Works perfectly!! Thank you very much for posting that!

__________________

-boom

I'm enjoying it greatly so far. I've had the 6700 for the last 2 years, so this feels like a massive upgrade. The lack of buttons took a little getting used to but really does not bother me any more. The screen could be a little bigger, but it looks great so I'll live.

I'm not entirely sold on TouchFlo. It looks great and doesn't seem very slow compared to some of the "reviews" I heard before its release...I'm just partial to the old today screen I suppose.

Overall compared to the 6700, the touch pro seems:
1) MUCH smaller ++
2) More memory ++++++
3) Faster & more responsive +++
4) I can actually hear conversations now through the speaker +++++++++++

Once I play with it some more I'll post additional feedback, but so far I really don't have any stand out negatives.

Will have to post my review soon...The only store in AZ that has one is in Prescott. It's a great drive from Phoenix and only about 1:30 from the house. Can't wait to get my hands on it in a couple hours!

__________________
Bryan

"I'm not going anywhere NEAR that sabertooth snatch of yours." - Dr. Christian Troy

I hope you get it! I think it is worth the drive up to Prescott.

I was able to get one of the first on Friday from one of the Best Buy's in Phoenix. I was able to see the quantities available at the other stores and none of them had over 10 to begin with.

I wonder if there will be any second TP shipments to Best Buy before the coupon expires?

__________________

-boom

The Scottsdale store at 101 and FLW had 3 but sold them all. They have 2 on order, but don't know when they'll get them.

Just got home, was about 3.5 hours round trip including time spent at BB. Luckily I live just north of the 101 and Tatum, so the drive isn't too bad.

Voice services are working...patiently waiting for data to be ported over and working...normally goes right away when I switch devices, but could take up to 4 hours

Overall the phone has been great. Super fast and lots of memory available. I'll keep it stock for a while and fool around with TouchFLO and see how it goes.

I'll definitely be hanging on to it and don't expect to return it.

Total price was $260.03 out the door. Never have bought a Sprint phone from BB before, but the process was extremely smooth and a lot cheaper than going through Sprint (no need to deal with mail in rebates, etc.).

Oh, and I'm already missing the scroll wheel on the side!

__________________
Bryan

"I'm not going anywhere NEAR that sabertooth snatch of yours." - Dr. Christian Troy

I purchased my Touch Pro at Best Buy of course. I had never bought a phone there; I've always bought them through TeleSales. Let me start off by saying my Best Buy purchasing experience was amazing. They had the phone in my hands, activated, and me out the door in less time than it would normally take on the phone with TeleSales to order one and have to wait for it. My out the door price was $499.95 with a 1 year re-up (I was not elligible for the 2 year).

I upgraded from the Mogul, so a lot of what I'm writing is from that perspective.

General
The phone itself is considerably smaller and lighter than the Mogul, and has a much more comfortable feel in the hand. The VGA (not QVGA!) display is crisp and clear, providing a good vehicle for the TouchFlo interface. One thing I noticed is that the vibrate function is somewhat less intense than the Mogul's was. It's still quite easy to feel, but it has a big bonus: it's actually QUIET. You can't hear the phone vibrate from across the room. The automatic backlight intensity is a good feature that works well. It doesn't dim up and down crazily. The only thing is that it still doesn't seem to dim quite enough in a completely pitch black room.

One big difference is obviously the keyboard. Full QWERTY, with a number row It makes a big difference not having to FN-lock to type in numbers now. Other keys, like a forward slash, comma, period and even a Control key are thoughtfully added. I've needed the FN key very rarely. I find I can type much faster on the Touch Pro KB than I could on the Mogul's.

Bluetooth handsfree has proven solid, both with my Jabra JX-10 and my 2008 Honda Accord. No noise, pairing problems, dropouts or other things I've experienced in the past.

The Phone application is much nicer and responds very quickly to touch screen dial pad input. In-call navigation is easy to use, contact pictures are displayed on call ring-in and so forth. A major improvement in this phone over the Mogul is, well, the PHONE!

Interface
Coming from the Mogul, the interface is obviously very different. The first thing I noticed was the lack of hardware buttons. On the edges, there are only the volume buttons on the sides, and the power button on the top. This was a mindset shift for a former Mogul owner who had buttons for everything - IE, Recorder, OK, camera, comm manager, etc. After a short adaptation period, it was no problem getting used to accessing those features in TouchFlo.

The TouchFlo interface itself is intuitive and elegant. Press and drag across the navigation "tape" and release on the component you want to work with. It took a little practice since I was new to it, but I can whip around to the applet I want to use in no time flat now. You eventually learn how much finger movement it takes to get from here to there, and it becomes second nature.

Applets
The Email application shows the first few lines of your messages in a little envelope, and you can use your finger to scroll through them, pick one and then tap it to read. You can left and right swipe in the messages for next and previous message, finger scroll up and down to read them, and the touch sensitive zoom outside the D-pad works to make the font size bigger or smaller. It's a very cool applet that's responsive, intuitive and looks smooth as well. I do not find myself going into the underlying Pocket Outlook for mail very often.

