Digital Trends

HTC Touch Pro December 3rd, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Features & Design

For those who are already familiar with the slim HTC Touch Diamond, the design of the Touch Pro will look strikingly similar. It’s really the same phone, with an extra quarter inch of depth tacked on to make room for the keyboard within. That brings it up to a rather hefty .71 inches deep, which is reasonable, but combined with the phone’s weight of 165 grams, makes it feel rather brickish.

Though there’s no “diamond” in the name, the Pro borrows all the same jewel-inspired styling cues as its little brother, including the cut-gemstone pattern embossed in the plastic on its back shell, chamfered edges, and a satin metal triangle around the camera lens (though this version has an extra hole for the LED flash). The screen and lower button panel have also both been given a mirror-like sheen.

Like the other phones in HTC’s Touch line, almost all interaction occurs through its 2.8-inch touch screen or the handful of buttons scattered around the rest of the outside shell. These include a home and back button on the face, along with start/end call buttons, and a discrete directional pad in the center. We liked how the lack of raised edges on this pad contributed to a clutter-free look, but functionally it also makes the pad much more difficult to use. On its edges, the Pro has a power button up top, volume rockers on the side, and a stylus squirreled away in the lower-right bottom. The QWERTY keyboard appears by sliding the screen away to the right.

Other features include a fairly generous 4GB of internal storage (but with no room for expansion), a 3.2-megapixel camera, a built-in FM radio, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and media player.

Accessories

Besides the phone itself, HTC’s retail Touch Pro package includes a fairly standard bundle of accessories. This includes an HTC ExtUSB cable for charging and connecting to a PC, a pair of headphones with the same jack, and a wall charger that terminates in a female USB jack for use with the cable. 

Keyboard

The Touch Pro’s defining feature – its full QWERTY keyboard – is one of the best examples we’ve seen built into a handset to date. For starters, the sliding action to reveal it feels exceptionally firm, and we have no qualms about opening it and closing it all day without breakage, or even, in a moment of clumsiness, dropping it that way. HTC has also done an outstanding job opening up space for the keyboard, since the shelf revealed by sliding the keyboard away is over an inch and a half wide, with the keys occupying most of it. They keys have also been lightly bubbled out to make them easier to distinguish from one another, and each has a defined “clicky” feedback that lets you know you’ve pressed it. These are keys not nubs or little eraserheads. Overall, the typing experience felt extremely comfortable, and we’re confident that professionals will have no problem typing out e-mails and SMS messages all day long after a short adjustment period, as with any new phone.

Display

The display on the Pro (identical to that on the Diamond) is among the finest we’ve ever seen on a mobile handset. HTC has managed to squeeze a full 640 x 480 VGA display into a space just 2.8 inches across, giving it an extremely fine dot pitch (a measure of how close together the pixels are spaced) that makes text and images extraordinarily smooth looking – as if printed on the page of a magazine. Add in a powerful backlight, vibrant colors, and you’re looking at one of the best screens in the business, though it is somewhat prone to fingerprints like all large touch screens.

Image Courtesy of HTC