Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and in this video I'm going to cover all of the interesting features of the HTC touch pro lot of little things that HTC has done with this device that makes it really interesting so I'm gonna start off with the case in this case is more like a sleeve it's made out of leather and it actually has two purposes one purpose is to keep the device protected of course so that if you drop it you don't get a scratch on your beautiful touch pro and the second purpose is to actually clean the device the sleeve has very little clearance if you can see that so that when I push out the device it rubs against the flush screen and takes off a little bit of surface debris if there is any if you can see inside of the case it's a nice felt that does a good job of cleaning the screen now obviously it's not going to clean off facial grease or you know smudges are that kind of thing that requires more agitation but for surface debris or little pieces of dust that does a great job at keeping the screen clean so that's a really good reason to use the the case that it comes with now like the touch diamond the HTC touch pro has a magnetic stylus such that when you remove the stylus the screen comes out of standby goes on automatically which is a really good feature so that you don't have to take the extra step of pressing the power button at the top of the device okay now that we're closer in I want to show you more about touchflo 3d touch flow 3d is HTC's acclaimed interface for Windows Mobile that replaces the today's screen and it does a lot of interesting things this is the first screen it's the home screen and what you can do with this is you can see your call history if you click on that you can see your appointments or you can go straight into your calendar for the day and you can flick your finger downward if you are upward actually to get a different clock if you don't like the massive clock and you want to see more appointments but for me I like to see my next appointment and that's that's about it so having this big clock is really nice and as you just saw the animation is really catchy too you can you can navigate through touchflo 3d through this bar at the bottom and as you can see there are a lot of icons and what I was afraid of is that I would have to slide my finger numerous times to get to all of the icons but HTC has designed this such that you only have to move your finger left to right one time to get from beginning to the end okay so let me take you through some of these tabs the next tab I'm going to go to is the people's tab and I can get there of course by pressing the button down here or I'm gonna actually swipe to the side and it goes right to the side and from here I can dial a favorite person or I can flip through the pictures that I've added kind of like album art or Cover Flow as they call it let me go to the next tab here which is messaging so this shows me my text messages and I can flip my stylus upward or of course I can do that with my finger to see my messages my SMS that have come through and if I want to read the message in full I can click on the message if I want to make a new message I click this button right here and go over the next tab we've email an email just like SMS allows you to preview the message that's there although with mail it gives you a nicer visual representation you can actually preview the piece of email as if it was inside of an envelope it's very beautiful and from here you can click on the message to go into outlook mobile if you want to do some some work in there going over to the next tab we have Internet it's a dedicated Internet tab we can scroll to the bottom here and see all the favorites that we have added for Opera Mobile I'll cover a little bit about Opera Mobile in a few minutes and from here we can launch the browser with this big icon on the top sliding over to the side we have pictures and video which will look into your device for any pictures that you've taken or look into your storage card if you have any photos and it will put them all in here and of course you can slide your mouse or I keep calling it a mouse you can slide your stylus up to flip through the pictures in a very beautiful way if you find a picture you like you can just tap on it with your finger and it will bring open the gallery and the gallery is one of the places that the accelerometer works so it'll automatically reorient the picture so let me get out of the gallery and go to the next tab the next tab is the music tab and like the photo tab it will search your device for music that you have and if we click on library' here we can kind of use this really nice looking touch flow based playlist control so we can see the albums that we have on the device and we can click on one of those or scroll with our finger to see various ones it's just it's just really refined and we can also make playlists we can filter by genres and all that sort of thing and it just integrates so nicely throughout the whole device so I'm going to get out of here by clicking now playing and it'll take me back to the main screen and if course you can play songs right from the screen which is pretty neat too the next tab is weather and it needs to be updated right now it says updating because the moon's not out it's actually during the daytime over here in Philadelphia and the animations for the you saw it right there are beautiful for the weather and I here I haven't seen it yet but when it's raining you'll actually get a animation of a wiper blade come across the screen to wipe off droplets so that's really well done and down here we have a five-day forecast if you want to see more of what's happening in the weather and if you press more it will take you to the accuweather.com homepage through Opera Mobile so you can get you know a 10-day forecast or the current humidity or something like that and then over in the Settings tab we get access to just some basic settings we can change the wallpaper sync all of the data on the device turn on Wi-Fi Bluetooth that sort of thing and if we go over to the final tab it's a program launcher and you can scroll through the programs you can add new programs shortcuts and if you click all programs you don't get the Start menu you get this much better-looking list of programs that is very thin you're friendly and you can scroll through them and see all of the programs that are included on the device so that is really well-done so you may be wondering what is touchflo 3d looking landscape because this has a slide-out keyboard and the screen rotates to landscape well I'll tell you what there really is no touch touch flow 3d and landscape much to my surprise look look at this look look what it looks like this is touchflo 3d in landscape I'm really not sure why HDC didn't put the same experience in the landscape orientation that they did in the portrait orientation it's completely different it's it's kind of silly actually but that's what we have to work which with which is fine if you want to use the real touchflo 3d interface you have to keep it in portrait mode to do that okay so let's go into the programs listed I'm going to get out my stylus to do this I like the precision of the stylus and you can see the Start menu is arranged in a nice finger friendly fashion there are dividers between all of the entries now a note on screen rotation because you just saw the screen rotate and if you watch any other videos that I've made you know that I hate slow screen rotation and Windows Mobile exhibits very slow screen rotation well take a look at how it how it is on the touch