HTC Touch Pro2
Published: 30 July 2009
Last modified: 29 March 2011
Background
There are numerous reviews of the HTC Touch Pro2 on the Internet, but most are concerned with its looks, its audio and video capabilities, and its browser capabilities. Whilst these are important aspects, they don’t really cover using the device for real-world applications.
As a self-employed IT professional, my requirements are probably different from those working for companies with large networks and a Microsoft Exchange server. I am not particularly concerned about the technical specifications—the numbers mean little to the average user, and they are rarely a true indicator of ability or performance. This review is going to get straight down to my experiences with the Touch Pro2 over the first 48 hours of use. It’s worth noting that this is my first review, and my first Windows Mobile device, so there may be some things I missed while trying to get it up and running.
My set-up
I work from home, and have a small network, comprised of parts accumulated over the years. I have three Debian servers which between them provide firewall, DHCP, DNS, web server and file server. My LAN has a few devices attached, including my main desktop PC, a laptop, a wireless access point and an Xbox.
On my desktop PC, I run both Windows XP and Ubuntu. I use Thunderbird as my primary email client, and do not have a Microsoft Exchange server. Instead, I have multiple email accounts, both web based—like my GMail account—and accounts provided by my web hosting provider and ISP. I like to keep my accounts separate, and have accounts for business, banking, personal, testing, and so on. I access all my accounts using IMAP, as this provides synchronized access from wherever I happen to be. I can access them via webmail services, or from my email client.
Down to business
I received my phone from Vodafone, and they have modified the standard colour scheme to fit their corporate colours:
Contacts
The first thing I wanted to do was import my contacts. As a Thunderbird user, this could prove a little tricky, as most mobile phones—this one included—only provide synchronization software for Outlook contacts. As a one-off procedure, it would have been simple enough to export my contacts from Thunderbird, import them into Outlook, and then use ActiveSync to transfer them to the phone. However, this is hardly ideal for a regularly updated list of contacts. Thanks to Google Sync, I didn’t need to do this. I already use Zindus to connect to Google Sync and synchronize my Thunderbird contacts with my GMail contacts. Using ActiveSync on the Touch Pro2, I can sync my phone contacts with my GMail contacts too:
Run ActiveSync from the Start page:
Add a server source:
Enter your Google Mail address (and copy it to save some typing on the next step):
Enter your Google Mail address and password:
Enter the Google mobile address:
Select Contacts, then Finish:
The synchronization only took a few seconds, and worked perfectly. This is great, because it means that I can keep my phone and Thunderbird contacts synchronized at all times, without having to mess around with the USB cable, ActiveSync and Outlook on my desktop PC.
Wireless
My next task was to set up access to my home wireless network. This is where a few flaws in the the TouchFLO 3D interface began to show.
I used the TouchFLO 3D interface to select Settings, then Communications:
Then Wi-Fi. Note that if your phone is connected to ActiveSync via USB, the Wi-Fi option on the screen below will be greyed out, even if Allow wireless connection on device when connected to the desktop is enabled in the ActiveSync Connection Settings. You can still access the settings via the Settings menu at the bottom right of the screen, but this takes you into the Windows Mobile interface, rather than the TouchFLO 3D interface.
From here, I selected the wireless network to which I wanted to connect:
My wireless network is secured with WPA2/PSK using the maximum allowable 63 character password. I generate and store my passwords with KeePassX, which ensures very strong passwords which are really difficult to type. I normally rely on copy and paste when entering these passwords. In this case, rather than typing in the whole password, I created a text document on my desktop PC, and transferred this to the phone via ActiveSync. A mobile version of KeePassX would be great, but I couldn’t find one. Using Word, I opened the document, and copied the key, ready for pasting into the Network key field:
The usual tap-and-hold context menu doesn’t appear to work in any TouchFLO 3D screen, so I used Ctrl+C from the keyboard to paste the password. After spending a few seconds trying to connect, the connection failed, but there was no error message to indicate why. I tried another few times, and eventually, a message appeared telling me that I had entered an incorrect network key. I was given the opportunity to enter the key again.
