Our correspondent tries out two phones that make both work and play a pleasure

HEAVY ON STYLE
FROM the first instance, the HTC Touch Pro screams business. I am fairly familiar with HTC’s TouchFLO 3D user interface by now and the Touch Pro was as easy to use as the Touch Cruise and Touch Diamond before it.
No issues there, though I was a little taken aback by the Touch Pro’s size and weight. At a rather heavy 165 grams, the beefy handset is like two Touch Diamonds fused into one.
Many of us are familiar with the Home screen, which displays the time, missed calls, call history and calender appointments. One scroll down is the contacts menu, followed by Messages that seem to fly into and out of view, and Mail.

Next up is the Internet browser and with the Touch Pro’s excellent screen along with 3G, hopefully soon, browsing the web on-the-move will only get better. You can create bookmarks for one-touch access to your favourite websites and turn the phone sideways to see webpages in landscape view.
Then there is the Music menu. Unlike the Diamond which didn’t have a slot for microSD memory cards and used a comparatively paltry 4GB internal memory, the Touch Pro does have memory card slot and is compatible with upgrades of up to 8GB.
Suddenly, the extra girth doesn’t look so bad. And you can also load up on your favourite songs.

After that comes the Weather, Settings and Program menus. While the Settings menu just makes life so much easier, the Programs menu, my favourite, lets you add on and access any feature of the handset in the quickest possible way. All this, without even venturing into the Windows Mobile operating system!
The similarities with the Diamond end here. The Touch Pro has a 3.2-megapixel camera and flash, although a weak LED one, but a flash nonetheless.

... contd.