HTC’s been a fan of Windows Mobile for their phones for a while now. Even though they’re going with Android on their newer phones (such as the Hero, which we ignored for the sake of this video), their current Windows Mobile offerings still make for awesome fun. In this run-through, I take a rather quick look at HTC’s current US-bound Windows Mobile phones:
- Snap, coming out on two different carriers (and two different bands) with different looks for each carrier
- S743, for those who don’t like touch screens but love their candy bars
- Touch Cruise, basically a standard Windows Mobile touchscreen phone
- Touch Pro 2, a touchscreen phone with a full horizontal keyboard and other ridiculous features
- Touch Diamond 2, essentially the same as the Pro 2 but with the keyboard swapped for a higher resolution camera.
All of them are solidly built. The only downside to these phones (except for the Snap, which is subsidized by both T-Mobile and Sprint) is the price, but when you consider that HTC makes some of the best Windows Mobile smartphones around, that price might not be a bad business expense. Sadly, if you’re aiming for the Touch Diamond 2 or Pro 2 with hopes of using that front-mounted camera, consider moving to Europe; two-way video calling isn’t offered in the USA.
You can catch the vanilla YouTube and YouTube HD videos after the break.
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There’s an additional phone by HTC coming out in 3-6 months not reviewed here.
Those of you who know me in person know that I have a ridiculously huge “phone”, the HTC Advantage X7500, or codename “Athena”. It comes with a 4.7″ VGA screen, detachable magnetic keyboard, and pretty much the same ridiculous features as the HTC Touch (minus the TouchFLO frontend software, but with the VueFLO gravity sensor). It also supports TV and VGA output, and is even compatible with some USB storage devices. The only downsides are the size, weight, and inability to be used as a standard handset (a headset is “required” in the literature, or you can hold the phone in front of you and have it speakerphone the call).
HTC is coming out in September with an updated version of the Advantage, codename “Thoth”. It retains the same form factor, but includes double the RAM, a larger hard disk, a 1GHz processor (double the speed of the ones in the phones Bryant reviewed as well as the Athena’s), an ATI ImageOn 2D/3D graphics accelerator, and the latest version (6.5 according to reports) of Windows Mobile Professional.
The “Thoth” probably will not be suitable as a crackberry replacement, as it retains the difficulty taking calls without additional hardware. However with the large screen size and extra RAM, it’s quite suitable as a handheld PC, for those who need to check their e-mail, view the latest metric graphs in Excel Mobile, and surf their intranet and the Internet in Mozilla Fennec.
(For the record, I do not physically have a Thoth, but I do have a copy of the maintenance manual and spec sheets.)
Why do you only show the crappy HTC models ? The new HTC phones have poor quality (i can not say this about Touch HD), cheaper matherials (look like toys) nothing revolutionary for their price, you can only compare the latest prones to the chinese unknown brands of WM phones… It is sad that HTC go this way. I hoped that HTC will make better phone than HTC Touch HD in 2009, but all the phones produced have far worst quality. Take a look at Acer new phones, after Acer bought ETEN, their first phones look very promissing. Also Asus have few devices which will show up in Q4. If HTC continiues this way they will loose.
haha, crappy? The touch pro 2 is miles better than the touch HD.
Well if you look more closely, the hardware in HD and TP2 is exactly the same (same phone difrend shell) they both have same results in multimedia benchmarks (which is normal because it uses same CPU on the same speed). Samsung CPU berforms a lot better in multimedia than any HTC phone so far (tested Acer m900, and Acer f900 with Touch HD and Touch Pro 2 – and HTC devices can not handle video even close to HD). Also tested HTC Universal (good old phone) with HD, and the result was that the HD is a little better in performance (same test video 1-2 FPS difrence). And if you looked at the recent news HTC is one of the companies which sue Qualcomm because of crappy performance of their cpus (which are in at least 3 generations of HTC phones). So please reserach a little before made posts like this.