I’ve been fooling with this new HTC Touch Pro2 all day and I almost sent it back. The phone itself is good but Windows Mobile totally sucks. I had been using a Palm 700p running PalmOS and when I originally got it for the most part it just worked. With Windows mobile almost nothing worked at first.

The user interface is poorly designed to the point of being unusable. If not for it having a keyboard and arrow keys it wouldn’t work. It can’t be used with just the finger and requires the stylus for about everything. It lacks scroll bars in critical places and you have to flick the screen to scroll. If you don’t flick it just right, you either select the wrong thing or you flip past what you want.

I have the Verizon version. The first thing I noticed when un-boxing it was a large area of paint missing off the back of the rear speaker grill. Turns out it wasn’t paint missing but a map of the world. A really bad map. If I can find the right color of black paint I’m going to paint over it.

When I first turned it on, it dialed *228 to talk to Verizon and program itself. But it only got to the main menu and didn’t dial the option “1” to actually start the programming. The volume was initially low so I didn’t hear what it was doing until it looped and failed about four times.

The interface was cluttered and non-intuitive. Basically you have to fight every step of the way to do anything. Eventually you learn its quirks and you can get it to be barely usable. Many of the applications were probably written for phones with 4-way selectors that work like arrow keys and therefore there is no way to step one by one through the menus.

The operating system itself seems solid. I’m downloading some free apps to try to get the thing up to usable. I think if I replace enough of the interface with free stuff and some purchased apps I’ll eventually like this phone. And Mobile 6.5 is coming and it will hopefully be better. But the bottom line is that if you are coming from the PalmOS world to Windows Mobile you will be shocked as to how bad the interface is. I’m sure the iPhone folks can really laugh.

On the good side you do get full real multitasking so the email app is still running while I’m online with Putty checking my servers and using the browser. When connecting the USB cable to the computer it mounts the phone like an external hard drive so I can drag and drop files between my laptop and the phone. I also bought an app that turns the phone into a wifi hotspot so I may be able to drop my tethering charge I’m paying Verizon.

I’m looking at adding more apps. Considering something called SPB Mobile Shell which replaces most of the user interface. Downloaded iDialer to replace the dialing app. Looking for a contact manager that will allow me to import from Yahoo Address book (or at least a CSV file). The contact manager has NO import options. Comes with Opera but not very impressed with that either. You would think that you could tap on a link and go there. NOOOOO! You have to change the text size with the zoom bar before the links work.

My conclusion: I would bet that whoever designed the interface doesn’t actually use it themselves. It looks like the designers didn’t even own cell phones. My expectations for this phone were high but I’m really disappointed. Maybe you all can point me to the right apps to make me happy.

I’m looking for:

1. Way to import contacts.
2. Opinions on SPB Shell
3. Want a launch icon for Mobile Putty (SSH)
4. Replacement for Outlook Mobile

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