HTC Touch Pro2—another 48 hours
Published: 2 August 2009
Just like the film of the same name, this has been a frustrating waste of time. I eventually managed to get all my emails to load after yet another factory reset. The first thing I did was turn off TouchFLO 3D in the Today panel (Settings > Personal > Today > Items). This made a significant difference to performance. Whereas previously the phone would freeze for many minutes as the email count built up, it soldiered on, albeit slowly, with TouchFLO 3D turned off.
Outlook Mobile
Outlook Mobile is still painfully slow. Even when there are no new emails, a Send/Receive still takes in excess of five minutes, while the phone sits at Receiving headers for most of the time. ProfiMail completes this check almost instantly. I downloaded a task manager for Windows Mobile from Dotfred, and monitored the CPU usage while Send/Receive was stuck at Receiving headers. Amazingly, the CPU was doing very little — the System Idle process was up at around 98%. I have tried all manner of different settings, and have tried a number of different email accounts, on different servers. All experience the same problem. The amount of time stuck at Receiving headers appears to be directly related to the number of items in the inbox, suggesting that Outlook is reading all of these prior to getting new messages. All the messages are stored as individual plain text files in the Windows\Messaging folder. Does Outlook Mobile not index these files?.
With no IMAP IDLE support, I am limited to setting the send/receive schedule to every 10 minutes or so, and putting up with the phone going slow during this process. This is not a great hardship, but it’s crazy when small third-party developers, like those who produce ProfiMail or FlexMail are able to produce a properly working email client, and Microsoft seem unable to do so. I don’t feel as though I should have to pay for another email client, which doesn’t integrate fully with the rest of the phone like Outlook Mobile does, just so that I can receive emails. It’s almost as if Microsoft have done this deliberately, just to boost sales of Exchange Server. But they wouldn’t do that… Would they?
Performance and usability
As well as providing a noticeable performance increase, removing the TouchFLO 3D Today interface resolves a number of other minor issues. SMS notifications work correctly when viewing an SMS conversation thread. The user interface becomes more consistent, and the weird hybrid display of TouchFLO 3D screens with Windows Mobile menus is no longer an issue. Navigating around the phone is simplified, as there is only the one interface.
What now?
I’m in two minds about keeping this phone. The single most important feature for me is IMAP email, which this phone does not handle at all well.
File access is also important, and it hardly excels at this either. Resco File Explorer is a massive improvement over the built in File Explorer, but why should I have to pay extra for something that should work out-of-the box? ProfiMail handles IMAP emails brilliantly, but does not integrate at all well. And again, it bothers me that I should have to pay extra for something that should already work.
I didn’t think that the lack of Flash support in Opera Mobile would be much of a problem, but it soon became apparent how many sites use Flash. It would be great, if on a long train journey, I could head over to the BBC iPlayer and catch up on a programme or two, but this is not possible without a hack, and even then, the performance is terrible.
This phone offers a number of great features, but is hampered by poor, unreliable, unpolished software. I have looked into other phones, like the Nokia N97, but this too appears to suffer from poor email support. That, combined with its less than ideal keyboard layout, makes me wonder if the HTC Touch Pro2 is the best I am going to get…