Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the hardware and software tour of the sprint HTC touch pro that has been released in the united states there are going to be two more touch pros coming up on AT&T and on verizon so let's talk about the hardware of this particular device and look look at it in comparison to the original they're very similar like I said in the unboxing they're about the same width although if you look really closely I'm going to try to do this right it turns out that the that the European touch pro on the right is actually about one millimeter thicker than the u.s. sprint touch pro so that's good news we have a lot of chrome on the touch pro and it's funny if you think about the Titan to when it came over from Europe to the to AT&T as the tilt it just had a lot of chrome on it apparently Americans like chrome and I and I can see why I mean chrome is flashy chrome looks good chrome looks high-end so we have this chrome stretching all around the device and and because of that it just looks really great if we look at the european version it's completely black okay so looking at the front of the device we have a light sensor here with a speaker plus a few different buttons down here only one of which is programmable we have a home button and okay or back button here call end and call start and also if you run your finger around the outside of this edge it will zoom in and zoom out of web pages and that sort of thing over on to the side we have a volume rocker and there it says HTC innovation again going over to the top we have the standby button over on this side we have the stylus and like the the original touch pro if you take out the stylus it'll turn the phone off from put it back on from standby I should say and if we look at the bottom we have the EXT USB port that's proprietary to HTC although it works with mini USB ports if you have those we have a soft reset hole and a microphone and fortunately HTC and sprint have included this adapter which will allow you to plug it into the bottom and use the the pass throughs for 3.5 millimeter 2.5 millimeter and you can even keep charging or sinking your device while you listen to audio it's a little annoying having this hanging off of your device but but if you want a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack built in you're going to have to look to other devices if we turn over to the back we have something that really differentiates this device from the original touch pro we have a rubbery kind of silver metallic backing which really makes the device feel good in hand compared to the faceted backing on the european version which makes it feel kind of boxy so that's a really great thing about that if we take off the cover we see the 3.2 megapixel camera sensor and the LED flash and we also see the microSD slot over here behind the battery cover unfortunately the battery is thirteen hundred and forty million Bowers just like the original and that provides a pretty good amount of battery life okay let's take a look at the software on the sprint HTC touch pro the first thing I want to compare is touchflo 3d on both versions on the european version if you slide your finger you get the you know the icons show up on the screen like so and if we do likewise on the sprint version we get kind of fluorescent looking icons which is kind of cool actually and also the icons along the bottom are slightly different so if we go over to weather and over here to weather it just looks a little bit different sprint kind of dressed it up to to match their own colors and you'll see throughout the operating system on the sprint HTC touch pro that a lot of yellow is used because Sprint's colors are black and yellow okay so let's take a closer look at touchflo 3d on the sprint HTC touch pro on the first tab we have just as the regular version we have the time plus any voicemail notifications and we can also get into call history if we flick our finger up we can see some more appointments that are coming up if we go over two favorite people we can add their pictures and flick through them kind of like album art and and call them just by tapping on their picture if we go over to mail if we have mail a mail account setup you can flick through your messages kind of in this 3d like fashion that looks really great if we go over to messages it will show you your text messages and again you can flick through these it'll show you how many messages you have on the right side and you can just flick your finger to get through those if you go to internet pressing on launch browser will launch opera mobile 9.5 if we go to sprint music again you can flick your finger to go to previous CDs and the device will automatically search your phone for music you may have installed on a storage card now this is a little different there's a button and a link to sprint music store and what it'll do is take you to Upper mobile to a not so well a mobile optimized sprint music store layout and from there you can buy tracks for ninety-nine cents there will be downloaded to your device and that sort of thing and if we go into pictures we can do that really nice flick where we just flick through our all of our pictures if we like what we see you can tap on it it will bring it up full screen and it has the accelerometer of course so you can flip it to the other way and it will follow and then if you want to zoom in you do a little circle and that sort of thing so let's get out of that okay if we go to the next one sprint TV this is a little bit different and i'm going to show you this i'm going to launch sprint TV by just pressing on the center there and this is a subscription service prices start fifteen dollars for basic channels you can get you can get sports channels and a lot of different kind of entertainment packages with sprint TV and basically it's a rebranded version of mobitv it probably looks familiar to you by now and what you do is you can go down the line some of these are live channels while some of them are kind of on demand type programming so if we go