HTC takes the best Windows Mobile phone available today and makes it even better with the Sprint version of the HTC Touch Pro2. Like the T-Mobile version of this phone, the Touch Pro2 is a powerful device with a huge touch screen and a roomy five-row keyboard. Sprint adds a standard headphone jack, a better speakerphone, and additional software to make this the king of Windows phones in the U.S.

Design and Calling Features
Like its T-Mobile cousin, Sprint's Touch Pro2 is a boat. At 4.6 by 2.3 by 0.7 inches (HWD) and 6.3 ounces, it's a big phone. But it's solidly built and handsome, and you get a lot for the size. The phone's main screen is a vast 3.6-inch, 800-by-480-pixel resistive touch panel, and it slides to the side and tilts up so the Touch Pro2 can sit on your desk like a little laptop. With the screen opened, you can type on a huge five-row QWERTY keyboard, one of the best I've ever used on a handheld—it's roomy, spacious, and clicky.

Sprint's version changes the look of the bezel and some key colors and labels from the T-Mobile model, but it's not worse, just different. The only noticeable negative change is that the microSD memory card slot has now slipped under the back cover, but at least you don't have to remove the battery to use it.

To enter data on the Touch Pro2, you can use a nice-looking portrait-style on-screen QWERTY keyboard or the roomy physical keyboard; the screen rotates when you pop the keyboard out.

The Touch Pro2 is an acceptable voice phone. Signal reception was decent, and the earpiece is loud if a bit muddy. Calls through the built-in mic sounded fine on the other end, without too much background noise being transmitted. The speakerphone was excellent—much louder than the T-Mobile Touch Pro2's, thanks to a larger grid of holes on the back of the phone transmitting sound. The speakerphone mix did transmit quite a bit of background noise, through. The phone works with both mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets.

We're still testing the 1500 mAh battery, but we expect it to get good talk time. One thing we've noticed, though, is that Microsoft Direct Push e-mail completely drains the battery in half a day. Changing the e-mail setting to check for messages every 15 minutes seems to fix the problem; we'll have more details soon.

Like the BlackBerry Tour 9630, but unlike the Palm Pre, the Sprint Touch Pro2 is a global CDMA/GSM phone, able to access Sprint's 3G network here in the U.S. and 2G EDGE networks abroad. Sprint lets phone owners unlock their SIM card slots on demand if they want to use inexpensive foreign networks when they're outside the U.S.

Improving Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile 6.1 is old and creaky, so the measure of a Windows Mobile phone nowadays is how much the manufacturer can paper over Microsoft's ancient UI. Sprint's Touch Pro2 goes even further than T-Mobile's on this front: not only have they designed their own home screens and supplanted the Internet Explorer Mobile browser with the much better Opera Mobile 9.5, they've now replaced the pop-down Windows program menu, program list, and all the settings screens with much more attractive HTC-made equivalents.

Like the T-Mobile version, this Touch Pro2 is full of useful little advances. Clicking the "X" button in the corner of the screen actually closes programs, which seems obvious but doesn't happen on most Windows Mobile phones. When you receive an email, you can tap a button to quickly call the person who sent it. You can create conference calls on the fly, straight from the address book. From contact cards, you can quickly flip to see all the phone calls or messages you sent to a particular person. The Touch Pro2 also integrates Facebook details right into your address book.

Sprint's Touch Pro2 comes with a ton of software, even more than the T-Mobile version does. Clearly, Sprint is trying to show people what Windows Mobile can do. The Sprint Touch Pro2 comes with Sprint's NFL and NASCAR tracking apps, Sprint streaming TV, a link to Sprint's music store, Jetcet's direct printing program that lets you print to Bluetooth printers, an audio equalizer utility, a business card scanner, the usual Office Mobile apps (Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint), a PDF reader, and IM clients for AIM, Microsoft Messenger, and Yahoo. It's fully set up to handle HTML e-mail with attachments and any other kind of messaging you want to throw at it. The device has a 528 MHz processor, 225 MB of available memory, and a microSD card slot that takes 16GB cards, so there's plenty of room to add software.

The only real disappointment was with Sprint's GPS navigation program, where I had trouble locking on to a GPS signal in Manhattan. And Windows Mobile is still Windows Mobile, which means it has the occasional stability issue.—Next: Multimedia Prowess & Conclusion >