I pasted the key again, and it connected straight away. It took me a couple of attempts to figure out what was going on. The network key field on the screen with the signal strength meter limits input to the width of the field. In my case, that was 49 out of the 63 characters in my password, but this changes depending upon the width of the characters (with an i being narrower than an X). The incorrect password screen allowed the full password to be pasted. This is something to watch out for. After a bit more use, I found that using the default Windows Mobile interface for wireless connections was easier than using the TouchFLO 3D interface. Although it doesn’t look quite as fancy, it does provide more information, allows full-length passwords, and tap-and-hold context menus work throughout.
I now wanted to start adding email accounts, so I used the TouchFLO 3D interface to open Outlook Messaging, then selected New Account:
Using the keyboard to enter text is very easy. The keys are well spaced, and with a bit of practice, typing can be done quickly and efficiently. When the screen is tilted fully forward, the number keys can be a little tricky to reach, but this is only a minor problem.
Unlike the wireless network key field, the email account password field hides the password with asterisks. This is good security practice, but can make entering complex passwords quite tricky. At this point, I went back to my text file, and copied my mail account password to the clipboard. However, I then discovered that it is not possible to paste into this field. Whilst looking for an alternative route to create email accounts—the Windows Mobile interface, rather than the TouchFLO 3D interface—the device locked up temporarily and would not respond to key strokes or screen taps. It took it around 2-3 minutes before springing back to life.
As with the wireless connection, using the Windows Mobile Messaging application from the Today panel proved to be easier than using the TouchFLO 3D interface. This can also be accessed via the mail key on the keyboard. Copy and paste worked correctly:
This is where things started to go wrong. I have around 2,800 emails in my main account. I realise that this may seem excessive, but having access to these emails has proved very useful in the past, and I would like my phone to be able to handle this quantity of emails. I had set it to only download the email headers, so it did not have to store the the body or attachments. The first 50 or so emails arrived very quickly, but after that, the import rate began to slow. At around 100, it was probably working at a rate of one email every second. At 376 emails, it gave up and disconnected from the network. The email client became unusable and kept freezing. Slow response times were also noticeable in other applications. I ended up having to reboot the device.
Even after a reboot, the device was still not quite as it was prior to the email import. It was sluggish, whereas prior to the import it was fast and very responsive. It had lost the settings for my wireless connection, so I had to enter these again. I restarted the send/receive process, and it managed to download a few more emails before locking up. Over the next 12 or so hours, I tried this many times. This error appeared frequently:
I wiped the device and started again at least six times:
On some occasions, I managed to get almost 2,000 emails to download, but never all in one go. I tried reconfiguring the networking so that it used my wireless connection to connect to the Internet, instead the 3G connection, but it made no difference.
I set up Outlook on my PC, and downloaded all my emails into it. Once done, I tried to use ActiveSync to transfer the emails via the USB connection. This was hardly ideal, as ActiveSync will only transfer emails from the default Outlook account, making transferring multiple accounts extremely difficult. Even if I could switch round the default email client on the PC, all the emails would still end up in default Outlook E-mail account on the Touch Pro2. I would then have to move all the email across to the correct account. As it turned out, this option was no more successful than the previous methods. ActiveSync would process a few emails, then claim to have completed. In fact, it was nowhere near complete.
By 3am the next morning, I’d had enough. I gave up trying to import my emails. Asking it to import almost 3,000 email headers may have been asking too much (despite their tiny size), but it struggled to cope with less than 400. Some of what appeared to be complete device freezes turned out to be the device just being extremely unresponsive. On one occasion, I left it for a good 15 minutes, and it eventually came back to life, until I clicked something else, which then caused it to die again.
