond that till the time you don’t pull out the keyboard, you won’t feel it any different from the Htc Diamond. The only major difference apart from the keyboard it has with Htc Diamond is that it has a microSD card slot supporting up to 16GB of micro SDHC cards while HTC Diamond comes with only a 4GB internal storage

Is it an advantage? Well, it depends on how you perceive it, but in our HTC Touch Pro Review we would like to mention that the card based storage is a better solution for those who need a lot of storage, first of all cause they can always use it with a card reader which offers better transfer rates as compared to mass storage profile on phone and secondly they can always carry more than one card to increase the storage space by slipping in a new card when the current one gets full.

The HTC Touch Pro is also equipped with a regular 1-pin USB port which doubles up as TV-out port, with cable sold separately, a USB cable port and hands-free connectivity port.

Battery life is going to be really very good as it comes with industry un-surpassed 1340mAH Li-Ion battery. For facts, the HTC Diamond is equipped with meager 900mAH battery as standard and still manages to give standby of almost 2 days with decent amount of usage.
Other standard PDA features of the HTC Touch Pro are: the loud speakerphone, GPS and A-GPS, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Auto UI rotate with built in accelerometer, 3G and HSDPA 7.2Mbps support, multi format supporting windows media player 11,Word, Excel, PowerPoint reader suite, Mobile Internet Explorer and Outlook Mobile.
If you have been an admirer of HTC’s TyTn, then probably you would drool over this phone. Or if you have ever been put away with the idea of on-screen virtual keyboards, in that case you will be pleased to own this device.

And finally, here’s the end of our HTC Touch Pro Review: the price. There’s no chance for this PDA to be any cheaper than HTC Diamond which retails for $700-1000 across world. We expect it to be in the next months available for about $900.

HTC Touch Pro technical Specifications:

1. Processor: Qualcomm® MSM7201A™ 528 MHz
2. Operating: System Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional
3. Memory ROM: 512 MB
4. RAM: 288 MB
5. Dimensions: 102 mm (L) X 51 mm (W) X 18.05 mm (T)
6. Weight: 165 g (with the battery)
7. Display: 2.8-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with VGA resolution
8. Network: HSDPA/WCDMA: Europe/Asia: 900/2100 MHz Tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE: Europe/Asia: 900/1800/1900 MHz
9. Transfer rate: Up to 384 kbps up-link and 7.2 Mbps down-link speed
10. Device Control TouchFLO™ 3D
11. Touch-sensitive navigation control
12. Keyboard Slide-out 5-row QWERTY keyboard
13. GPS and A-GPS ready
14. Connectivity Bluetooth® 2.0 with EDR
15. Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g
16. HTC ExtUSB™ (11-pin mini-USB 2.0, audio jack, and TV Out* in one)
17. Main camera: 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus and flash light
18. Second camera: VGA CMOS camera
19. Audio Built-in microphone, speaker and FM radio with RDS
20. Ring tone supported formats: MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, WAV, and AMR-NB 40 polyphonic, standard MIDI format 0 and 1 (SMF)/SP MIDI
21. Battery Rechargeable Lithium-ion or Lithium-ion polymer battery
    Capacity: 1340 mAh
22. Talk time: Up to 397 minutes for WCDMA or Up to 485 minutes for GSM
23. Standby time: Up to 503 hours for WCDMA  Up to 406 hours for GSM
24. Video call time: Up to 201 minutes for WCDMA
25. Expansion Slot microSD™ memory card (SD 2.0 compatible)
26. AC Adapter Voltage range/frequency: 100 ~ 240V AC, 50/60 Hz
27. DC output: 5V and 1A

Hopefully our HTC Touch Pro Review managed to help you out in understanding what HTC Touch Pro actually is and what it can and can’t do.

Later edit: here’s the short, romanian version of our HTC Touch Pro Review