Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com and this is the hardware tour of the HTC Touch pro2 the European version whether you're in the iPhone world or Android world or Windows Mobile world you probably know about this phone it's getting a lot of attention and it may shape up to be the hottest device of this year especially for the mobile professionals and as you're gonna see through this demonstration it has a lot of features that are really targeted to people that need to be on the road and be able to communicate with their with their co-workers and friends and business professionals and things like that so to start the case that it comes comes with as you saw on the unboxing is actually real leather it's not a holster and it doesn't clip onto your belt and I don't see a way of doing that but it is a really nice way to protect the touch pro2 and it's an expensive device so naturally you want to be able to protect it it closes with a magnet like so and you just slide it out like this and I accidentally turned it on there now the touch pro2 has a chrome ring around the edge which is quite nice if you turn over to the back there's no shiny black coating which means that you don't have to worry about fingerprints at all on the back it's actually got a metallic shiny glossy silver coating here and there's a texture in the center and then a piece of almost aluminum here very nice looking device the screen is 3.6 inches diagonal and actually it's only point two inches smaller than the Touch HD they actually hat feel about the same size so basically think about the touch pro2 kind of like the touch HD but with a slide-out keyboard in fact we thought that this may be called the touch HD pro but HTC decided to call it the touch pro2 so let's get a little bit closer and go around the device so up here at the top we have the status light next to the light sensor and the front-facing video camera which of course you can't use in the u.s. because networks don't support it but in Europe that's not the case down here we have no d-pad but we have the zoom slider which uses resistive screen technology and that can be used when you're in photos or an opera moe and not really that many other places down here we have some hardware buttons call start and call end and call end also goes home and then the start menu button here and an okay or back button there so let's go over to the side here we have a volume up and down rocker it's very similar to that on the touch diamond2 same place a little bit thicker going over to the bottom we have HTC zxt USB port which works with all of your mini or mini USB plugs which is good we have microphone number one of two and I'm going to show you the second one in a second it's quite interesting now the stylus in the touch pro2 is not magnetic but it does automatically turn on the screen as you see there now other HTC devices last generation had magnetic style ice so if you look at the touch HD and you try to bring it in close it sucks it right in if you look at the touch pro2 and you bring it close it sucks it right in but not the case with the diamond too and the pro tube which i think is a sad omission so let's go around the other side i'm here we have the second microphone and this microphone is used in conjunction with the first microphone to provide noise cancellation when you put the device in straighttalk mode now let me explain straight talk mode so the idea here is that you're on a phone call and maybe you're in a boardroom or you're in a meeting and you want to put the phone on a conference call mode or speakerphone mode so you turn over the device and automatically the device with the accelerometer knows that's been turned over and suddenly it turns into a speakerphone and it uses two microphones to do noise cancellation and it also has two speakers one here and one here which helps to make it louder so that it actually functions like a conference room speakerphone we're going to talk more about how well this works in the in the review coming up soon okay so I just want to quickly demonstrate the Straight Talk feature right now I'm on the call with someone and I'm gonna turn over the phone and you see a little light the device vibrates Chris can you hear me do I sound clear excellent and as I mentioned there's a microphone button here you just press that it turns red he can't hear me right now can you hear me now alright thanks for the demo Chris and on the top we have the standby button continue continuing on the back we have a 3.2 megapixel camera here with no flash unfortunately below that is the mute button so another feature of this Straight Talk speakerphone feature if the phone is on its back and you want to say something quietly and not hear the party that's on the phone here you just tap on the mute button it'll mute and you'll see a little light on there and press it again to turn off mute taking off the back cover we see that the behind the 1500 milliamp hour battery is the SIM card slot and unfortunately they put the micro sd holder under the battery cover so if you want to quickly swap out your your micro SD card you have to take off the battery cover which is kind of annoying but not too big of a deal ok so let's talk about the keyboard the keyboard on the touch pro2 is totally different than it was on the previous generation touch pros so if you look at the titan ii for example the keyboard is in a symmetrical row pretty much with all the keys being spaced evenly apart and that sort of thing if you look at the touch pro 6s err to that we have a similar layout which was good and it was it was easy to use it was a good keyboard nice and spacious but HTC has taken it to the next level on the touch pro2 the keys now are in an offset pattern and what that means is that it's more ergonomic kind of like a keyboard on a desktop or a laptop the keys are much larger the surface area is just immense for people that have large sized hands this is going to be excellent for them this keyboard is effortless and you're gonna see in a minute I'm going to type some things and it feels so good the only problem is that there's a lot of finger travel because it's so large but again people with large fingers or even medium-sized fingers are going to appreciate this so let me try typing something here and keep in mind that I've only been playing with this for a few hours so I can tell you that it feels really good when you type and and having the dedicated number row up top is really helpful let's take a look at what else we have on the keyboard while we're down here we have a button that goes right into messaging we have we have a link that goes to the web if you press function and that key and there is a way to silence the phone and go page up page down and if you press the function button you get a little light right here and if you press the caps lock button you'll get a light there you can keep them both on if you want and a lot of people are asking about how this feels in hand and in the pocket because if you remember the original touch pro was very thick and the touch probe for that we'll call it the Titan 2 it went by million different names was even thicker it was basically a brick well fortunately the touch pro2 is considerably thinner than both of those devices HTC made the device taller and a little bit wider which I think allowed them to spread out the electronics and not make it so deep so in hand it does have heft to it and does feel it does have some significant weight to it which isn't a bad thing but it definitely feels a lot thinner then does the touch pro or the Titan 2 and in the pocket it slips nicely in the pocket because it's the shape of a because it's very tall and not too thick so that's it for the hardware tour on the HTC Touch pro2 we'll be back soon with a software tour and a full review be sure to check us out at twitter.com slash pocket now tweets for more on that that's it for now