HTC Touch Pro

Like the Touch Diamond, the Pro is equipped with HTC's new touchscreen interface, TouchFlo 3D. This replaces the awkward Today screen of Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional with something far more attractive and suited to finger-driven operation. A large flip-chart-style clock greets you when you turn it on and it's complemented by equally attractive home screens for email, text messages, contacts, web browser, photos & video, music, weather and settings.

Admittedly, HTC has since updated the ROM for the Diamond, so owners don't have to suffer its previously excruciating performance, but even with this update applied the Pro feels slightly nippier. We can only attribute this to the increased helping of RAM, up to 288MB from 192MB, since the processor is the same 528MHz Qualcomm unit.

The 640 x 480 screen is as glorious as it was on the Touch Diamond too, and the web browser - Opera Mobile 9.5 - is as brilliant as ever, allowing you to zoom in an out of fully-rendered web pages and pan around at will. The Pro, like the Diamond, has an accelerometer that detects the orientation of the phone, rotating photos and web pages automatically as you move the handset from portrait to landscape mode in your hand.

And the Touch Pro is rammed to the gills with smartphone hardware. Where you can get a signal it'll let you browse the internet at speeds of up to 7.2Mb/sec; there's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS and an FM radio tuner; plus a 3.2-megapixel camera on the rear (with LED flash) and a VGA camera for video calls on the front. Call quality is good, the camera works much better than that of the Diamond, and the GPS receiver works brilliantly, regularly achieving satellite reception in under a minute. It doesn't have much flash memory built in - just 512MB - but a microSD slot allows you to add much more than that if you want. It's far preferable to the Diamond's more generous, but non-expandable, 4GB allocation.
HTC's Touch Pro is clearly a highly capable smartphone. It has a brilliant keyboard, screen, web browser and all the features you could possibly want. It's lovely to use and an effective pocket computing and communications device. And the keyboard is the best we've come across on any Windows Mobile smartphone. In fact if a Windows Mobile device is what you want, you'll not get much better than this.