HTC Touch Pro

From straight on, the HTC Touch Pro looks much like its sibling, the HTC Touch Diamond, with its sleek, smoky mirrored face, rounded edges, and attractive silver trim. Of course, the big difference is the addition of the slide out QWERTY keyboard, which is a boon for messaging fanatics but also consequently adds some bulk to the smart phone.

At 4 inches tall by 2 inches wide by 0.7 inch deep and 5.3 ounces, the Touch Pro is thick and heavy, making for a pretty tight fit in a pants pocket, but it's a more compact device compared with the HTC Mogul. The handset has a solid construction and features a soft touch finish on back for extra texture. However, instead of a burgundy cover like the Touch Diamond, the Touch Pro has a silver back, which is somewhat plain but a more safe color for the corporate centric smart phone.

The Touch Pro features the same 2.8 inch, 262,000 colors touch screen and 3D TouchFlo interface as the Diamond. With a 640x480 pixel resolution, everything looks incredibly sharp and vibrant on screen.

The touch screen is responsive and works well with the 3D TouchFlo interface. There is a toolbar along the bottom of the screen that lets you scroll left to right and launch applications with one touch.

In several of the programs more specifically email, the camera, and music you can go through your files and messages by swiping your thumb or finger up or down the screen, all with a cool animated 3D effect. While the Home screen is set to the Sprint theme by default, you can choose from others in the Settings menu as well as add items to the Today screen and change the background image.

On top of all this, the Touch Pro is also equipped with an accelerometer, so when you physically rotate the phone (left or right), the screen orientation goes from portrait mode to landscape mode. However, there are a couple of caveats. First, the accelerometer only works in certain applications, such as pictures, video, and Web browsing, but not for others like Office documents, Calendar, or email when the phone is closed.

We also found that at times, it takes some time for the screen to switch, and the delay was long enough to make us wonder whether the system froze. This was never the case, but the lag got to be pretty annoying. There is a utility called G-Sensor, which you can find in the Settings menu that lets you recalibrate the screen if you think it's off.