Touch Pro Review

Hi,

I've had this phone for about a week now and although its a good phone with good features, I have to say I am disappointed with it.  Its just not as good as it should be.


GUI

My main gripes are ... the Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro Operating System uses a 10+ year old GUI.  I guess this is to keep the memory demands low, but it really should be better than it is. 

The TouchFLO 3D GUI is far better, but its merely a facade, as soon as you press a button you're back into the ugly Windows OS.

OK so those are merely cosmetic gripes.  Onto the more substancial problems.


STANDBY SETTING

Say you are phoning a call centre, the screen blacks out every 5 seconds so you have to press the power button to type in the rest of whatever numbers they ask you to input.  It totally ignores the user pressing a key a second before going into standby!!!  That is absolutely rubbish.


MESSAGING

Why not keep the TouchFLO GUI when entering text messages, which would be a main usage function of this phone.

The inputting is not intuitive at all.  If you want to input a non dictionary word, like slang or an abbreviation, you have to write in bits, you can't just press the across arrow to accept the part you have written, by doing that it'll scroll across to the next word in its predictive text options.  Its not even a matter of getting used to it, there doesn't appear to be a way around this issue, other than changing from predictive text to regular... I guess you don't need predictive when you have a qwerty keyboard though so maybe I just turn that off.


INTERNET BROWSING

I don't like not being able to access googlemail via the browser, rather I have to use their email application.

Only being able to open 3 browser windows at a time is poor.


CALL VOLUME & SPEAKER

The speaker is very tinny when used above volume level 2 and on max its extremely tinny and the max volume isn't even very loud.  There are 5 levels.

The usual ear speaker is very quiet on max volume as well and virtually inaudible on lower volume levels.


I think this phone overall is very unimpressive, especially for its pricetag.  It doesn't even get the basics right.


There are things I do like though... I like the Google Maps application, I like TouchFLO (there is just not enough of it), I like Teeter, I like the overall style of the phone, I like the WI-FI connectivity and speed of Internet access.  I like using youtube on it and I like how it re-alignes the text on the browser so it fits on one page.    

I heard the Sprint version has corrected alot of issues thru software updates and in term of the tabs issue you have with the web browser (can only open 3)...when was there ever a time that mobile browser allowed you to even open 2 and have them running at the same time? Overall good review