The Messages application shows your text messages, and allows you to swipe up and down to scroll through your messages, with a cool line by line drop in animation transition betweeen messages. Underneath is the same threaded SMS that was built into the latest Mogul ROM update. There's nifty looking animation as you transition from message to message. Again, I don't find myself spending a lot of time in Pocket Outlook itself, since the TouchFlo applet exposes the most commonly used functionality.

PictureMail, BTW, uses a Sprint written application for sending picture messages. It's not a true MMS inbox. Also, I haven't been able to successfully PM from my phone to a Verizon phone yet either, although I haven't tried much.

The Settings area is okay, but it's still a bit of a weak point IMO. The basic stuff is there - different radios on and off, ring tones, audio, etc. I still find myself having to go into the All Settings interface often to tweak this or that. When you go in there, it feels like dropping back to Windows 3.1 from Vista or something. Swipe navigation doesn't work well, since of course it's traditional WinMob. HTC could do a better job exposing more of the advanced settings in their TouchFlo settings applet. The BlueTooth and Exchange ActiveSync pairint process come to mind in particular. These are one-time things for most people though, so once they're done, you're done with those.

The Programs area is also okay, allowing you to assign your 18 favorite programs on a swipe scrollable quick access set of icons or access or scroll and run all programs. It's a suitable replacement for the Start Menu. My only complaint is that it shouldn't be all the way at the right of the navigation tape, but over on the left. (It'd be nice if you could reorder those items on the tape.)

Web Experience
The web browsing ("Internet") functionality is by far the largest improvement over the Mogul. The Opera Mobile browser is light years ahead of PIE. Full versions of web pages (as opposed to mobile versions) are easily browsed in OM. You double-tap a section of the page that you're interested in, and the browser will zoom into that section. It appears to use the underlying page code as a guide, zooming into the DIV, table row or table cell that you double tapped in and zooming it to fit the width of the screen. OM is fully accelerometer aware; when you turn the device on its side or even upside down, the browser's orientation will change to match within a second or two. OM has a full JScript implementation, so pages I couldn't use before like online calendars, pages with JScript navigation and so forth work perfectly in it. I have yet to find that works on a desktop browser but not OM on the Touch Pro thusfar, and I've tried my best to break it with intense JScript pages and so on.

I can't comment on Sprint Music or Sprint TV as I haven't played with them yet on this device.

Photos/Videos/Camera
The Touch Pro quite possibly has the best PDA phone camera I've ever encountered. The white balancing and light metering on the Mogul's camera really stunk, and it took pictures that often looked like they were taken on other planets. Over/under exposed, white balance way off into the yellows. The Touch Pro seems to have overcome this nicely. The built-in 3.2MP camera (with variable focus and auto-focus!) takes excellent pictures. I find them comparable to a low end point and shoot camera. I shared some of the photos with a friend who is a photophile, and they agreed that the pictures were excellent. The placement of the lens CAN mean it gets smudged during normal phone use, so desmudging it before taking a photo is a must. By default, JPEG compression is set to "fine" and will yield some rainbow ailasing and jaggies on some lines. Setting it to "super fine" instead removed these artifacts and yielded picture quality almost unbelievable from a phone camera.

The Photos and Videos application is a pleasure to use. It's swipe navigable as is everything else. Swipe up and down to scroll through your photos, which are aggregated from all the folders you have photos in on the phone. Tap a photo to see it full-sized, swipe left and right, use the touch sensitive ring to zoom in and out and finger drag to pan around. There's even a slide show mode. The P&V appliction is also accelerometer aware and the photo orientation will follow the phone's very quickly.

My complaint here is the difficulty in accessing the camera. To get to the camera, you either have to go to Photos and Videos and click the still or video camera, or have a shortcut to the Camera app on your Programs menu. This is one place I DO still miss having a hardware button for fast access.

Summary
This is the first PDA phone I can honestly say has EVERYTHING I want in a PDA phone. I have no desire or need to load hacks or third party applications to do what I desire; it's all in the ExtROM right out of the box. I have to say that I'm in love with this phone, and I would not go back to my Mogul for anything or any reason. An A++++ to Sprint and HTC on this device!

Touch Pro Review:
Ok, In this review I will try to address issues point by point in comparison to its predecessor the Mogul.
1. Design: The external design of the Pro is a welcome change from the Mogul. The Mogul always felt, well, a little clumsy. The 5 row keyboard is a welcome change. However lack of soft buttons is a bit trying. HTC appears to have tried to overcome this lack of soft buttons by including a more robust application (program) launcher tab. I have finally gotten used to using it and I have to say I don’t miss the buttons too much anymore. I did like being able to map a button to flashlight, however, now I only have one (the talk button) so pressing and holding it does the same thing. As it appears that HTC was primarily focused on making this device tactile and voice driven then that explains the lack of buttons. Also the screen is not really that noticeably smaller than the Mogul and the extremely improved resolution is a trade off that I can more than live with. Externally, I would have liked to have had the diamond (stealth) back for the device; the pearlescent back is fine and actually gives it a more “classy” look with the chrome ring accents and high gloss screen. Because of the things I have noted I would give its overall design 4 out of 5. There is room for improvement here.