to CNN that will actually be one of the live channels and what's kind of weird is you actually have to double tap to select one time to select two times to actually get it to go and I'm going to go to CNN mobile live so you can get an idea of of how it looks when you're streaming TV and I'm right now I'm ovary video with a kind of a weak signal but it should work pretty well still let's take a look okay here it is and if you rotate the device we can get a full screen view let me shake a little bit so that it registers or screen rotation and it goes full screen the quality is pretty good you know it could be better over a video and to show off the vga screen of yeah of the touch pro would really be great it's not very high resolution but it looks pretty good and it sounds pretty good if you're on the road and you want to get some entertainment it's a it's a good program if you're willing to pay for it ok so here we're back in touch both 3d I'm going to go over to the next one which is weather and again in touch flo 3d you can swap your finger to the right or to the left to move or you can just click on an icon on the bottom so here we are in weather and of course you can have multiple cities here you can flick your finger up to change the city just like you're used to in touch flo 3d over in settings we don't really have anything unusual here it's the same settings as found on the european version finally if we end up over in programs you know we can add our own list of programs and that is very flick friendly in fact the entire operating system is flick friendly so if we go into the programs and i'm going to show you the unique entries and the programs i can flick my finger or just kind of move it slowly like so ok so here we are in programs let's take a look at what we have we have a full version of Office Mobile 2007 we have adobe reader for pdfs a camera application let's see what else we have clear view presentation sweet communication manager let me just show you what that looks like it's it's a little bit different than it is on the original touch pro let me just show you the Communication Manager here a little bit different again the yellow and black theme is prevalent here going down the list we have live search already installed we have instant messenger which is actually 0 Z messenger client which is really good at lets you get on live and yahoo and aim going down the list we've mp3 trimmer we've seen that before it lets you make ringtones from songs that you have on your device pocket Express it's a it's a free program that you can get for any device but it's actually pretty nice it allows you to get a lot of information for free so we have breaking news and opinions we can go to stocks maps entertainment look up movie times we could do weather and get a a forecast for the area like so so a pretty good pretty good addition going down the list we have sprint software store which is actually just a internet based store it's nothing like an application store application that allows you to easily download applications right to your device it's not that great we have sprint navigation sprint music all this proprietary sprint stuff if you want to spend more money okay going down the list we have the YouTube application that we are seeing on all the HTC touch devices and it's really fantastic it's a great way to look at youtube videos while you're on the go okay so let's take a look at settings now okay here in settings we have a full version of microsoft voice command belton which is really great voice command is one of the best voice recognition programs out there let's see what buttons we can customize I think I mentioned this earlier that you can only customize the hold action of this call start button and right now it's set to launch voice command so if I get out of here and I you know hold hold the button what time is it so there you go if we go over to system we can take a look at some of these things we have the g sensor calibration wizard which which we know is on other HTC devices let's take a look at how much memory we have now the specifications of this version of the touch pro are almost identical to that of the european version let me just show you for for comparative purposes the eight the sprint version actually has a little bit more program memory which is kind of interesting we have 203 over here and 200 megabytes on the european version and we also have a little bit more of storage space but only about 6 megabytes or so other than that they both share the same processor so they're pretty much the same inside except for of course sprint version is running on cdma and the european version is on GSM let's go down the list this is interesting we can turn threaded text messaging off I don't know why you would want to do that but there are some people that are kind of bothered by windows mobile 6.1 threaded text messaging so you can turn it off here and going down the list we have the video out setting here but we can't access it until we actually plug in a video out cable which you have to buy separately it's one of the good things about the touch pro is that you can do video out but they don't include the cabling for that unfortunately and that's pretty much it for for system settings and over in in connections nothing's really unusual here so overall I think sprint did a really good job at bringing the touch pro to their network they didn't cripple it with a bunch of software the specifications are similar it's still a fast and powerful device that I think a lot of business users will really appreciate and by the way there's still no touchflo 3d and landscape you just get a bunch of icons but we kind of expected that so if you're on the sprint network and you're looking for a really powerful windows mobile phone then the sprint touch pro is really a great way to go if you want the keyboard of course you have the option of the sprint touch of diamond which is the same exact thing just lacks a keyboard and of course that makes it thinner as well so that is it on the sprint HTC touch pro