HTC Touch Pro with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional

To start, I have a tip. By default, the color scheme used on the Touch Pro is HTC Black. This makes the top and bottom bar a flat black color, which can give the illusion of a smaller screen because they can blend in with the device itself.

I found that changing the color to something other than HTC Black made the screen seem a little bit bigger by making the top and bottom border stand out more.

     This is the first screen of TouchFLO 3D. There are ten icons along the bottom that represent a new tab. You can access these tabs by running your finger along the bottom and landing on an icon, by tapping on an icon directly, or by sweeping your finger across the center of the screen screen horizontally.

     In the Home tab, we get to see current time in a gorgeous, animated clock. We also see the date, state of missed calls (which links to call history), plus next appointment. If you swipe your finger downwards where the arrow is, the clock will shrink to a smaller one so that you can see more appointments.

     Over on the next tab, we have favorite people, which lets you flip through pictures of your favorite contacts by swiping your finger up and down, kind of like coverflow. Or, to flip through contacts, you can run your finger along the pictures on the right side of this screen.

     A tip: if you add a contact and have a picture associated with the contact through Outlook, the picture will be blurry that is used in this tab. Instead, load the original picture (shrunken to 256x256) on your device, then press the Menu button on the new contact, and choose Change Picture, and navigate to the picture. Do this also for Music.

     In the next tab, we have a window into our SMS. From here, you can swipe your finger up and down to cycle through the most recent text messages. You can open up the reply screen by tapping the message, or start a new one by tapping the button in the upper right.

     The next tab is Mail, which, like the previous tab, lets you flip through your messages in this elegant-looking envelope-preview screen. It will work with multiple accounts, and for each new account, there will be a new envelope on the right side. Unfortunately, this tab doesn't work with sub folders. All of my email goes into sub folders, not the inbox, so this tab is worthless to me.

On the next tab we have a link to Opera if you tap the big picture of the Earth. Flicking your finger down will cycle through your favorites.

     When in the Photos and Videos tab, you can flip through pictures that are in your My Pictures folder in a stunning animated display. You flick your finger upwards to get to the next picture. What's great is that this mini gallery is updated immediately when you add new images to the My Pictures folder. From here you can also access the camera, video camera, view the album, or go into slideshow mode.

     As is the case on earlier HTC Touch devices, the album is visually pleasing and finger-friendly. When you open up a picture, you can make a circle on an area that you want to zoom in on, pan the picture around with your finger, and flick left or right to move forward or backwards.

The next tab is the music tab, which scans your device for music. If your albums have album art, you will see them all displayed here, and you can flip through the covers like cover flow.

This is the music application which is consistent with the TouchFLO 3D theme. Well done.

     Next up we have the weather tab. You can have weather for multiple cities, and you cycle between them by flicking your finger up or down. The animation for the weather is gorgeous. When it rains, a windshield wiper comes across the screen to remove water droplets. Nice!

And we also get a 5-day forecast, and if you hit More, Opera Mobile will take you to the AccuWeather page for your city.

This is the Settings tab which gives you access to some settings.

Clicking on Sound will let you change the profile of the phone easily.

And the program list is n ice iconic-based grid that you can add your own programs to. If we hit All Programs...

...we get this finger-friendly program list that is much more attractive than the Windows Mobile program menu.

Sadly, this is how TouchFLO 3D looks in landscape when you flip out the keyboard. There is no TouchFLO 3D! It's just a row of 8 icons. That's silly.

SYSTEM SOFTWARE

This is what happens when someone calls you. If the phone is face up when the call comes through, turning it face down will mute the ringer. Like the Palm Treos, you can ignore the call with a text message.

And this is what the in-call screen looks like. As mentioned, removing the stylus during a call launches the notes application to associate a note to a call in Call History. I'd like to disable this feature. I never make notes during a call.

And speaking of Call History, here it is. Notice where it says "Matt" there is a picture of a note, indicating that I've written something during the call.

Everything is larger and finger-friendly on the Touch Pro. Pressing the volume up/down button on the side of the phone brings up this slider for the volume. This is another quick way to change the profile of the phone.

     Using your big finger to tap on a small icon in the system notification area may be difficult, so by default, you'll get this enlarged menu when you tap anywhere on the top bar. Yes, it adds an extra step to simple things like checking WiFi or Battery status, but I found it useful. You can turn off this feature if it bugs you.

     HTC's task manager is a great application that lets you quickly close programs that are taking up program memory. Using the wrench, you can set programs to actually close, rather than hibernate, when you hit the X. This feature has been in all HTC devices for a while now.

If you click the Call Start button while in landscape, this is what you get. I like the well-sized dial pad which uses T9 to find relevant matches.

I want to emphasize that all menus throughout the Touch Pro are larger than you would find on other devices to make them finger-friendly.

Here is the Start Menu, which has larger entries separated by dots. Office Mobile 2007 is included. Also, you'll see the Pocket IE is hiding in the Start menu; it is not present in Programs.

Here is the first part of the Start menu. You can read PDF files with Adobe Reader LE. Audio Booster provides an equalizer for the audio, and only works if you've got headphones (wired or wireless) plugged in.

The radio reception was not great indoors, but pretty good outdoors.

The Comm Manager is a beautifully skinned in HTC green, white and black.

Going down the list we have a printing utility, an MP3 trimmer (perfect for making ring tones), Opera, and an RSS reader...

Here is the printing utility, which I didn't work much with.

The MP3 trimmer program let me, in about 2 minutes, take a segment from one of my favorite songs, and set it as my ring tone. Nice!

RSS Hub is a simple RSS reader that let me view the pocketnow.com feed.

Opera Mobile 9.5 brings desktop-class browsing to the Touch Pro. All menu items are finger-friendly. That said, I think that Opera still needs some work. At times I found it to be very slow and sometimes buggy.

The settings are simple and easy to use with a finger in Opera Mobile.

     The default mode of Opera makes the window go to full screen. From here, you can double-tap a column to bring it in closer. Then you can move your finger around to pan, or double tap to zoom back out. Rubbing your finger in circular motions on the D-Pad will also zoom in and out.

     Continuing down the list we have a program for streaming media, a Voice Speed Dial application (where is Microsoft Voice Command?), a program to snap pictures of business cards and convert to text, and the YouTube application.

The custom-made YouTube app is beautiful, simple, and well-done. Unfortunately, this application does not render in landscape when you slide open the keyboard. What's with that?

And the app can utilize YouTube's new "high quality" setting now available on most videos. Streaming high quality videos on the Touch Pro was a great experience - the videos were super-crisp on the VGA screen.

This is Teeter. Holding the Touch Pro parallel to the ground, you tilt the phone to get the metal ball into the green hole. It would be nice if there were other games like this included.

     There are three very well-done keyboards on the Touch Pro, should you have a need to use it in portrait without the slide-out keyboard. This is the full QWERTY. All keyboards have great spell correction and word completion.

This is the T9-style keyboard.

And this is the SureType keyboard.

Click on to the next page as we cover Settings and talk about picture quality on the Touch Pro.