HTC Touch Pro Review

I was not impressed with the HTC Touch Pro.

About two months ago I decided to switch wireless phone carriers and get myself a new phone. At the time I was with T-Mobile and had the HTC Dream; known more commonly as the T-Moblie G1. My decision to switch from T-Mobile stemmed mostly from the fact that their coverage in Southern Utah isn’t terribly good, as well as the fact that they have absolutely no 3G coverage anywhere here in Utah.

My experience with the G1 was good overall. In my opinion the phone did feel a bit klunky and as if it were rushed to market simply to get an Android phone out there as soon as possible. However, most of the little quirks that I disliked about the phone – the lack of a virtual keyboard, for instance – were corrected over time with software updates.

Because of my generally positive experience with the G1, and the fact that I absolutely love the phone’s design, I decided to give another HTC product a shot – the Touch Pro. It has everything that the G1 has, physically anyway. The slide out full QWERTY keyboard, a large touch-sensetive LCD display, camera, video recording capabilities, GPS, 3G connectivity, excellent web browsing (as good an experience as you can expect from a phone) etc, are all things that I like.

The choice of carrier was easy. Verizon Wireless has the best coverage down here in St. George and the surrounding rural areas, as well as the fact that most of my colleauges, friends, and family with them. The only real choice was the phone itself. By day I am a network administrator for one of the largest marketing firms in town. By night I own and operate a small consulting/computer repair firm, and on top of all that also operate my network of websites. As such, I need a phone that will act as a task manager, scheduler, storage device, MP3 player, and obviously still be able to make quality calls. I browsed through the various phone choices available to me and was extremely pleased to come across the Touch Pro as it does all of these things in the exact form factor that I like (I positively love full QWERTY slide-out keyboards. Typing is so much easier on them).

So – I made my purchase and gleefully took my shiny new phone home. Right off the bat I carefully trimmed a screen protector and applied it to keep my display safe. Courtesy of owning previous Windows Mobile devices before (A Dell Axim X3, for instance) I was able to set up ActiveSync to connect and sync with my gMail contacts and calendar right off the bat. This alone made my entire evening; no spending one and a half hours manually entering contacts for this cowboy! It was also a trivial matter to get the Windows Mobile Device Center for Vista software installed and the phone setup to sync with Outlook on both my desktop and my laptop. In fact, I was able to set it up to sync via bluetooth with my laptop so that even plugging in a USB cable wasn’t required!

Suffice it to say, that initially at least, I was very pleased. Unfortunately, the honeymoon period was quite short lived.

The HTC Touch Pro was awfully slow.

It didn’t take too long before I noticed the HTC Touch Pro’s largest and most fatal flaw – its llllaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggg. This fully featured and might I add quite expensive smart phone is SLOW. AS. HELL. Doing trivial things, such as simply sliding out the keyboard would cause it to hang for a while as it though about realigning the display to the landscape format. Switching between running apps would take several seconds. Trying to type a text message is infuriating because not only does it take a few seconds for each sub-menu to appear once you select ‘New’ within the messaging app, but once you’re finally into the message and start to type then at least half of the time no text will appear until you’re halfway done composing whatever it is you’re going to send – after which the cursor comes flying across the screen with all of the letters chasing it. Of course, if you’ve made any typos then you now have to either manually scroll back to correct it, or you have to pull out the stylus to carefully select where you’d like the cursor to be.

Messaging isn’t the only thing that is frustrating with this otherwise promising piece of hardware. Phone calls are nearly impossible to manage with it as well. Because of the phone’s incredible lack of speed, it takes on average at least 5 seconds before the “answer” option is available to you once the phone starts ringing. This is in addition to the fact that once the phone realizes that there is an incoming call it locks up the current app. So not only are you not able to answer the call until the phone decides to display the option to do so, but you can’t even keep doing whatever it was you happened to be doing at the time of the incoming call. I could go on about the phone’s 8086-style slowness, but there are so many examples of this P.O.S. lagging out or completely locking up that I’d have carpal tunnel by the time I got done writing them all.

What was that? You thought that I was done? Nope. The phone’s other absolutely fatal flaw is the volume of the handset speaker. Unless you’re in an absolutely silent area then you’re not going to be able to hear what the person on the other side of the call is saying. I’m a guy, so I definitely can’t say that I’m a great listener. That said, I also cannot say that I am hard of hearing. With that in mind, then you should have a good idea of just how quite this phone is with the volume all the way up. The only way that I can use it without either having my headset on, or connecting it to the uConnect system in my car, is to turn on the speaker phone. Not only is it annoying to have to turn that on every time I get a call without a headset in tow, but the godforsaken laggyness causes problems here too.

Example: The phone rings, and once it finally decides to display the option to answer, you do so. After this, you can start talking – but good luck hearing the person on the other side. During this time the phone is now slowly thinking about showing the in-call options that it should. Once it does this, you have to select the menu where the speakerphone option resides. Another couple of seconds later that menu eventually shows, and then you can turn the speakerphone on. Because of the amount of time this takes – paired to the fact that I probably won’t be able to hear, much less understand them until the speakerphone is turned on I usually answer the phone and then wait for a second or two before giving my greeting. This buys me a little time to wait for the phone to become responsive and then get into the menu needed. Some of the time, if it’s being particularly slow for instance, I will give a somewhat longer salutation; I basically try to drag it out long enough to where I can get the speakerphone turned on that way I don’t have to have them repeat their last several sentences because they were blabbering on before I was able to hear anything.

I fully expected to come into this review blasting HTC for not putting a decent processor into the Touch Pro. Imagine my surprise when I learned that not only does the Touch Pro have the exact same processor as the very responsive HTC Dream, but it also has MORE MEMORY! At this point it would only be natural to place all of the blame on Windows Mobile, but I don’t feel it fair to do so. Windows Mobile is inherently a bit more laggy than other phone OSes. This is common knowlege (It’s called “The infamous Windows Mobile lag” for a reason). Because of this, HTC should have crammed a much faster CPU into this particular phone in order to compensate for it.

All of you must also keep in mind that I have, in fact, done my due diligence. I’ve used the performance tuning utilities recommended by my friend Eric over at IsYouGeekedUp.com. I’ve also flashed custom ROMs onto it, the Psyki ROM from PPCGeeks being my favorite. MightyROM is also a good one. I’ve also done hard resets, made a point to keep my running tasks at a minimum, etc. None of this helped enough to make the phone worth keeping, let alone recommending to anyone.

If I used any sort of rating system on this site then I’d give this doozy 1 out of 5 stars. Technically, yes, the phone works. Yes there are many cool features included with it that work as well. But with the phone being so slow as to make it unusable coupled with the crippling volume problem, I would never recommend it to anyone for any reason. There are plenty of other phones out there that will not only do everything that this phone does, but will do it well (and quickly!). Personally, I’m going to switch to the Blackberry Tour just as soon as I can offload this piece of garbage on eBay.

PROs: I’m sure that I’ll be able to sell it on eBay.

CONs: SLOWEST AND MOST QUIET PHONE I HAVE EVER USED. Lag makes phone nearly unusable.

Other Thoughts: Blackberry Tour, here I come!