In a much shorter set of prose, having given a long thought trail on my experiences with the Pre, I should also mention my thoughts about my other Sprint phone, the HTC Touch Pro. A WinMo phone is easier for me to cover because there are fewer things I find wrong with them. I am certain that that particular philosophical perspective on mobile technology is going to get me castigated on the interwebs. I am sure that I am in the minority when it comes to smartphones I approve of. But I insist on my work-week smartphone being for work and not for play.

Most of these comments are based on my write-ups on the Palm Pre. In order to gather some of the context from the somewhat choppy **** you may need to briefly skim one or two of those posts. Sorry.

Keyboard: the HTC TouchPro has an excellent hardware keyboard. While Blackberry keyboards used to be the bees knees for me, the recent ergonomic change in the Blackberry Curve series has made those keyboards more narrow, making it tougher for my fat fingers to fly across the buttons. The Pro's keyboard is provided in a landscape orientation much more suited to my large hams. Additionally the five-row layout means having to hit the shift and Fn keys less. It even has a Tab key that acts just like a normal PC's keyboard would, jumping you to the next field of a form in a web-browser.

Battery life is bad. My TouchPro and my Pre are currently battling it out for the worst battery life of them all. I have purchased expanded capacity batteries for the Pro just like I have for the Pre. The Pro's were bulkier than the stock battery and and so came with a custom battery cover to replace the stock cover. This also means that rubberized protective skins for the Pro will not fit when the expanded battery is installed. However, I am still able to use the horizontal leather holster I bought for its predecessor, an AT&T Tilt.

I mentioned in my Palm Pre review about why I insist on a WinMo phone for my work-day life. One of the reasons is that I can write on it, an absolute must in a work-day life that frequently has me on the move, away from my desk phone and TabletPC, and able to speak to some of my guys for only seconds at a time. Another reason is that, good or bad, I need tight integration with MS Office products, and preferably out of the gate, without me having to download third party apps or monkey with the phone. Because I am also a TabletPC user, that means I need integration with MS OneNote, which is only offered on WinMo phones.

The speakers on the HTC Touch Pro are adequate. I would not hold a stand-up teleconference on one like I used to be able to do on my Blackberry 8700c, but I do not have to put the speaker right next to my hear if someone is on speakerphone like I do with the iPhone. I have not used the Pro for prolonged music-playback. I have watched some videos that I recorded on my point-and-shoot camera in an environment without a lot of ambient noise and the volume levels were fine. If you are going to do a lot of media on the TouchPro, synchronization with Windows Media Player is as clean as it has ever been so your needs should be well served.

Accessories for the TouchPro are not as abundant as they were for the Tilt. There is only one case I have found for a phone fitted out with an extended battery, and it is not one that I would use. Similarly, I have only found one skin for it other than the one I was able to pick up right in the Sprint store. There is not even a variant of the poorly designed cradle that I was able to find for the Pre available for the TouchPro. There might be one or two accessories that I have missed because there are a lot of variants of the TouchPro, and some have slightly different form factors when it comes to their edges and such. So I have only searched specifically for Sprint TouchPro accessories. I have fitted myself out with two extended batteries and two regular batteries and the car charger. I am travelling less these days, so the time when I needed every cell phone accessory under the sun may have passed and this set of gear should be enough.

I am not as fond of the Windows Mobile Device Center (deployed as part of Win Vista and Win7) as I used to be of Active Sync (WinXP and earlier). WMDC tends to do things in a more automated fashion and reduces your level of fine control. I had trouble setting up the Pro on my HP 2730p, which runs Windows Vista Business because it insisted on trying to sync to everything the first time around. This despite the fact that I configured the phone and PC to only sync Tasks and Files. Additionally, configuring which machine wins in the event of a PIM file conflict is outside the boundaries of completely manual control, which makes a little nervous each time I connect the TouchPro to my TabletPC.

The TouchPro is still centered predominantly around syncing the device to a local PC. However, both Google and Microsoft seem to have found middle ground in not restricting WinMo 6.1 phones to that regime. In all honesty, I could get by with never connecting my TouchPro to a PC. Most of the time that I do it is to transfer pictures off of the phone, or to sync the numbers of memos that I keep in MS Word format on the phone.

There are Evernote and Twitter apps for Windows Mobile phones that I use on the TouchPro, so I am able to keep my posts on my micro-blog and my thoughts as collected in my Evernote notebook accessible at all times. Because most of my memos these days are done in MS Word, I am able to store them on my NAS and work with them from any PC. Most of these docs are the non-cloud data items that I retain within my local control as I discussed in the Pre review (part III).

As far as the GUI, this is where the most people will likely have gripes with my approval of the Windows Mobile 6.1 Top End, and HTC's TouchFlo layer that it deploys on top of it. There are tons of ways to configure your Program access icons on the TouchPro, so I do not have the problem that I have with the Pre and the fact that it only presents 4 app icons on the very top layer that is presented to the operator.

