Overview: Few cell phones have the look and feel of the HTC brand and the Touch Pro2 continues that trend with a solid form, sleek lines, and hefty hardware. It’s specs make it a juggernaut in the market but will the price keep buyers at bay?
The Rundown: It would be an understatement to say that the HTC Touch Pro was ‘well received’ by technophiles the world over. HTC managed to pack a great deal of hardware into the touch-screen slider. That left the Pro2 designers with a bit of a conundrum; how do you improve upon such a sound design? Well, first you start with the eye-candy, in this case on-screen eye candy. Gone is the VGA screen, replaced with a sleek 3.6-inch WVGA display running at a 800 x 480 resolution. Now you can call it ergonomics or you can call it just plain cool but feel free to tilt the screen to your preference when you’ve slid it up for some full QWERTY texting.
Now, there’s no sense in having a pristine screen unless its navigable and so HTC cooked up a dedicated zoom-slider that just happens to be touch-sensitive. Add to that a G-sensor functionality (gesture recognition, as opposed to a simple tilt sensing accelerometer) and you’re pretty much talking about the forefront of portable user interfaces. One particularly nifty application of the G-sensor is that when the phone is flipped over during a conversation it will automatically go to ‘speaker phone’ creating some rather seamless ‘Oh no he didn’t!’ moments in the boardroom.
Speaking of boardrooms, the HTC Touch Pro2 is aimed fairly squarely at the business-class. That means, among other things, a hefty price tag to go along with all the sleek and fancy bells-and-whistles. In fact, these’ll likely be the most expensive bells-and-whistles you’ve ever purchased; with the HTC Touch Pro just recently hitting North American shores, retailers are charging as much as $800. Obviously prices vary depending on contracts, but if we’ve learned anything from the iPhone it’s that contracts generally differ costs, they don’t erase them. The Pro2 will land in Asia and Europe in the second quarter of this year with the North American date TBA. Rest assured, it won’t be costing any less than it’s predecessor.
All in all: An excellent buy, worth every dime, if you have thousands of them to spare. Read on for more specs…
The Specs:
Outside:
- 3.6-inch TFT-LCD touch-sensitive screen with 480 X 800 WVGA resolution with adjustable tilt screen
- 175 grams (6.17 ounces) with battery
- Overall dimensions; 116 X 59.2 X 17.25 mm (4.57 X 2.33 X 0.68 inches)
- Slide-out 5-row QWERTY keyboard
- 3.2 megapixel color camera with auto focus
Inside:
- Processor: Qualcomm® MSM7200A™, 528 MHz
- Operating System: Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional
- Connectivity: Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP for wireless stereo headsets, Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g, HTC ExtUSB™ (11-pin mini-USB 2.0, audio jack, and TV Out in one)
- G-sensor
