Business-focused devices seems to have fallen by the wayside of late in favour of 'pro-sumer' phones, designed to bring business functionality to consumer smartphones. But the HTC Pro2 takes things back to business basics, with business-centric features, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and an advanced speakerphone.

 

Style and handling for HTC Touch Pro2

The first thing to mention about the Touch Pro2 is its size – it's a chunky old handset. But it's  stylish, with a black and matt silver finish, and its weight feels sturdy and reassuring. The 3.6-inch touch-screen and an embedded large speaker for speakerphone, alongside the prominent 'HTC Touch Pro2' plate down the centre, make this look like a real business powerhouse of a phone.

HTC has made some improvements to its touch-screen on the HTC Touch Pro2, making it more accurate and responsive. But the pressure-sensitive resistive screen needs to be pressed as bit harder than we would like, and it was difficult to tell if our actions had been effective sometimes.

You can tilt the screen for viewing films and videos and typing without glare, or opt to slide the keyboard flat out. The Pro2's sliding system is smooth, in line with the excellent overall build quality of the phone.

 

Ease of use for HTC Touch Pro2

HTC's proprietary TouchFlo interface gives a touch-screen boost to Windows Mobile, and includes a customisable, scrollable list of functions. When you first switch on the Pro2, you are prompted to set up your email accounts and make phone settings. You have push-email support for Microsoft Exchange as well as for standalone Microsoft Outlook (not on the Exchange server), as well as support for most webmail accounts, although these are not push emails.

The Touch Pro2 was launched with Windows 6.1. However, a free upgrade will run the phone on Windows 6.5, one of the first phones to do so. One of the new features is a Windows key, which opens the programmes menu. Sadly, it's not the easy process we would have hoped for: the scrolling menu is non-customisable and goes on forever, so you need to remember where things are. Phone, text, email, web browser and calendar are sensibly close to the front, but after that, things get a bit confusing. Messenger is near to the calculator, Facebook is near the bottom – it's just not intuitive. We think it would have been vastly improved if HTC had included  several customisable home screens. As it is, you can use the Programs tab in TouchFlo to customise a most-used programs screen, which goes some way towards clearing the confusion.

One neat new feature is that your missed call, text message and email notifications pop up on lock screen, and you can be taken to each one simply by swiping. It's a shame that you just get the notification with no details. We would have liked to see caller ID or the subject of the email, for example, like you get on the Palm Pre.

There's a menu icon to take you directly to Windows Marketplace – this will feature on all Windows Mobile 6.5 phones. The marketplace is rather understocked at the moment – at the time of writing there were just 107 apps available – and at a minimum price of £3, pricier than both the Android Marketplace and Apple App Store.

 

Email for HTC Touch Pro2

Email is the HTC Touch Pro2's greatest strength. The full QWERTY keyboard, complete with number key line, has spacious tablet keys for easy typing. The full stop and comma keys are within easy reach, and direction keys make editing messages a breeze. Those with small hands may find it to be a bit wide, but the keys are as responsive as those on a laptop, with similar weight.

There's an dedicated button to take you straight through to your email and messaging homepage without having to return to the menu first. All you need to do is slide the out the keyboard, press the email button and type your message – the screen will automatically switch to landscape view.

The experience is somewhat marred by the lack of auto-correct. Except for capitalising the first letter of a new sentence, the rest of your text is left alone. Contractions aren't punctuated automatically and even the humble 'i' is left uncapitalised.

You also have the option of using the on-screen keyboard, which does have auto-correct, but unsurprisingly, it's not as good as the QWERTY. It's accurate, but you're slowed down by having to press quite hard to get a response, and a delay of up to half a second before your press registers. Typing at our normal speed resulted in missing out letters, and auto-correct then compounded the problem, leading to having to go back and make a lot of changes. Frustrating.

 

Web browsing for HTC Touch Pro2

Windows Mobile 6.5 brings the new Internet Explorer along, with a better-looking user interface and, at last, tabbed browsing. You can load full websites now, rather than having to rely on mobile-optimised version, thanks to a new JavaScript engine and support for full HTML. They do take some time to render, though – even if it looks like a website has loaded fully, try to move around the page too soon and you end up looking at a loading screen.

A new zoom bar is vastly better than having to tap boxes to zoom in and out, but it's neither as responsive nor as smooth as the multi-touch functionality on the iPhone 3GS or Palm Pre, for example.

The push-internet feature is a nice touch: it automatically downloads and saves four nominated web pages so you can access them even when you are out of range.

 

Speakerphone for HTC Touch Pro2

The Straight Talk speakerphone is one of the Touch Pro's most overtly business-focused features. Simply turn the phone face down to activate the speakerphone function at any time. It has two microphones and two speakers for maximum noise cancellation and audio boost. These both worked well, with little background noise and good clarity. Call quality is tinny, but that's the case with most speakerphones.

If you need to mute your ringing phone in a hurry without cutting the call, simply flip the phone over – it's a handy feature for when your phone rings at just the wrong moment.

 

Camera and GPS for HTC Touch Pro2

The camera is nothing special, and certainly not designed to be your main snapping device. It's three megapixels with the capacity to adjust white balance and brightness, and ISO up to 800, but there's no flash. As a result, pictures are only really any good if taken in daylight. Autofocus works well, producing clear pictures even with shaky hands, But zooming into a photo shows up over- sharpening, and low-light snaps are blurry with a green hue.

GPS is a real letdown for the HTC Touch Pro2. It gets an accurate location fix, but it takes a while to find it. Google maps took a frustrating two minutes to load and another two minutes to zoom in.

 

The verdict for HTC Touch Pro2

The HTC Touch Pro2 is great for emailing, with push-email to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, support for most web-based services, and an excellent keyboard for comfortable typing. The touch-screen doesn't match up to capacitive displays on the HTC Hero, for example, but it's much more responsive than its HTC Windows ancestors. The web experience, too, is not as smooth or responsive. TouchFlo makes the Touch Pro2 the best Windows touch-phone yet in terms of responsiveness, and the bundled stylus didn't get much use. Overall, this is the kind of easy-to-use Windows phone at which HTC excels, and Windows 6.5 brings some good new features.