I have no problem clearing alerts on the TouchPro. I will admit that there are times that the interface seems to lock up, or at least not respond to input via the touch-screen. But I have experienced mobile phone OS lockups since I got my first Blackberry. I can not say that they are any more frequent on the TouchPro. In fact, I would have to evaluate that it happens less frequently on the pro than it does on the Pre or the iPhone.

One of my pet peeves is not being able to configure a preferred filter in my contacts list so that it will always come up displaying my Personal contacts or some other filter choice. But at least it has filters, unlike the Pre. I will admittedly declare that the iPhone has the best implementation of this on the market. However, I do not have as low an opinion of the Contacts app on the TouchPro as I do of the Pre because when you scroll down on the TouchPro, it jumps letters of the alphabet the same way an iPod click-wheel does when you scroll quickly. So moving through letters of the alphabet is quicker and has a more visible indicator when I am driving. Also, you can scroll the Contacts on a TouchPro by just clicking down on the hardware center-wheel. This is easier to do while driving and one-handed than flicking the screen on the Pre. Also, the TouchPro has a front-end that allows you to designate favorites and have their picture as a big button you can push on the touch-screen to dial.

I have also lost the partnership between the phone and Google on a couple of occasions, just as I have seen once on the Palm Pre. However, this has occurred in the course of changing my login data on my Google account, and then once when setting the phone up to sync with a different PC. Another annoyance of contacts and cloud computing with the TouchPro, though, is that Outlook categories for Contacts and type designations in Google Contacts do not necessarily translate one-for-one. I am still incrementally monkeying around with a few contacts each day to get the Contacts to filter on the right categories, but it is proving a losing battle.

Another thumbs up for the TouchPro and Sprints 3G network connectivity. Bravo.

I have experienced no other incompatibilities between the TouchPro and Google than the aforementioned categorization of Contacts and the note in the Palm Pre review about the fact that appointments do not sync if I have not already accepted them on my desktop. Keep in mind that I am forwarding the appointments as an email, and have my GMail account set up to automatically place emailed appointments into my calendar. This is because the only way to add an appointment to your Google Calendar directly is to accept the invitation. Google Calendar has no way to accept an appointment and not send a reply acknowledgement; the reply ack always goes. In my case, this would result in an ack going from my personal email account to a work contact. So I have to use the work-around that works.

On a positive note, altering an appointment in Google Calendar moves it in Windows Mobile. Dragging an appointment in WinMo 6.1 also synchronizes with Google Calendar. So despite the Calendar disconnects that I have between the Pre and Google, I can at least keep the TouchPro and Google in sync. Of course, Windows can also make a zero-time appoinment, so I do not have an issue with this...as I do in the Palm Pre.

Start-up time on the TouchPro is similar to the boot time of the AT&T Tilt, which is not great, but was faster than my old iPhone and seems like the Flash in comparison to the Palm Pre. Shutdown time is all of 5 seconds; the most impressive I have seen in any smartphone, beating even my Blackberry experiences.

The only apps I have needed to download for the TouchPro were the Twitter (CeTwit) and Evernote apps. Other than that, everything that I needed was pre-baked into the OS. My list of pre-installed apps that see everyday use?:

1. Calculator
2. Windows Live Search
3. Notes
4. Opera Web Browser
5. Word Mobile
6. Excel Mobile
7. MS OneNote Mobile
8. the Camera

Note that both here and in my discussion of the Pre, I do not count the Calendar, Contacts, or email as apps that are worth any note. I expect these apps to be implemented well on any smartphone and to not be broken. I will gig a phone for doing them poorly, but no phone gets extra credit for doing them well. This is expected of any smartphone.

The TouchPro's Outlook Notes will sync with MS Outlook and will do so using WMDC in Vista. However, I do not give the TouchPro a by on this one when the mobile OS, handset makers, and the desktop OS' post-Vista are gooned up on this issue. Whether or not Outlook Notes on a WinMo phone will work or not is a matter of full integration across the three culprits just mentioned. I have seen WinMo phones that will sync with Outlook Notes, and some that will not. What is really aggravating is that it is not written on the box anywhere. I have therefore been forced to not rely on Outlook Notes anymore, and to move my most personal of memos to MS Word format. This buys more ready access to those docs across multiple phones and PCs, but it still does not excuse this point of broken integration. I should not have been forced to create this work-around. Notes sync should work on every WinMo smartphone regardless of carrier and in every instance of a Windows OS that supports the device.

If you read any of my articles from last year during my transition from the iPhone to the AT&T Tilt, you will know that I am tickled pink by the Windows Mobile OS and the advantages I perceive that it offers over other Mobile Phone OS'. The Tilt was a solid phone, but it had its shortcomings. The TouchPro improves on the Tilt in just about every way when observed under conditions of long-term use. I am hoping that MicroSoft's new strategy to get their mobile phone platforms to compete well in the consumer market space does not lead to a dumbing down of the features that make their OS great for business use. Hopefully, the two needs can exist at the same time. I went away from the WinCe/PocketPC/Windows Mobile platform once. These devices fit my needs well enough now that I would not consider going to something else. Unless MS stops servicing my needs.
- Vr/Zeux