The Touch Pro has a few minor cosmetic changes but is otherwise identical in appearance to the Fuze. For instance, it has a soft-touch silver back panel, whereas the Fuze is black, and a dark chrome ring around the front panel, which the Fuze lacks. It's also slightly larger than the Fuze, measuring 4.2 by 2.1 by 0.7 (HWD) inches, although at 5.3 ounces, its weight is lower than the Fuze's by half an ounce. Sprint's version of the five-row QWERTY keyboard makes much more sense than AT&T's: It has a full row of numbers across the top, and symbol shortcut keys where you'd expect them to be. The keys remain too flat and stiff for fast typing, but the design is still powerful and flexible for more intensive document editing and messaging. The rest of the details are the same, including the controls on the phone's face, the packaged accessories, and the centerpiece: the bright, crisp 2.8-inch, 640-by-480-pixel touch screen.
On Sprint, the Touch Pro is a dual-mode (800/1,900 MHz) CDMA phone, featuring both EV-DO and Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) radios. Reception was a little weak: In a rural area, the Touch Pro vacillated between 1X and EV-DO modes, while a nearby Sprint BlackBerry Pearl 8130 held a solid lock on EV-DO. Calls also came through a bit choppy with static on the Touch Pro in the same location, although callers sounded full-bodied in the earpiece. A paired Aliph New Jawbone had clear and punchy audio through the Touch Pro. The handset's speakerphone was too quiet and distorted for anything but close, indoor use. Even worse, battery life was miserable—just 3 hours 8 minutes in our talk-time run-down test.
In past HTC device reviews, including that of the Fuze, we've lamented the Windows Mobile–TouchFLO combination, so I won't rehash everything here. Suffice it to say, though, that depending on the task, you either get a pretty interface that works with deliberate finger touches or a cluttered Windows-like interface that requires the stylus. And sometimes you jump back and forth between them even when you're in the middle of a single task, such as during media playback, Web browsing, or when configuring the phone's deluge of settings. The handset also feels sluggish in use, despite its relatively powerful 528-MHz Qualcomm CPU, 122MB of free user RAM, and respectable benchmark scores. I'd bet some hardware graphics acceleration would do wonders for TouchFLO.
For e-mail, the Touch Pro's built-in Outlook Mobile mail client hooks into Exchange servers, supports Microsoft Direct Push, and can read POP, IMAP, and common Web-based mail accounts. The HTC Touch Pro edits Word and Excel documents and views PowerPoint files. The handset also synced with a Windows Vista laptop on the first try. Combine all this with the five-row keyboard and you've got an excellent mobile office.
In addition, Sprint includes a more robust software bundle than AT&T does. The Touch Pro features ClearVue Presentation 5 Pro, a third-party app for creating and editing PowerPoint files. Sprint also throws in RSS Hub, a mobile RSS reader that comes preloaded on the handset with over 100 links to news, entertainment, sports, and tech sites, among other categories. The reader gives you a several-line summary of each article, along with a link to fire up the browser and read the rest. You also get Handmark Pocket Express, a neat little information aggregator for things like weather and sports scores, and Titan, Sprint's Java virtual machine. There's less crapware on the Touch Pro than on the Fuze, although, like many handsets these days, it's still loaded with nonfunctional icons and demo programs.
Other mobile apps on the Touch Pro mirror the ones on the Fuze. Opera Mobile renders desktop Web pages well, helped plenty by the VGA screen resolution. The IM client connects to AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger accounts in a tabbed interface. Sprint TV offers dozens of channels in various bundles, but some channels can get a bit wonky. CNN Mobile Live, for example, took a while to start up and looked squished owing to an incorrect (and nonadjustable) aspect ratio, although it played relatively smoothly even when blown up to fill the screen. You can also buy music tracks over the air from the Sprint Music Store. The Touch Pro supports TeleNav-based Sprint Navigation, although I couldn't test it since our test handset wasn't provisioned for the service.
Music sounded incredibly tinny on the included wired earbuds, and just as bad over the minute built-in mono speaker on the top. Treble was warm but lacking over a paired set of Cardo S2 stereo Bluetooth headphones. As for the Touch Pro audio interface, it displays album-art thumbnails and lets you flick through them with your finger, but it takes several seconds to switch tracks. At one point I got stranded on the home screen with music playing in the background, and the Task Manager wouldn't quit the app. I had to navigate back to the music player and close it from there. Videos, including DivX and Xvid files, played back smoothly, with occasional stutters when blown up to full screen mode.
There's no dedicated camera button on the handset, which makes it tough to snap a picture quickly when the opportunity presents itself. The 3.2-megapixel camera took blurry, flatly colored photos and couldn't resolve details as simple as books on a shelf 12 feet away (all the bindings sort of blurred together). The autofocus mode, which can't be disabled, added several seconds to the phone's shutter delay. The Touch Pro has an LED flash that is bright for a flash of this kind. In this regard the Touch Pro is a nice improvement over the Touch Diamond, which lacks a flash entirely. Recorded video files were relatively smooth at 352 by 288 pixels, though the phone is missing the Fuze's QVGA (320 by 240) setting.
Overall, the HTC Touch Pro is a bit more pleasant on Sprint than the Fuze is on AT&T, thanks to its lighter weight, improved software bundle, and better keyboard. However, its battery life result is more than two hours shorter than the Fuze's, and it's not as good a voice phone. Sprint smartphone buyers should also consider the Touch Diamond, which is less expensive but lacks a QWERTY keyboard. The BlackBerry Curve 8330 remains our Editors' Choice–winning Sprint smartphone for its excellent keyboard, stellar e-mail management, long battery life, and great value—even though it lacks the Touch Pro's advanced graphics and touch-screen interface. But if all you want is a more-responsive touch screen and easier-to-use media features, the Samsung Instinct is a viable alternative to the Touch Pro—and a solid value, too.
- Price as Tested: $299.99 List
- Service Provider: Sprint
- Operating System: Windows Mobile Pocket PC
- Screen Size: 2.8 inches
- Screen Details: 480x640, TFT, 262K colors
- Camera: Yes
- Megapixels: 3.2 MP
- 802.11x: Yes
- Bluetooth: Yes
- Web Browser: Yes
- Network: CDMA
- Bands: 800, 1900
- High-Speed Data: 1xRTT, EVDO
- Processor Speed: 528 MHz
- Special Features: Music
- Notes: Price: $299.99 w/ two yr contract and $100 mail-in rebate
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