ALAS, I actually got the Sprint HTC Touch Pro phone. So here’s my attempt at a brief review, first timer;



So far, the phone is very sleek, very stylish as far as looks and hardware goes as you can see. As you can also see in one of the images, it comes with all of your standard pieces, charger, USB to plug into the brick charger or to your PC. You got your phone’s earphones as well just in case you don’t like blue tooth for whatever reason, the battery pack, a 1gb micro SD card, the phone’s manual, another piece that has mini USB ports on it and what appears to be a headphone jack or a TV out jack, and lastly, the carrying case. The carrying case in my opinion is down right ugly, however I’ve been using it anyway just to carry it, not to snap on to my belt or anything, but just to carry it around so it doesn’t get scratched up in all of it’s sexiness. The phone also comes with a magnetic stylus hidden within the phone and also a spare one in case you lose it or break it some how. They also provide you one screen protecting sheet that sticks right on easily and doesn’t provide any interference for the touch screen, thank the lords for that one.
Regarding the hardware, the on board RAM handles a lot at once thus far. The biggest concern that people had as I recall reading across forums is the battery life and the heat of the phone and also the phone’s hearing speaker. Much like any powerful device, the battery life always sucks. Makes you wish these companies would just dish out their ultimate batteries, but it’d probably be way too costly and less profiting for themselves. I’ve yet to heavily use the phone, but the battery does not seem to be too bad…yet. Future updates whether through an individual or the company themselves could help improve the battery life, and plain old just how you manage your phone’s options with whats running, or what’s turned on–also expect extended batteries with higher MAH power in the future from the company or 3rd parties. As for the heating issue, the phone does get hot, but it’s pretty bearable in my opinion and I’m sure it’s possible to be fixed in the future with updates. I’ve no such problems with the hearing piece myself, so I don’t know what everyone is talking about, works fine for me. There was also a size issue people had, but I’m a big guy and this phone’s pretty small in my hands, so I’ve no complaints there, it’s pretty sleek.

The phone itself is pretty damned smooth, I noticed some lag from time to time depending on what I’m running or doing on the phone. But the touch VGA screen is very clear and very nice. Running Windows Mobile 6.1 with HTC’s TOUCHFLO 3-D interface makes the Windows Mobile experience a lot smoother. Some applications to note that comes with the phone, your basic Sprint applications like Navigator, SprintTV, the fancy looking weather option, there’s an OZ Instant Messenger that includes AIM/YAHOO/MSN. The web browsing experience with Opera 9.5 works a lot more nicely than anything I’ve ever used before, besides the iPhone’s Safari web browser, but I’d say it’s close to it. There’s more applications included, but I won’t get into that, ask otherwise if interested. The phone’s accelerometer makes it nice for when you want a page view or landscape view by flipping the phone sidewards just like the iPhone’s. Since this is a Windows Mobile phone, you can find all sorts of other applications on the net–wish they’d hurry up with Windows 7 and hopefully put together an application store to bundle up every application in one specific area.

There’s two ways to type on this thing, you have the touch screen keyboard which is pretty useful and easy to use, I’ve not had much problems with it despite my big hands and steely fingers. If the touch screen just ain’t your thing, then this is why they even released this phone because of it’s full qwerty 5 row pull out physical keyboard. I’m not used to the wide type of keyboards yet, but it’s easy enough to use and just takes some time in getting used to before you’re a typing master. It’s also good to note that if and when you pull out the keyboard, it’ll switch to landscape mode and have a simplistic list of icons for you to choose from instead of the Touch Flo 3-D interface. The phone also has a bunch of hard keys on the bottom of the touch screen, your home button, back button, call button, end call button, and a 4 way D-pad in the middle of all of that. The D pad’s inner circle also acts as another button for entering things. the circle D-pad is also a spin wheel, like the iPod’s where you can make a circular motion around either way to say, zoom in and out of web pages or photo’s with ease, very nice option.
Next up is the phone’s camera, it comes equipped with a 3.2 MP camera, which is very nice, takes pretty good stills and I’ll try to upload one before I get done writing this just to show it off. The video option doesn’t seem like much, I haven’t played around with it and have yet to transfer it to a computer to see how well it fairs out, but I never expect much from phone video recording, I’ll explore it more in time. The camera/photo album interface is pretty nifty, you can have it moved in a timed manner for a slide show or simply browse through them by stroking the screen in that direction. Here is an image I just took using the phone and re-sized;

All in all, it’s probably the best cellphone I’ve owned to date. Not that I’ve gone through much cellphone’s or anything, but yeah, I really like it. Since I’m no average beaver with this type of stuff, I’ve also been keeping up on and reading a lot on Custom Rom’s that individuals out there are releasing. Supposedly, these users edit the phone in ways to make it better by removing things they and a lot of others would deem useless that the companies add onto the phone, plus any other type of hacks and tweaks that could improve the phone. Of course this phone was just released and is still in early stages, there’s no doubt about it that HTC/Sprint will be releasing updates in due time to make better enhancements.

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