As a test, I downloaded and installed a trial version of ProfiMail. It connected to my mailbox, and downloaded all 2,819 email headers in under a minute. This clearly demonstrates that there is something severely wrong with the built-in email client. Unfortunately, ProfiMail is not built in, so it would have to run as an application. It doesn’t integrate well, so message notifications don’t work as they would with the built in client. It also looks terrible, and it is not free, so I’d be paying for a mail client that handles emails as the built-in client should already be able to do, but which does not fulfill its other requirements.
LAN & file access
Update
14 September 2009
Since writing this review, I discovered that my LAN connection problems were in part caused by a bug in the Debian build of Samba that I was using on my file server. I spent some time tracing network packets and checking Samba log files, and noticed in the Samba log files that it was receiving a truncated password, but that the phone was transmitting the correct password. I scrapped by build of Samba, and built the latest version from source files. LAN access from the HTC Touch Pro2 suddenly worked flawlessly.
After failing to get email working correctly, I moved on to connecting the phone to my home LAN via the wireless access. This would allow me to transfer files between the phone, my server and my desktop PC, without having to use the USB cable and ActiveSync.
This turned out to be harder than I expected, but this was due in part to me not fully understanding the way Windows Mobile handles network access. The first thing I tried was connecting directly to my desktop PC using its IP address:
This did not work. I then tried using the NetBIOS name for the PC, but this failed too:
After a little research, I found some useful information on Windows Mobile networking, and some possible solutions.
The Connection Manager FAQ on Chris De Herrera’s Windows CE Website was by far the most informative. Spotlight on Connection Manager on the MSDN Blogs site is also worth reading. In the end, all I needed to do was change the network to which the wireless card connects, from The Internet to Work:
Once done, I could then connect using the NetBIOS name of my desktop PC. I could not connect using the IP address, and I think that this is because the Connection Manager routes any address containing dots (.) to the Internet. It is possible to add FQDN exceptions in the Connection Manager, but I was unable to do this for my IP address. The Connection Manager kept reformatting it. As the NetBIOS name works correctly, this isn’t really a problem. I also tried to access my Debian server’s SMB shares, using its FQDN, but was unable to get this working, even with an exception added in Connection Manager. Perhaps, with a little more time, I could have got this to work, but it’s a shame it is not as simple as it should be.
Whilst experimenting, I tried Resco File Explorer, and this proved to be much simpler to use. It allowed me to browse my network, and create mappings in a ways similar to those on Windows XP. I still couldn’t get it to connect to my Debian server though.
Once I had connected to my desktop PC with the built-in File Explorer, I was able to browse shares, and copy files between the two devices. I was not able to open files directly from the shared locations. This is not really a show stopper, as the main reason for the connection is to copy files to the device before going on a trip. The Resco File Explorer provides this functionality seamlessly, but again, it’s a shame that the built-in explorer does not do this.
Internet browsing
The Opera mobile browser is generally very good. It’s fast, and fairly simple to use. It is leagues ahead of Internet Explorer, which is also installed. My phone was set to allow only two tabs to be open, which I found very restrictive. This may just be a Vodafone setting, but it’s easy enough to change from the about:config page (User Prefs > Maximum Allowed Tabs). Many websites open links in new windows or tabs, and this also became annoying, as it soon fills up the available tabs. I couldn’t find an option to force a page to open in the current tab.
It’s well known that the Opera Mobile browser on this phone does not fully support Adobe’s Flash Player. Whilst this is not really a big problem for a business phone, there are a large number of sites out there that rely heavily upon Flash. This may prove to be a problem for some users. As was to be expected, the BBC iPlayer would not work, and nor would YouTube. There are probably plenty of hacks around to enable this sort of stuff, but I didn’t spend any time looking into them.
Opera does a great job of displaying non-mobile sites. Sites are displayed quickly, and panning around a page is quick and easy. I was less impressed with the zooming feature. The dedicated zoom bar on the Touch Pro2 zooms from the middle left of the screen—I found this a little awkward, and would prefer it to zoom from the centre of the screen. The double-tap zoom method only worked occasionally, and when it did, it sometimes zoomed from the middle left, and sometimes from the point at which it was tapped. It was quite strange.
