HTC Touch Pro2 - For the Professionals

Features - Part 1

A Little Here, A Little There

One of the most frequent first comments we received was, "Is that a fake iPhone?" All credit to HTC for a device whose smooth, glossy silvered textures and soapy shape exude style without being too loud for business use. But the large amount of chrome surrounding the display does nothing to distance the Touch Pro2 from that "i-too" look.

Let's move on to something we can quantify instead: size and weight. In a nutshell, the Touch Pro2 is thinner than the chunky Touch Pro, but larger and heavier. Most of the increased surface area goes to the 3.6-inch WVGA display, and in turn makes more space available for the larger battery, whose capacity is boosted to 1500mAh. However, there's no escaping density, mass and volume. While the Touch Pro clocked in at what we would consider a pocket-friendly 165 grams, the Touch Pro2's 187.5g heft runs quite close to the days when Pocket PCs such as the O2 Xda IIs would sag one's pants if kept in anything but a belt holster.

Since we've already covered most of the aesthetic in our preview, we'll talk about the hardware buttons on our way inside the Touch Pro 2. In a nod to the business aspirations of this range, there is no side camera button, and indeed the navigation pad and circular touch wheel found on the Touch Pro have been removed. In their place remains the Windows Start button (seemingly mandatory on all new Windows Mobile devices), a Back button, Call and End keys.

Those aforementioned directional controls have made way for a zoom bar which provides instant magnification gratification while messaging, web browsing, editing documents and most other applications with a zoom function. This is just an extension of the touch-sensitive area below the display, and thus it lends itself to occasional unwanted presses of the soft keys on the bottom bar, similar to laptop touchpads that have a "scroll zone". Overall, those who work with documents are most likely to appreciate the zoom bar - an example of the professional focus of the Touch Pro2.

Let The River FLO

No one can argue that HTC has stepped up to the plate in making Windows Mobile usable for those who don't fancy tinkering with its many eccentricities. The initial HTC Home interface, seen on the TyTN II, spelled the beginning of the end for styluses. Then came TouchFLO 3D, giving access to the majority of common functions and abstracting even more of Windows Mobile's teensy scrollbars and hard-to-press buttons.

In the latest iteration of TouchFLO 3D on the Touch Pro2, HTC has added even more tricks to make sure that the user never needs to pull out the stylus... well, almost. Let's walk through this in pictures.