Sprint Touch Pro – First Impressions

I received my Sprint Touch Pro yesterday and performed an off-camera unboxing.  There are plenty of videos up on youtube already if you are interested in seeing one.  Also there is a good gallery over at Engaget of in hand shots.

Referenced from Engaget

My first impressions of the device have left me staggering.  It was well worth waiting for and skipping the Mogul.  Here are a few of my thoughts on the device so far, more posts to come.

• The build quality of the device is very high, the keyboard mechanism is more solid than the mogul/apache models, and slides out from the same side as the apache.
• The backlit keyboard is very good and the key feel is accurate, although the buttons feel slightly smaller than the apache counterpart.
• The stylus is magnetic like the diamond and alerts the phone that it needs to be ready and an extra one is included in the packaging.
• The touchflow interface is smooth so long as you don’t leave many (5+) applications in the background.  Combined with the screen resolution, it provides the best Windows Mobile Navigation to date. 
• Comes with Tomtom Pocket Express, need to test it more
• Windows Livesearch (available without this particular phone) rocks, the speak function works very well, where’s google voice activated search??
• The TV-out function (with the correct cable) has yet to be tested, but is a great feature not available on many smartphones.   IT supports NTSC and PAL which almost all projectors have.  It won’t be VGA quality, but in a pinch could serve very useful.
• The business card reader has yet to be tested, but it’s a great concept to be able to photograph a business card and have it OCR and import on the fly.
• Put the included screen protector on immediately after removing the Sprint shipping protector and be sure to make sure there aren’t any oils or dust on them.
• The inertial sensors are very sensitive as displayed by the maze/ball game.
• The screen resolution is striking, the pixel pitch is very hard to see (I couldn’t) even when looking very closely.
• Includes a 1gig Micro SD card
• The 3.2 MP camera does better than I’ve seen any phone.  Decent controls and resolultion, video works well
• Active sync works like a champ, and a new configuration option was added to automatically setup your account (I think this was added in 6.0)
• The opera web browser (IE is still available) is very good an provides the scroll/zoom feature like the iphone New York Times Demo.
• Includes Acrobat Reader, a must.
• Includes an IM client that supports, AOL, MSN and Yahoo
• Includes JetCet Printing over Wifi.  Printing from your phone!
• MP3 trimmer for those audio recordings and making ringtones on the fly
• RSS reader, does what it says..
• Sprint TV works much like the other phones but now has auto orientation depending on how you hold the phone
• Includes a dedicated youtube application that works well, but takes some time to buffer large videos
• Includes Windows Voice Command (push and hold the phone send key) I believe it’s v1.6
• Includes an audio booster for use with headsets and car BT pairings.
• I have yet to test the phone as modem, but it looks like the PCS vision option has been removed, so I’m curious if they are locking down on data access.

More to come!

Sprint Touch Pro Delayed – Sometime in Nov

As reported by Cnet and a local anxious fellow geek, the news has broken that the Touch Pro from Sprint has been delayed.  Bonnie Cha of Cnet quoted her Sprint contact:

“Sprint expects to slightly delay launch of the Touch Pro by HTC to ensure we have adequate inventory in all channels before making the device commercially available. Customers can expect the device to become available in select national retailers by the end of the month and then in all Sprint sales channels including online at www.sprint.com and Sprint Stores by early November.”

Boo.  But I’ll still wait.

Sprint Touch Pro Passes FCC muster

In another chapter in bringing a decent phone to Sprint after a 3 year hiatus, the HTC Touch Pro received it’s approval from the FCC for the CDMA version. Sounds like it’s still going to be a few months, but i hope to see a preview of it at the upcoming Microsoft Partner Conference next week.

If you haven’t seen an overview.. here’s a short video