[Revelate]

I am a Mogul user who bought the Touch Pro as an upgrade and have very mixed feelings, mostly negative, about the Touch Pro. If any other Mogul users who have upgraded to the TP have insight or suggestions that would improve my experience, I'd love to hear your comments.

I really want to like the Touch Pro for the keyboard and screen improvements, but these are fairly minor hardware updates for Mogul users. The real pain is the usability of the phone itself. A little background on my Mogul experience is that I was very impressed with the Mogul after the stock Sprint WM6.1 update in August. WM 6.1 improvements, full GPS, great battery life and as stable as WM devices can get. Sure it is on the slow side and the limited memory required occasional application monitoring for memory usage, but those were pretty minor when compared to all the great features. And most importantly, everything just worked. The Touch Pro, so far, is a much worse experience.

Pros:
- Great hi-res screen
- (Mostly) good form factor
- 5 row keyboard is fantastic, especially for numbers and symbols

Cons overview (many more below):
- Battery life is horrible, can barely get 6 hours with average usage (Bluetooth on, ~2 hours of voice a day, 10-15 minutes of web browsing)
- Screen sensitivity is poor at the edges where the OK, Start Menu, scroll bar and soft keys are
- Either the screen, or the TouchFlo interface, or both, is horrendously inconsistent
- The TouchFlo interface itself, even if it worked properly, is almost completely useless

TouchFlo interface

Overview: This phone, combined with TouchFlo, has a disturbingly inconsistent and useless interface. Some of the worst offenses are:

- A home screen with a clock that covers half the display. Worthless. Even sliding it up to be a smaller clock, it still consumes too much real estate for the important information that any business user would want to see at a glance - a full day of calendar items, tasks, and shortcuts to commonly used apps.

- Poor integration with native Windows Mobile notifications.
Example #1 - The alarm clock. When an alarm goes off using the regular WM interface the two soft keys change to "Dismiss" and "Snooze". in TouchFlo, there's no screen pop or soft key options when the alarm goes off. Through trial and error I found that pressing the End button stops the alarm, but there's no snooze option.
Example #2 - Notifications (meeting reminders, new mail, etc). There is no screen pop or soft key to view and review system notifications. Instead it's a two-step process to select the icon bar at the top of the screen (if it works due to the lack of sensitivity on the screen edge) then select the notification icon. On the Mogul I just tapped the left soft key (which changes to Notification when appropriate) to view my reminders. Now it's a freaking job just to view them and I miss nearly all of my meeting reminders.

- Screen "sliding" in all applications.
Example #1 - Application bar. The app bar across the bottom of the screen is supposed to scroll if you grab any part of it and slide/flick across the screen. Instead it just selects the app that I first touched and opens it. It makes the entire application bar useless and I'm forced to click left and right on the D-pad. Why have a touch-centric interface when I can't use it???
Example #2 - Mail. When I'm viewing mail it defaults to showing the envelope with a message in it. I should be able to flick up and down to scroll through messages, but that only works about 70% of the time. The other 30% it opens the message that I was trying to skip by.
Example #3 - Calendar. No sliding, flicking, grabbing, available. Plain ol' WM Calendar, must use D-pad. Again, ts this suppose to be a touch-centric device or not??

Even without these problems, the interface itself is just poorly designed.

Physical design

Overview: I like the design. It's the right weight and size for its intended use as a slide-out smart phone. I could see the display benefiting from being just a little wider to accomodate the touch interface when used without a stylus, but it's still good. I don't find the design to be a significant advantage over the Mogul though... they share similar design characteristics.

The display is beautiful. It's bright and crisp. The resolution is so good that more text on web pages is legible which helps avoid time consuming zoom & scroll when scanning a web page.

The 5 row keyboard is great. I love using numbers without a function key, especially when typing passwords.

The flush-mount display is great for making full use of the screen all the way to the edge when not using the stylus.

The accelerometer, while present, rarely comes in handy with this phone. Only a couple of apps actually work with it (web browser, photo viewer) and in Opera it's incredibly slow to change from portrait to landscape and visa versa.

Even with some great hardware enhancements, the execution suffers greatly. It's definitely form over function. The chrome and black gets dirty and oily very quickly. The entire button section (D-pad and hard keys) is incredibly frustrating to use. There's a fine line between clicking the center of the pad, to clicking a direction on the pad (up/down/left/right) to clicking one of the 4 hard keys that surround the pad. I find myself trying to click right on the pad and getting the "back" key instead. If I move closer to the pad to click right, it clicks the center of the pad instead.

No dedicated soft keys. No Start key on the keyboard. No OK key on the keyboard. These are sorely missed. In contrast, the Mogul has all the "missing" keys, and also has a number of buttons around the entire case that are very useful. I use one for Comm Mgr to turn BT on and off. I use the other for voice commands, and yet another for opening a browser.

The battery life is junk. I can't get through a normal day without the phone dying around 2-3pm. Just not acceptable. The Mogul will go all day and half of the next before it dies.

Browser support

Overview: The Touch Pro includes Opera Mobile v9.5 as the default browser. This was one of the most exciting features for me as Opera Mobile didn't work on my Mogul due to the memory limitations... I got "out of memory" errors on every page, so I was "forced" to use Skyfire on the Mogul.

As it turns out, Skyfire is simply a better, faster browser for the mobile world. I was shocked at how slow Opera Mobile is when compared to Skyfire. The clarity of Opera is a little better than Skyfire, but I'll trade a bit of blur for a web site that opens in 3 seconds (Skyfire) vs 15 seconds (Opera).

While the Mogul doesn't work with Opera Mobile, I now know that I don't need Opera Mobile when I have Skyfire, thus removing one of the limitations I thought I had with the Mogul.

Summary

I am disappointed with the phone, mostly due to the TouchFlo interface and the lack of usability. I'm about 90% sure I will return it and go back to using the Mogul, but there's still a glimmer of hope that I (or Sprint, or HTC) can correct the worst issues and restore my faith in what I thought was going to be the "killer phone".