First impressions: Sprint HTC Touch Pro 2

My first impressions with the HTC Touch Pro 2.... I like it!

Days with phone: 2.5

Features I like on the phone

Some of these are specific to the HTC Touch Pro 2, some applicable to all PDA/smartphones with Windows Mobile.

• Synch Outlook contacts with the phone's address book. I no longer have to manually enter contacts on my phone and Outlook separately!
• Touch Pro 2 specific: Synch FB profiles to contacts and see profile photos on phone and in Outlook
• Touch Pro 2 specific: Easier to use (just put the phone down, face-down) speakerphone with excellent voice clarity
• Touch Pro 2 specific: The larger screen makes it easier to read on the phone and easier to use maps applications. When I'm sitting in the doctor's office waiting for Julian, I'm able to catch up on my reading on Google Reader
• Touch Pro 2 specific: The 3.2-megapixel camera included on this phone is not too shabby (see photo taken of Arty below). It includes control for ISO (Auto, 100, 200, 400, or 800), focus area, brightness, white balance, sepia/grayscale effects, metering mode (center or average) and even a self timer. There's a panoramic mode to stitch photos together. So far, I've only played with designating the focus area and brightness of photos. Can't wait to try the rest!
• I've got my Google Apps gmail work account set up (via IMAP) on the phone - this allows me to see first thing in the morning, before I even get out of bed, whether new work emails have come in overnight and respond to them. This is especially handy since I have engineers working in a different time zone.
• Love having a qwerty keyboard again, and the tilt screen is dope!

Takes some getting used to:

• When the phone rings, you see who's calling along with the calling number, a slider in the middle with "answer" to the left, and "ignore" to the right, and a mute ringer button on the button. I'm still getting used to moving the slider to the left to answer the phone. Of course, I could just click the "call" button instead to pick up.
• This morning, when sending an email while in bed, I kept touching the "Send" button on the lower left of the touch screen as I was typing, thus accidentally sending multiple copies of the email before I was ready to send.
• I found the "Task" application a little difficult to use. It was difficult to create a task with a due date. I had to create the task, then go back to the task to add the due date.

Problems encountered so far

I have encountered a couple of problems so far; both problems seem like they are Windows Mobile OS related.

• My screen refused to scroll from left to right once. But like most Windows problems, nothing that a reboot wouldn't fix. ;)
• Today, as I updated some contacts and tasks in Outlook and tried to synch with the phone via Windows Mobile Device Center, the software reported a synch error, with a super-useful error mesasge of "activesynch encountered a problem on the desktop". (Update: the synch problem happened a 2nd time soon after I published this post! I have a feeling this is going to be an annoying issue.) Upon a quick search, this seems to be a common problem introduced with Windows Mobile 6.1. As suggested in a Microsoft forum post (here's another), I deleted the partnership with the phone and everything is functional again, although I had to set up "Favorites" under Contacts and re-connect some profiles to Facebook. Other suggestions from the post to fix the issue:
• Uncheck each synch area and check them back one at a time to identify issue. It seems like tasks was an issue with a quite a few folks.
• Back up existing Outlook pst file, create and use a new pst file, restart outlook, delete partnership with phone, synch, and then restore backed up pst file
• Look for scanpst.exe under c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\ and run the program to repair errors in the Outlook pst file
• Run Microsoft Office Diagnostics

Julian also got the same phone. His came with a sticky 'a' key. Sprint took care of that right away and he received a new phone the next day! But suffice to say, probably a good idea to try all your keys on the qwerty soon after you receive your phone to allow plenty of time to resolve the issue if that were to happen to you too.

I'm so happy to be able to answer my phone again! This mini-computer might change my life greatly!

Update: xda-developers has very useful forums by phone. Touch Pro 2 is listed under Rhodium. I'm waiting for Julian to look through and try the list of software recommended. ;)

Update 2:

• It turned out I did not have a double-send of my gmail email. It simply saved 2 copies of Sent mail into my Sent Folder (gmail keeps one copy, then the phone tells gmail to keep another copy - thus the duplicates). The good news is that the duplicate is only my Sent box. Here's a forum post with more information about the issue.
• I noticed that my battery drains pretty quickly, until I scanned the PC Magazine review and realized that it must've been caused by the setting to have the phone check for new emails every 5 minutes. I have now set it to every 30 minutes and see if the situation improves.