Have a nice day.

Rating: 5/5

Superb business oriented Windows Mobile smart phone.

The HTC Touch Pro 2 is offered by all the major US carriers at this time. Some like Sprint have retained its international features so you can use CDMA and international protocols.

I’ve been using cellular phones since the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS)was introduced in 1983. With the enhancements provided by HTC atop Microsoft Windows Mobile v6.1, the Touch Pro 2 is an absolute delight for the businessperson. With one glaring exception, it can be used as a substitute for a laptop computer in many circumstances. The exception is the lack of mouse support in the Qualcomm Bluetooth stack. Bluetooth keyboards work fine, but mouse functions are not supported. In my eyes, this represents a major oversight which I hope will be rectified in future ROM revisions.

Aside from that, the HTC Touch Pro 2 represents the state of the art in smart phones. It has a gorgeous 3.6-inch TFT-LCD touch-sensitive screen with 480 X 800 WVGA resolution. The screen also tilts which makes airline tray or restaurant table movie watching, RSS feed reading and (where possible) web browsing a pleasure. It also makes working on business documents in Microsoft Mobile Office, DataViz or SoftMaker products a pleasure. There is a five-row, slide-out QWERTY keyboard that is the best I’ve ever had on a cell phone. While you can’t touch type, you can do a pretty good job of two finger pecking.

Some carriers, again like Sprint, offer the HTC Touch Pro 2 with a standard 3.5mm audio jack. What a pleasure to finally just be able to plug in a pair of ordinary headphones!The HTC Touch Pro 2 accepts microSDHC cards up to 16 GB. (I presume 32 GB is also supported.) You can put plenty of music and video on the card, have great audio and a truly luscious screen. I am really amazed at just how well movies look on that screen. You’ll be best served with a third party media viewer like the CorePlayer.

The design is very finger-friendly. Some functions, such as browsing with the included Opera browser are adapted to finger swipes for navigating on and between pages and sites. My personal preference, however, remains the stylus. The onscreen keyboard is the best I’ve ever worked on and works especially well with fingertips. You don’t have to be dead-on to type a character. The logic does a very good job of figuring out what character you intended to strike.

The CPU is the same Qualcomm MSM7200A 528 MHz used in the Touch Pro and other HTC cell phones. It gets the job done, but it is not the fastest processor on the block. The allotment of 512 MB ROM and 288 MB RAM is reasonably generous, but like money, you can never have enough.

The Touch Pro 2 measures 4.57 X 2.33 X 0.66 inches and weighs 6.3 ounces. I carry it in a shirt pocket and don’t find the size or weight to be a problem.

Bluetooth and WiFi work just fine on this unit.

Some carriers, again Sprint is an example, keep the GPS enabled. While Sprint has an optional paid navigation program, I use my Touch Pro 2 GPS with Google Maps and Microsoft Bing. I no longer use a separate GPS unit this is all I need.

Output volume is excellent and there is a novel conference phone feature built in. Put the unit on its face and the back microphones are started. Fidelity and noise cancellation are pretty good. It is a nice feature for those who use it.

The 3.2 megapixel camera is nothing spectacular. There are no hardware buttons for the camera and it is both slower and more inconvenient to use than one triggered by a hardware button.

There is TV output through an optional cable and a bunch of other features that some may find useful.

A 1500 mAh battery is standard and it will last through a day of strenuous usage. But overall, plan on charging this unit every day or two if you make much use of it. Buying a second battery or an external battery is a wise idea.

Overall, I have found performance to be excellent in every regard. Teamed with a Bluetooth keyboard, I can often leave my laptop at home. Web browsing is a delight with Opera, Skyfire or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Memory problems have been non-existent for me no matter how many applications I’ve launched. (I do continue the well established habit of invoking the Task Manager from time to time.) The reset button is under the back cover which is, in my opinion, a design error – but I haven’t had to use it much. When I need it, though, it is something of a pain. You have to remove the stylus first, then the back cover. It is not a pleasant task under any circumstance, especially when the lighting is low.

Do I like the HTC Touch Pro 2? You bet. I think it is the best smart phone I’ve ever used. It gets closer to the grail of the highly portable computer that has been envisioned since the 1970s. Yes, the pipeline is already filling with devices running the much faster AMD Snapdragon processor. HTC is about to launch a unit with Snapdragon and a 4.3 inch screen. I suspect that the next model of the Touch Pro will be launching little more than a year from now and I suspect I will be straining on my leash to get one.

In the meantime, the HTC Touch Pro 2 is a dream to work with. If they fix the Bluetooth stack to work with a mouse or if a third party follows through with its promise to release a replacement stack, the HTC Touch Pro 2 will truly be a hand-sized laptop replacement. It is quite the marvel and a delight to use.

