[acteon]

Sprint Touch Pro - Purchased Oct. 24 From Best Buy

One of the really "decieving" things about the HTC Touch Pro is its size. (I say decieving because the pictures do not do it justice, I really love it for the size) If anyone has ever held a Blackberry Pearl it is the same size but slighly thicker. When I first got back to my apartment one of the first things I noticed about the phone was its bright screen and then later its battery life. One thing that was very difficult to set up after transferring from a Blackberry was email. Lets be quite frank, setting up email on the Touch Pro other than Gmail or Yahoo POP or IMAP was ridiculously difficult. Recently I had opened a Rocketmail account (through Yahoo) and to set that up had to add it as a regular Yahoo account and when it would not connect change the the username to @rocketmail.com. I also connect to an exchange server and find it very frustrating that if I set it to not sync my contacts they simply delete off my phone. Another issue I have is that my POP accounts do not push the email to my phone. Rather they have to sync every 5 or so minutes. I discovered later that this significantly drains the battery so I have adjusted it to every hour or so.

(Now please do not interpret this as I dislike the phone, I really love it, I just want to be fair to those who may wish to purchase it, so that they know all of the facts.) Another thing I found is that the phone is literally a battery ***** when you take it out of the box. Now while some of you may argue, I understand it is a windows mobile phone and in that realm it is acceptable. Well for myself and I feel most business users, four hours is not a work day. In order to extend the battery the screen brightness must be reduced. Indoors this is fine, I have it set the the 3rd from the lowest, with the automatic adjust off. Outdoors it is incredibly difficult to see.

After doing all of these battery adjustments the phone now will last me over twelve hours with regular use (but no wifi, bluetooth, or long phone conversations). I've heard some mention that out of the box this phone is slow and to do a hard reset. I myself have had no experienced this, my phone is incredibly fast and Touch Flo 3D is very responsive. The built in IM client for the phone is effective but lacks features (such as showing when users are idle) and unfortunately most others are very expensive ($20). Connecting the phone to a pc is very easy and everything works as expected. I have yet to try loading a video but music, youtube, and the internet work as expected. I am truely amazed by Sprint's network (I am coming from a long and hateful relationship with T-Mobile). Basically this phone just works, the camera is not a replacement for your good old digital camera but it is sufficient for picture mail and undetailed shots. A slight annoyance is the phone must be on/ in standby for the alarm to work (This may be an obvious for most people, but coming from a blackberry this was a feature I had enjoyed).

Doing a softreset is easy, and the phone comes back quickly as is expected. Something that has been mentioned a hundred times is the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, the dongle is annoying and does not charge the phone as fast as a direct plug in to the wall. To sum up, if email is your life, stick to a blackberry (you will truely miss the push email). If email is important, but will not end your life if it syncs every hour, than this phone would generally be a good buy for you. It is responsive and a truely well designed and beautiful phone. Do yourself a favor, however, invest in the insurance, I know I did. I feel as though if I dropped this phone, it might not survive. I hoped this helped someone in their decision. If anyone is teetering and would like to speak to me personally about a specific issue, please PM me.

Have a great rest of the weekend.