This is a follow up post to my last article reviewing the Palm Pre.

As I explained previously, I was not a huge fan of the Pre. It was an ok platform, but it didn’t knock my socks off and it really didn’t measure up to the iPhone, in my opinion. In fact, even though it did some things very well, making phone calls wasn’t one of them (that is the reason most people buy a phone, after all!).

So at the end of my 30 day trial with the Pre, I told Sprint I wanted to upgrade my phone to the HTC Touch Pro 2. I previously owned a HTC Touch Dual with Cincinnati Bell, so I had a feeling I was going to like the Pro.

I was wrong. I LOVE IT!!!

The Good

The Pro 2, as well as some of the other HTC models, comes with the TouchFlo 3D interface that sits on top of the Windows Mobile 6 platform. While it takes some getting used to, after only one week I find myself much more productive with the TouchFlo than I was with the Palm OS. Here is the good stuff, point by point.

• The Pro 2 has an “application slider” across the bottom, displaying icons for your Home, Email, Messaging and Calendar by default (you can see it in action on the Touch Pro here). You can also drag and slide your finger to the right to go to other areas such as Internet, Music and Weather. There are about a dozen in all. While on the Home screen, if you have any emails or text messages, the number of each appears on top of the associated icon. This is a nice improvement over the Palm Pre, which displayed notifications at the bottom of the screen by reducing the top part of the display. And the Palm only had 5 launch icons, one of which was the phone keypad (which underscored, to me, that the phone functions were thought of as an application rather than the primary purpose of the phone). In all, I find that both launching applications as well as  “eyeballing” the current status is much better on the Pro than the Pre.
• What can I say about the Home screen? In short, genius. With the large clock display and statuses for missed phone calls, voicemails, and upcoming appointments (in addition to the application slider), I can easily glance at the screen to figure out what action to take, or anything I may have missed. The Palm was a little less informative, and the clock display was only large while the phone was locked (the eyes aren’t what they used to be, you know?).
• The People page is where you set up your favorite contacts, or you can display all contacts. This is where the Palm really fell flat, IMHO. Setting favorite contacts just wasn’t the Palm’s strength, again underscoring that it is an app platform and not a phone.
• Email and texting, which I associate as similar applications, are about the same on the Pro and the Pre. When texting, I do prefer the “instant message” type of view that the Pro gives you, where the Palm would insert a line break every time the clock moved more than a minute. That’s minor, though.
• Web browsing I would also call a draw with the Pre. The Pro uses Opera Mobile 9.5, which seems to be about even with the Palm browser. And both take good advantage of the auto-tilt feature that is becoming very common. One minor complaint about the Pre was that I always had to drill-down one folder to get to a bookmark, which seems like an unnecessary burden.
• The keyboard – hands down winner is the Pro over the Pre. Both have full QWERTY-style keyboards, but as you can see in the picture above, the Pro’s keyboard covers the entire length of the phone. The Pre condenses the keyboard to the width of the phone, which is considerably smaller. For a guy with big hands, the Pre was a little annoying to type out long messages.
• The “App Store” – I’d have to say the edge goes to the Pro here, but that may simply be because Windows Mobile has been around longer than the Palm Pre. But both are sadly trailing the iPhone in this area. Microsoft has legions of developers, you’d think they would get on the ball here. I have no forecast for the Pre.
• Bluetooth features – again the winner is the Pro. While wearing your headset, not only does the Pro announce your incoming calls by reading out loud (yes, you read that right) the contact name, but you can also perform voice dialing without pre-recording the names in your own voice. Just say “Call Matt Noonan mobile” and the phone will confirm your choice, then dial the number. This was also a feature on the Touch Dual, and I loved it then (actually, I think it is a Windows Mobile 6 feature). My previous phone was a Motorola Razr V3, and if you wanted voice dialing you had to record each and every voice entry in your own voice. And somehow the Razr could never truly distinguish between “Home” and “Mom”. The Pro handles this with ease. There are also some other voice commands you can use, such as “What time is it?” and “When is my next appointment?”. If you don’t have a headset, you can hold down the Talk button and get the same function. Cool.
• And the coolest feature of all? While on a call, simply lay the Touch Pro 2 face-down on the table and it turns into a speaker phone automatically. Very, very cool.

The Bad

As I said in my last post, every cell phone platform has something about it you aren’t going to like. I think the complaint I have heard the most about the iPhone, which I think we can all agree is the category leader here, is that there is no physical keyboard. The question is always, does the phone have more features that you like vs. what you don’t like. So here are some of the things I don’t like about the Pro 2.