pro let me dismiss this email first okay watch this pretty snappy it's a little slower going into portrait it's pretty fast let me compare that to the HTC Kaiser so let me get that out here I've got it over here I've got the same menu open I'll zoom out even more so we can kind of get some perspective and let me try this at the same time the keyboards slide out in different ways so one two three it's funny because sometimes the touch pro is faster and sometimes the the Kaiser is faster but overall I'd say definitely the the touch pro has a fast screen rotation speed which I am pleased about okay let's get back in here now in the Start menu and throughout the entire operating system you can flick scroll which is really good because it has a touch flush the open up FM radio it is a touch flush screen and so too feel for the scroll bar is kind of annoying so having that capability to flick scroll is pretty good it's not as good as the iPhone I don't think it ever will be in Windows Mobile until major changes are made to the platform but it's it's pretty good and it's precise and you can move just a little bit if you want and that you don't really get accidental key presses so let's take a look at a few of the programs on the device that stand out a little bit and are of interest so going down we have you know a Communications Manager which is especially well done graphically for the touch pro I'm going to turn on Wi-Fi so that I can show you a demonstration of Opera Mobile the camera applications beautiful I'm going to show you that in the review it's just very fast the icons are easy to decipher everything is laid out very well we have standard things like Google Maps we have a printing utility we have this cool program called mp3 trimmer and what this allows you to do is look at any mp3 that you have on your device so I'm going to go to open I'm gonna go to my storage card I'll choose any track really and what it allows you to do is play the mp3 and stop it when you want and you get what is called a little segment and you can apply this segment to your phone as a ringtone and it works really well I mean in about two minutes I got a whoops in about two minutes I got a from a song and I applied it as my ringtone and it worked great and what you just saw up there I want to show you too if you click any of the notifications it brings up this big finger finger friendly list of what the notifications are which is great because if you want to check you know your Wi-Fi status you don't have to be really precise with your finger to get in on that you can just click on the top bar and go right to your Wi-Fi status so that's a really good addition to making it finger friendly going down the list we have opera browser I'll talk about that in a second I want to show you the YouTube application because it's another thing that's really well done it's as good as it is the YouTube application on the iPhone so right now it's downloading and I'm just going to go to search and I'm going to search for pocket now of course I could use the slide-out keyboard but I don't really want to rotate the device right now so it's searching and here we have the matches and it comes up pretty fast and I'm going to click on the first one I see and it goes into the other orientation and it looks very similar to the YouTube application on the iPhone and the quality is fantastic if you've been around you YouTube lately you know that there are settings for high quality video which makes the clarity much better and up here if you go to this button at the top you can choose whether it's high quality or low quality I've it on auto select right now so that is the YouTube application so now I want to show you Opera Mobile 9.5 which is revered as one of the best mobile browsers ever made here I've got cnet.com loading it's a it's quite a complex page it's got a lot of tables it's got a lot of content and that sort of thing and if you want to zoom in on a column you can double tap and resizes the column so that you can see it nicely it wraps it around you can move around the page as if it was a piece of paper double click to zoom back out and because there's an accelerometer built into the touch pro if you flip over the device to landscape it will reorient the screen although sometimes it's it does it a little bit slowly it's not as sensitive as it should be but generally it works well so opera mobile 9.5 is especially well done and I'm glad that HTC has included it on this device and the last thing I want to do is take you through the settings of the device to see if there's anything interesting in there here in the settings we can make a sound for the keyboard sliding open you know some people find that annoying but I actually like it going down the list nothing else interesting in here if you go into the settings for the today screen you see that touchflo 3d right now is the only entry that is set as on and that is why it's displaying going over to system we have some usual things we have a calibration utility for the G sensor or for the accelerometer and again there's not that many places in the operating system where the G sensor is used unfortunately so you know this allows you to calibrate it so that it's you know exactly right vertically and horizontally and that sort of thing unlike the omnia which can orient itself in any screen throughout the operating system now if we go down let's take a look at memory I've been opening a bunch of programs but even then I have a hundred and three megabytes of program memory left and there's a good amount of storage space but of course I have a storage card installed which is probably what you want to do if you get a touch Pro going down the list we have some settings for touch flow not that many we can enable the Start menu we can enable the sound when fingers scrolling and that sort of thing and finally on the bottom here we have TV out and because I don't have the accessory I can't show you that HTC should include the TV out cable just like I'm eight did with the ninety 502 professional device and over in connections nothing really here except what was really great is when I put my SIM card into the touch pro it automatically configured itself for AT&T and I know a lot of people will really appreciate that and it says country and operator AT&T or t-mobile so if you're in the United States that this will work I am getting an edge signal right now unfortunately no 3G though and one more thing that I want to show you that's pretty cool is how this touch sensitive scroll d-pad works so let me go into a program where I can adjust the font size so I will go into messaging and I will let's see I'll go into Outlook and here here's a message that came on the device actually it's called email tips and tricks and so what I can do is I can take my finger and I can just graze it around this touch sensitive scrolling mechanism and it resizes the text now unfortunately it doesn't scroll the text which is what I would like it to do but this is a good way to on-the-fly change the size of text in a lot of different screens on the touch pro so it's quite useful in that way and again touch touch scrolling works in a lot of applications it works in Outlook mobile of course which is quite helpful when reading through a long email so that is it for the HTC touch pro it's definitely one of the most refined windows mobile devices that exists that is not to say that there aren't some flaws with it and I'll cover all of those in the review coming up in a few days so check back at pocketnow.com for the detailed and very thorough review on the HTC touch pro that's it for now