HTC Touch Pro review: Heavyweight pro

Windows Mobile wars are at their fiercest and a truce is nowhere in sight with new recruits marching to battle as we speak. HTC Touch Pro is adding some heavy firepower to the Touch Diamond campaign for domination of the WinMo realm. The new pro by HTC is a true all-rounder, with multimedia and navigation just part of its ammo, and has every premise of becoming the most complete Windows-powered device to date. Armed and dangerous it is, but will it get a license to kill?

   

Having already seen this phone doesn't make us any less excited to take it out for a spin. Yes, you will hear us call the Diamond and the Touch Pro twins and there will be d?j?-vu aplenty in this article. After all, it's the same platform and design.
Key features
2.8" 65K-color touchscreen VGA display 
Five row full QWERTY slide-out keyboard of brilliant ergonomics 
TouchFLO 3D Home screen and gesture controls 
Wi-Fi 
Qualcomm MSM7201A 528 Mhz CPU and 288 MB DDR SDRAM 
Dedicated graphics chip (64MB RAM reserved for graphics) 
HSDPA 7.2Mbps 
Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS 
microSD memory expansion 
Stereo FM radio with RDS 
3.15 MP auto focus camera 
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support 
Active magnetic stylus 
Touch-sensitive scroll wheel 
Standard miniUSB port and Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP 
TV out 
Teeter game aboard 
Cool YouTube client 
Excellent video playback performance 
MS Office Mobile document editor 
Opera 9.5 web browser 
Main disadvantages:
Rather bulky and heavy 
Fingerprint-prone front panel 
Average sunlight legibility 
No standard 3.5mm audio jack 
Back panel design hurts usability 
Limited scroll wheel usage 
No adequate storage memory out of the box 

HTC Touch Pro is armed to the very last one of them QWERTY teeth, almost every worth having mobile phone feature on its list. So much so, that a viable alternative is hard to find on the current market. The arch enemy however is just a quick look ahead.