HTC Touch Pro

The Touch Pro takes a lot of visual style from the Touch, without sacrificing controls. One of the ways the it does this is by keeping most of its buttons hidden safely out of sight. The front panel looks like it has only a single main button, but in fact there are nine membrane-style controls there: a five way directional pad plus four navigation and control buttons.

The rest of the buttons are inside the slider, on the device's keyboard. I haven't been too wild about the quality of HTC's recent keyboards. The Touch Pro does a little better, but it's far from everything it could be. The buttons are a bit more convex, making them easier to find and push than the more totally flat style used previously. What hasn't changed is the annoyingly papery texture of the keys. Come on, guys, rubber isn't that hard to figure out. Samsung did it.

The keyboard's backlighting is a little weak, and shuts off too fast. Unfortunately there don't seem to be a setting to change this.

HTC Touch Pro vs. HTC MogulThere's also a few nice little touches, like the sliding keyboard overriding the device's tilt sensor. When the keyboard is open, no matter how you turn the thing, the screen stays aligned to the keyboard. Close it up, and you can go back to rotating the device from portrait to landscape by literally rotating it.

There's been some complaints about the Touch Pro being thick. I had the same first impression of it right up until I was able to compare it to similar devices. In fact, it's the same thickness as its predecessors, the HTC Mogul and the AT&T Tilt, but because it's a third of an inch narrower than the older devices -- combined with the ergonomics of the curving backplate -- it seems thicker in the hand than it actually is. While it's true that you're not going to get an iPhone-like thinness out of this, it's certainly no worse than any other keyboard-slider.

Features
The Pro comes in two important flavors: the GSM version, which is sold independent of a carrier as well as under the AT&T Fuze name, and the CDMA model, which is currently available on Sprint and Verizon. The Sprint version is what we're working with here today. They're more or less the same, other than some minor cosmetic differences (particularly in the keyboard design) and the fact that the Verizon model has 192 MB of RAM instead of the 288 MB on the others.

It may be that the Pro doesn't have every single thing you can pack into a smartphone, but if that's your goal, you can bloody well see it from here. A VGA (640 by 480 pixel) screen, 528 MHz processor, Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), Bluetooth 2.0/EDR, GPS, FM radio with RDS, 288 MB of RAM, TV out, 512 MB of flash storage, memory expansion up to 16 GB through the microSDHC slot...

TouchFLO 3DOne thing you don't often see on the spec sheet though, is the HTC customized software. But it very much bears mention. The new and improved TouchFLO 3D is light-years beyond the simplistic fingertip launcher that preceded it. TF3D is closer to a total conversion for the Windows Mobile Pro platform: virtually everything you need to do can be done from the rotating home screen, barely if ever touching the underlying OS.

Add to that the device coming pre-loaded with Opera Mobile for browsing, clients for YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace, a weather tab that's so pretty you could get mesmerized by a rainstorm, etcetera, and you get what I can only describe as a complete smartphone experience... and one where you could forget that you're running W