2. Processor/Memory/Power Consumption: Whether running Touchflo 3D or the standard winmo interface I have found no lag and very smooth operation. It is refreshing to have a winmo device finally capable of navigating, playing music, and doing multiple other things – at the same time without any noticeable problems. Power management is not even close to impressive though. If you have your email set to anything other than manual power consumption is very high. Same thing with Sprint TV. So unfortunately, with this device I will always have to have a charger of some nature close at hand to go through a full day. When playing music with media player I really didn’t notice a severe power drain. I believe this is mainly due to the fact that the screen is able to and does shut off while media player is playing.

3. Bluetooth: Ah here is a place of vast improvement over the Mogul. Sound is crisp and clear through my Jabra BT8040, Motorola HT820’s, and Motorola’s T505. I am definitely pleased with the suite of BT options in the stack. FTP is faster than the Mogul so is Active sync syncing.

4. Wi-Fi Implementation is excellent. No problems here.

5. Active sync: I felt this needed a mention by itself. Under Vista/WMDC – NO PROBLEM. Under XP, I found myself in Async hell. My 1st try at syncing under XP wiped out my phone (contacts, favorites, everything). I went through uninstalling Async to a hard reset of the phone to trying to get it to connect via Bluetooth and disabled the advanced networking option. No matter what I have tried I have yet to sync it with my XP box. Async sees the Pro, the Pro see the computer however when the sync begins it ultimately fails. Very disappointed, especially if the is MSFT’s attempt at making this phone Vista and beyond capable and another attempt to get the user to “upgrade”. I am always suspicious about MSFT’s motives since their introduction of Vista. I would be interested in knowing whether anyone else has experienced this but as of the time of this review I have to give this portion a 0 out of 5.

6. TouchFlo 3D: When I had tried to use the other version of this on the Mogul I found it very frustrating because it wasn’t very intuitive. It seemed more like a toy than an actual production application frontend. So I was skeptical about how it would shake out on the Pro. As I had mentioned in another thread, the integration of this version is flawless and the interface is extremely intuitive. There are a couple of things that I would change if I could and that of course would be the huge clock and make the home screen more customizable so that it would more resemble SPB’s Diary so I could have more info up front without having to go off and search for it. However, even with the way that it is currently, I find it isn’t that difficult to flip over to email or calendar. With my initial pensiveness about it I must say that now I cannot imagine using anything but the interface. In fact when I go back to my Mogul I almost feel like I am going back to XP from Vista. (For those of you who have migrated to Vista you will definitely understand this analogy. Kind of the same as going from a Linux interface to XP, same analogy). Overall I have found the implementation of TouchFlo 3D visually stunning, extremely intuitive, and a productive interface that doesn’t hamper the overall productivity of the phone but instead compliments the devices abilities and Winmo 6.1 in general. However, because of the lack of customization ability I will give it a slight hit and IMO place it at a 4.5 on a scale of 5.

7. The accelerometer/gyro: Love it and will be looking for many apps to utilize it so 5 X 5 here.


8. Camera: The best that I have seen on any phone. The autofocus and stabilization using the gyro is great. I haven’t seen this since my trusty ole’ Samsung A940. The 3.2 megapixel camera provides crisp images in high/low/and no light. The Mogul had a good camera but taking pictures with it, unless you tethered it to a tripod or had very steady hands, I would always end up with slightly blurred images. 5 X 5 here.

9. Sprint TV: Looks good and sounds good but it is one of those apps that I like to have but seldom use. However, I can see using this with the TV Out cable (when I get one). So it gets 5 out of 5 at this point.


10. GPS Navigation: Excellent tracking and fast location. I do like the Quick GPS application to download information for more precision tracking. I give it 5 out of 5 here too.

Overall, in my opinion, HTC really did hit this one out of the ballpark. I would like to give it a hit though because of the removal of the front-facing teleconferencing camera. But I understand this wasn’t an HTC thing but a Sprint decision based on usage. Other than that, after using my new Pro for a week I have to say I am hooked. I haven’t been this hooked on a phone/device since the Mogul. While I can’t speak to whether or not it is an “iphone killer”, because I have never owned an iphone. I can say that based on everything I have read, if you are a true windows mobile kind of person, it probably is. However, with that said I know I have probably missed a point or two but I am always happy to answer questions.

Cheers!!

__________________
BMW

I had the PPC6700, and skipped the Mogul. I jumped at the Touch Pro when it became available. After about a week, I must say I'm thrilled. Comparing to the PPC6700, sound quality is vastly improved; operating system is better; I even like the TF3D, and will probably keep it if just for the cool factor.

So, my only complaint seems to be that I can't program any of the physical buttons other than the End Call key, unless someone knows how I can add more keys to the list of programmable buttons. Other than, battery life could be better, but I'm not particularly unhappy about it.