Modern times ask for modern Communications. My old phone was still ok, but the features were not up to my demands anymore, so it was time to get an upgrade. I looked around a bit, and found the perfect replacement, which arrived today.
My new phone is a spiffy HTC Touch Pro. If you get it without a subscription, then the phone is a bit pricy (about € 600,-), but since I bought the phone via my work; the payment is done in parts. The phone is pricy, but given the features and possibilities, Id say it has definitely been worth it. A quick run-through:
It has a 2.8 screen with full VGA resolution (640x480). Most other Windows Mobile based phones have QVGA, which is 320x240 pixels. This phone has a much higher resolution on the same screen size, so the picture is much sharper and just looks amazing.
It has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but with separate numerical keys. This may not seem like a big feature, but on most other Windows Mobile phones (including my old one), this is not the case. On those you have to fiddle with press-and-hold keys to get numbers, which can get quite annoying if youre typing lots of numbers in an E-mail, SMS or MMS.
It has a built in GPS receiver. Its not the worlds greatest GPS receiver, and probably not one of the fastest; but it does its job quite well. Ive installed Google Maps and TomTom Navigator 7 (with full European maps) on it, and those work just great.
It has UMTS and HDSPA capability. In other words: up to 7.2MBps mobile internet. This was my main reason for replacing my old phone. The old one had just GPRS (64Kbit), which was more than enough for just MSN, but sometimes you want to look something up quickly, and that just took forever. I bought this phone because it has UMTS support, but to my great surprise my service provider also supports HDSPA. My mobile internet is lightening fast, and the Opera 9.5 browser works really nice too.
It has a 3.2 Megapixel autofocus camera with a flash, that produces very decent pictures. My old phone had a 2 Megapixel camera, but it had no autofocus. The pictures were always a bit grainy and blurry. I used to carry around my 7.1 Megapixel photo camera 24/7 to make photos for the website, because the photos from my old phone werent cutting the cheese. With the HTC Touch Pro, the pictures are crisp, sharp and pretty decent quality. So from now on, I wont be dragging my normal photo camera around 24/7 anymore, and most of the photos that you see in the blogs will be made using the HTC Touch Pro.
It has a tilt sensor. This has some fun uses.. you can use it in games, you can use your phone to level something out, and when your phone is ringing when youre sitting in a meeting for example.. you can just flip the phone upside down and it will mute the ringer till you flip it back up.
It has TV-out. Cool, this means I could use the HTC Touch Pro as a mobile DivX player. I could hook it up to a beamer for presentations, and I can even use it as an S-video webcam (with some software you can already use it as an USB webcam).
It has a built in radio tuner. I probably wont use this feature a lot, but its cool that its in there.. you never know when you might need it.
I really love my new phone, and will be using it a lot probably. It opened up a new level of possibilities for me, which I will definitely be using.