When a page is fully zoomed out, I found it impossible to activate links. Not because I could not see them, or tap on the correct area, but because Opera seemed to ignore my selections. I could tap-and-hold, which would display a context menu, but I couldn’t actually activate the link. When zoomed in a little, the links worked perfectly.
Audio and video
Audio and video capabilities are less of an issue for me than email, internet and file access. Having said that, it’s nice to be able to relax a little, and listen to some music, watch a film, or catch up on some telly.
Windows Media Player Mobile is the audio and video player of choice on this device, so it’s no surprise that only a limited number of audio and video formats are supported. I’ve nearly finished re-importing all my music onto my computer in Apple Lossless format, and not surprisingly, Windows Media Player Mobile does not like that format:
MP3 files are fine:
Windows Media Player Mobile could not play any of the videos that I tried, but as they were all large files that I wouldn’t want to copy to the phone, I don’t think this is a problem—they’d have to be compressed anyway, so converting them to a suitable format might as well be done at the same time. I was going to try Core Player Mobile, as this gets some good reviews, but they don’t offer a trial version.
If you want to use the Touch Pro2 extensively for audio and video, it looks as though you’ll either have to spend time converting video and audio formats, or purchase a more capable player.
Glitches and annoyances
Whilst working with the phone, I came across a series of minor glitches and annoyances. The TouchFLO 3D interface is great at first, but soon becomes a hindrance, getting in the way of things I wanted to do—it’s an extra layer on top of Windows Mobile, while although extremely snazzy looking, soon loses its appeal.
If, for example, you leave the phone on the TouchFLO 3D SMS screen after having viewed an SMS, new SMS messages are not displayed when they arrive. You have to navigate away from the screen, then back to it. Similarly, if you are in the middle of an SMS conversation, and leave the phone in the SMS conversation thread view, new message alerts are not sounded—only a visual indication is provided. I also found it impossible to simply display all received SMS messages. The phone insists on grouping them by conversation, so you end up seeing either just the latest SMS in a conversation, or the whole conversation, sent and received, complete with content.
Often, the TouchFLO3D menus will be replaced by the standard Windows Mobile menus, and only a reboot resolves the issue. The TouchFLO 3D introduces another, often simplified method for achieving something that can be done via an alternative route in the Windows Mobile interface. For some things, this is fine, but it does create inconsistencies in the user interface. After a while, I turned off the Today screen TouchFLO 3D application. This doesn’t remove TouchFLO3D altogether, but I found it generally easier to use with it off. Less pretty, but more functional.
Conclusion
To re-cap what other reviews have said, the HTC Touch Pro2 is a great looking device. It is quite well built, feels solid, and has a crystal clear display. The keyboard is as good as can be expected, given its size.
Out-of-the-box, it is fast, easy to use and very responsive. The touch screen took a little getting used to—especially finger-swipe scrolling without accidentally selecting something I didn’t want to select. As with any device like this, there will be a learning curve. Within only a few minutes of finger tapping and scrolling, the screen looks like a greasy mess. Obviously, this is to be expected, and is one of the drawbacks of any touch screen.
Unfortunately, as much as I liked this device when I first removed it from the box, its cracks soon began to show. Much of this appears to be down to Windows Mobile, but as this device is designed for Windows Mobile, and is one of the latest generation of smartphones, I expected better.
It’s inability to handle what I consider to be a reasonable number of emails, makes it all but useless for my needs. For a less demanding user, it will probably be fine.
Many of the things that I didn’t like about the phone may just be down to personal preference. For many users, the user interface issues may not be a problem. It feels like a product that has a great deal of potential, but is not quite there yet. If you can ignore the email problem, the sub-standard File Explorer, the freezes and slow downs, and the occasional factory reset, then all it needs is a little polishing.
It’s not the device for me, but I think there will be plenty of less demanding users who will love it. Perhaps I’m expecting too much, but for now, it looks like a standard mobile phone and laptop are what I need.