Jerry

Rating: 2/5

I got the HTC touch pro from Sprint and I am definitely not happy with it. Not sure if its becos its running Windows Mobile, but its just not very intuitive and user friendly. There is no way to turn it on from the face of the phone and you need to do it by pressing it on the top which is not very convenient. The apps run very slowly and the touch screen operation is sometimes very frustrating – it does things that you didnt intend to do. The bluetooth operation is very flaky. I have also had problems of the phone locking up a few times and you have to reboot it. Do not expect the touch to be intuitive and precise like the iPhone, you will be disappointed. The most frustrating thing is, its very slow in responding when you are searching for a contact or typing something to find someone. I have also noticed that there is a delay while making or receiving a call – like you have to give it a few secs to respond. So, overall I am very unhappy with this device considering the price.

Rating: 5/5

I had envy when the Tilt was announced, and bought one this summer when it reached an affordable price on ebay. Then, two months after carrying the tilt around, a work colleague asked me if I wanted to buy his HTC Touch Pro for $150. He is a very knowledgeable cell phone person, so I accepted the offer, without realizing just how good this deal was until I got it home and started using it! Wow! This gem does everything an IT professional would ever want to do! I recharge it every other day, and I keep USB recharging accessories at work and at home, so if I ever get caught in a conversation or WiFi session that lasts more than two hours, then I simply plug it in at the next stop. Mine has the Raphael RRE 6.5 ROM loaded, and it is fast and stable. No regrets at all on this purchase.

I will keep this one until the HTC Touch Pro 2 (second generation Tilt) gets down to an affordable price. I love this phone.

Woody

I have been an avid user of Nokia N-Series phones for a while now, including the N95, N85, and most recently the N97. These phones have everything and the kitchen sink as far as specs and features go, and I had simply grown too accustomed to using them for just about everything in life. “Decent” camera with flash? Check. GPS turn-by-turn directions? Check. Organizer? Check. Personal e-mail? Check. Work e-mail and calendar sync? Check. Tethering to share its data connection while on the road? Check. Multitasking? Check. Music player, FM Tuner, Podcasting, Internet Radio? Check, Check, Check, Check. Then there are the more esoteric features, such as Nokia Sports Tracker (to record your route, speed, distance etc as you go jogging, biking, etc), TV-Out cable and Bluetooth keyboard support (to use it for basic Internet access from your living room), Speech Synthesis to read your messages and e-mail out loud while driving, and so on. I simply could not see myself “downgrading” to anything else.

I had also tried out a Sony Ericsson k850i in the mix, but despite the Xenon flash, I was unimpressed by the overall picture quality. It performed no better than my N95 as a camera phone, and was lacking in every other aspect. (No GPS, no WiFi, not very many useful applications, etc).

That was then, and this is now. I recently sent in my N97 for service (the camera had started malfunctioning – that’s another topic), and go the C905a merely as a “stop gap” in the mean time. Since this is also by far the most interesting phone AT&T have had in some time, I figured it was worth a new 2-year commitment, and that I would hang onto it as a “back up” phone. Also, I did know a thing or two about its features and capabilites — for instance I knew that it supports FM Radio, WiFi, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, and any standard/personal POP3/IMAP e-mail setup – but also that AT&T had disabled all of these features. So, the first thing I did once I got it was to “de-brand” the phone. I used the DaVinci tool for this, another one is WotanServer; or you can even do it for free with the “A2 Uploader” tool and a little bit more reading beforehand. While I was at it I got it unlocked to, so that I can use non-AT&T SIMs (e.g. get a local pre-paid card while traveling abroad to avoid the exorbitant roaming fees to AT&T).

I have been absolutely blown away by this phone! It may not have every single feature that the Nokias do – but pretty close. More to the point, Sony Ericsson pay a lot more attention to the small design and implementation details, and so things generally feel more polished and complete, less quirky and buggy compared to the Nokias. The main thing it is missing is a “Smartphone” operating system (like Symbian/S60 in the case of Nokia); other than that it is in many ways more capable than even many high-end smartphones. More on that later.

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The Best Cameraphone
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The main feature of the phone is the camera — and the C905a has the best camera of any phone on the market, IMHO. Especially for indoor/party pictures, it – quite literally – shines above the competition. There are only a handful of other phones available that have real Xenon flash: The Sony Ericsson k850i, the Nokia N82, the Motorola Zine ZN5, and the LG Renoir – but the C905a flash illuminates better than any of these. Also image quality is better overall – i.e. more optical resolution, better color reproduction, and so on.

The camera interface and features are also quite extensive. For instance, it supports face recognition, which if enabled will put a square around every face it detects in the viewfinder, and use these for autofocus. Or “Smile Shutter”, which keeps the picture from being taken until the identified subject actually smiles. The one thing it lacks is manual ISO control – though it does have several “scene modes”, and usually picks a good ISO setting on its own. (Sometimes a bit conservative/low, choosing instead to rely on the flash for illumination. The good news is that means less grainy pictures; the bad news is that in twilight settings where the subject is close to the camera, you’ll find that the strong flash causes a very short exposure time, where the background becomes too dark in the picture).