• TouchFlo vs. Windows – While the Touch Dual let Windows Mobile menus invade it’s interface, the Pro tries to hide the standard Windows look and feel. In fact, the only hint that the Pro is based in Windows Mobile on the Home screen is the Start menu at the top left. However, clicking on Start does not produce the standard menu, but instead takes you to the application list (this is a nod to the iPhone’s app list). And other WinMobile functions are similarly buried. The problem is that the TouchFlo interface cannot get past the fact that Windows is under there, somewhere. And sometimes, TouchFlo gives way to Windows when it shouldn’t. For example, there are TouchFlo screens that duplicate Windows screens (email and texting are two), and sometimes you get one version and sometimes you get the other. It’s a little schizophrenic, but it’s a minor complaint. Clearly, phones like the Pre and iPhone benefit from having a “from the ground up” operating system, and all the apps inherit this benefit. It seems to me that Microsoft should get with the TouchFlo people and come up with an integrated OS.
• The Auto-Tilt – well, it isn’t always “auto”. Like the Palm, the tilt works great in some applications (particularly the browser), but seems oddly absent in others. However, Windows Mobile to the rescue, you can force a change to landscape mode, and on the Pro this is easily accomplished by sliding out the keyboard (push the keyboard back in to force portrait mode). Still, not as slick as the iPhone.
• HTML mail – I have seen the first Pro (not the 2) handle HTML formatted mail, so I know it is possible, but for some reason the option is disabled on my phone (as it was on the Dual). Google did not help with a solution, saying basically that you need Exchange 2007 to enable this feature, but I know this is not true. If I figure it out, I will post the solution so that others may benefit.
• No IE Mobile – While Opera is an excellent browser, sometimes it is nice to have an alternate (especially if you develop mobile web applications, as I do). It seems weird to me that the HTC folks removed this option.

Summary

Do I love my new Touch Pro 2? An emphatic yes. Is it better than the Palm Pre? For me, and for how I work, another yes. Is it the iPhone killer? No, probably not. The Touch Pro 2 is far and away the best Windows Mobile phone I have encountered to date, but the TouchFlo 3D is a (great!) bolt-on interface and will always trail integrated platforms like the iPhone and the Palm until the integration factor is overcome.

All 3 are good phones, the Palm Pre, the HTC Touch Pro 2 and the iPhone. I don’t think you would be unhappy with any of them if you are in the market for a smart phone. All I know is…

Unlike the Pre, I won’t be returning this phone after the 30 day trial period.  :)

Recently, I traded in my beloved HTC Touch Dual for the new and much hyped Palm Pre.

It was a really difficult decision, because I really liked my Touch. It had a Windows Mobile OS and a really inventive interface on top of it, and I was hooked almost right away. Sure, there were some quirks I didn’t like, what cell phone doesn’t have those? But my main reason was that my Touch was tied to Cincinnati Bell and therefore the Edge network. In other words, no 3G broadband. To make matters worse, CB informed me that 3G would not be around until Q4 (which really means next year), and in any case the Touch doesn’t support 3G so I would have to buy a new phone to boot.  Grrrrr…

So I decided to give Sprint a try. I had been using the Novatel MiFi 2200 card (which I absolutely love, btw) on Sprint, and I had a friend with an HTC Touch Pro, so maybe I could stay with HTC. No such luck. Sprint stopped selling the Touch Pro in advance of the upcoming HTC Touch Pro 2 (rumored around Sept. 8). Because I have had enough of CinciBell, I decided to give the Palm Pre a go, since I had 30 days to decide and I was within that window for the HTC release.

I had already seen all the commercials seemingly hyping the Pre as an “iPhone killer”. Well, it isn’t… at least not for me.

• For starters, it’s a battery hog (so is the iPhone, but that’s another story). A day to a day and a half was about the max I got out of it. That was a big change from the 3-4 days I got from the Touch.
  
• The app store… really isn’t much of one. This is understandable since the Pre is so new, but I have to believe that Apple has cornered the mind share on custom phone apps (for now). If you were going to write your own custom app right now, which platform would you target first? And since all of that work is probably throw away outside of Apple, are you going to invest in and support another proprietary code base? Probably not…
  Update (9/28/09): For a different take on this item, read this developer’s experience with trying to get his apps published to the Palm App Store.
  http://jwz.livejournal.com/1096401.html
  
• While I like the touch screen overall, the ability to copy and paste seems like an afterthought. There are too many times I want to copy some text from a web page and send it via email or SMS, but you simply can’t do it with the Pre. And for the few situations where you can select text, good luck if the text sits against the left or right edge of the screen.
  
• I’m sure this is the case with some of the iPhone apps as well, but why don’t all the built-in apps take advantage of the screen tilting mechanism? Email and texting seem to be  an especially odd omission for this feature. I also hoped that Tweed would take advantage, but it doesn’t. Only the web browser seems to be aware that the feature exists at all. The one nice feature I have not seen before: the screen shuts off during a call, so you don’t accidentally hit any buttons while you hold the phone to your ear. When you swing the phone away from your, say to hang up the call, the screen pops back on. Nice, but not a killer feature.
  
• The keyboard is too small. I think a full keyboard spanning the length of the phone rather than the width would have been better. But I have big hands. In a way I miss the predictive typing that I had on the HTC. Sometimes its nice not to have to type the entire word.
  
• Opening PDFs seems to darn near impossible. There is an app included to read PDFs, but only from the file system. You can’t open PDFs from the web, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to save the PDF from the browser to the file system. Pretty big oversight, if you ask me…
  
• And will somebody please explain to me why all these next generation phones can’t display email in HTML format? I know you guys can do better than this…

When the dislikes add up to more than the likes, and in this case they do, the phone is going back. I enjoyed my time with the Pre, and it is good to get experience with different platforms so you can develop a feel for which ones you like and which ones you don’t. But my sense is that I am going to stick with the Windows Mobile platform for now.

Next up for me, a report on how much I like the HTC Touch Pro 2…