As far as video recording – well – that’s another story. While competitors – notably Nokia – have standardized on VGA resolution (640×480 pixels) at 30 frames per second ever since the N95, Sony Ericsson STILL stick to their QVGA (320×240) resolution video mode. Well – at least – each pixel seems to count a bit more now than it did with the k850i; in terms of “real” (optical) resolution I’d say videos from this phone may actually be – just about – comparable to those from the N95/N96/N85/N97.

UPDATE: I compared the cameras of the C905a with the Nokia N97 (now back from repair). As it turns out, not only do the C905a’s still pictures have better optical resolution, particularly in low light conditions, but it turns out that zooming in on subjects while recording video is handled much better as well. The C905a’s zoom zooming operation is smoother, and subjects remain relatively sharp up to a factor of 3x-4x or so, whereas the N97’s zoom operates in discrete steps (“choppy” zooming), and the videos immediately become more grainy as you zoom in. It may simply be that the C905a features optical zooming in video recording mode, while the N97 is all digital zoom. Finally, the zooming range of the C905a is much larger (allows you to zoom in much further), though I would actually have preferred the option to limit that to about 3x/4x in order to retain video quality.

I don’t have any knowledge about other phones’ performance in this area; however if you are interested in a good camera that also has good video recording capabilities, you may wish to check out the Samsung OmniaHD (i8910). This is another 8MP camera phone that supports HD video recording (720p), and which otherwise has an operating system and feature set very similar to the Nokia N97. (But beware that it lacks support for one of the 3G bands that AT&T use, so your 3G coverage will be more limited).

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The Smartest “Dumbphone”
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Once debranded, the C905a has virtually all the features and capabilities that you would expect from ANY phone, smart or not:

- GPS, with included applications for turn-by-turn directions (WayFinder; subscription required), Google Maps, and location tagging of pictures taken by the camera. The GPS works pretty well: Where some of my Nokia phones and in particular the N97 would constantly lose and re-gain the GPS fix, and as a result Nokia Maps would constantly be recalculating directions and getting things completely mixed up, the C905a with WayFinder has been rock solid. It may not be quite as full-featured; for instance I don’t see a place to change the default UK English voice, endearing as she is; nor does there seem to be a way to store maps/data directly on your device, so you will depend on a data plan. Overall I am very happy with the GPS though.

- Wireless LAN (WiFi). Unlike the Nokias, when you setup a WLAN access point you can also chose to share your phone’s filesystem over the network, as if it were a Windows file server.

- Bluetooth with nearly every profile in existence. HSP/HFP for handsfree calling (obviously), A2DP/AVRCP for stereo audio streaming/control, DUN/PAN for internet connection tethering, GOEP/OBEX (so you can send/receive files, Contacts/vCards, browse the phone’s filesystem, etc), PBAP/SP (to transfer/synchronize your contacts with compatible devices such as your car stereo). One thing that’s missing compared to the Nokias is support for a Bluetooth keyboard – but then again, that’s pretty esoteric anyway.

- E-mail reader with support for standard IMAP/POP3 setups as well as Microsoft Exchange. It is nicely done – much more polished and userfriendly than the Symbian/S60 reader in Nokia smartphones, and in some ways works better too. For instance, the only way to get the S60 reader to persistently update your mailbox without having to keep the Messaging application open is to set it to poll at specified intervals; but in this case it insists on indexing ALL e-mails in your inbox. Since I have about 9000 messages in my Inbox, it would simply not work (it would become slow and eventually crash). Not so with the C905a – it autodetects IMAP IDLE support on my mail server, and consequently gives me “push” mail (without the need for any third party service such as Nokia Messaging, BlackBerry Connect or MobileMe). More to the point, it just works — right out of the box. NOTE: To set up a Microsoft Exchange account via Outlook Web Access, you need to go into Settings -> Connectivity (the right-most tab) -> Synchronization.

- There is a built-in IM application, which supports the standard Open Mobile Alliance IMPS protocol. In the branded version, there are predefined settings for MSN, AIM and Yahoo! (using AT&T’s IM service). Unfortunately, after debranding, these are not available; however you can bring them back by uploading a customization file into the phone’s filesystem via “A2 Uploader” or similar. More info in the comments. Alternatively, you may be able to use one of the several open IMPS gateways that exist – a free one is MobJab

Rating: 5/5

1. MicroSD slot means you have virtually unlimited space for files, and it is trivial to exchange files with any computer, not just one on which you have installed a files app.
2. Speed and multitasking means you can do things like listen to music, edit documents and send emails simultaneously and at the same time.
3. Superb Office document management capabilities. ‘Nuff said.
4. Higher-res screen means documents like Excel spreadsheets are much more practical, but even Word or PDF files are much more readable and easier on the eyes.
5. Windows home page (I turned off FLO) means you can see all tasks, calendar, to-dos, etc. on one home page
6. Citrix client compatibility meant for me I could control my office desktop from my phone.
7. Ah, that lovely keyboard. Besides being surer and faster, when you pull it out to type, you can still see the entire screen for surfing. This provides a much larger effective screen for anything which involves text.

Downside: Can’t make it iFart

I’ve owned both. I changed carriers and currently have an iPhone.