The time when phone manu-facturers tried to outdo each other with impossibly small phones is long gone, but there's still a lot of currency in being able to boast a waif-like profile. HTC clearly hasn't been taking note: with its newest Windows Mobile phone - the HTC Touch Pro2 - it's actually gone the other way.
This is a much chunkier handset than its predecessor, the Touch Pro. It weighs 188g, is 17mm thick, 116mm tall and 59mm wide - so large, in fact, that it feels more like a small mobile computer than a phone.
The size is a disappointment, but HTC has managed to squeeze a lot into the Touch Pro2's beefy frame. Most obvious is the screen, which measures 3.6in from corner to corner. It isn't quite as large as the broad expanse of the Touch HD (web ID: 136159), but it boasts the same 480 x 800 WVGA resolution, which makes browsing the web straightforward.
As with all of HTC's Windows Mobile touch phones, it's a resistive touchscreen - thus enabling handwriting recognition - so it isn't quite as responsive as the screen on the iPhone, but it's still pretty good. Screen taps and finger slides are responded to instantly, so you rarely need a second jab.
Next up is the keyboard, which is quite simply brilliant. As with the original Touch Pro it slides out from underneath the screen, but here it's an even more spacious five-row layout with individual buttons for the numbers running across the top, large and responsive letter keys, a sizeable spacebar, and common symbols such as the full stop and @ close to hand.
HTC fans will be glad to see that the tilting screen of the TyTN II has made a return, reinforcing the pocket computer theme. This makes it possible to lay the Touch Pro2 flat on a table and tap away with your fingers without having to position your head above it to see the screen. The hinge mechanism is smooth and feels solid too, a little more so than that of the TyTN II.
Of more potential use, however, is this phone's enhanced speakerphone capabilities. Dubbed Straight Talk, the phone boasts two speakers on its rear and dual noise-cancelling microphones.
These features are intended to improve the quality of speakerphone calls over the crackly, distorted mess you usually get with mobile phones - and they work really well.
Just place the phone face down while a call is in progress (the speakerphone mode activates automatically), and you'll find the speaker is loud, clear and distortion-free. Just as importantly, the microphone is particularly sensitive, so you don't need to speak directly at the phone to make yourself heard clearly.
Battery life is on a par with the best smartphones around. With its large 1500mAh lithium-ion battery, the Touch Pro2 provided nigh-on five days of life in our light-use test, which encompasses 30 minutes of calls, 50MB of downloads, and POP3 email checks every half-hour. That time will fall if you use it more intensively, but it's still an impressive result for such a powerful phone.
The Touch Pro2 employs the same latest version of HTC's Windows Mobile cloaking software, TouchFLO 3D, which we so enjoyed on the Touch Diamond2.This includes HTC's zoom bar - a touch-sensitive area below the screen that allows you to quickly zoom in and out of web pages and other views by dragging a finger left or right.
More importantly, TouchFLO 3D now casts such a heavy veil over the iniquities of Microsoft's mobile OS that you hardly realise it's there. We particularly like the new Start menu, which replaces the old list of apps with a scrolling, customisable icon grid, although the loss of the compact Qwerty onscreen keyboard layout is sad.
It's worth poking around a bit, though, as hidden in the depths of the Programs listing is Internet Explorer Mobile 6 - Microsoft's first stab at a full-page mobile web browser. We suspect most users will stick to Opera Mobile (TouchFLO 3D's principal browser) for convenience, but this improvement is welcome.
The Touch Pro2 also comes stacked with all the smartphone features you'd expect in a flagship HTC product. There's high-speed 7.2Mbits/sec HSDPA data, 802.11bg Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1.
You get GPS for navigation, a microSD slot, a 3.2-megapixel camera (with no flash or light), and a front-facing VGA one for video calls. There's an accelerometer (dubbed the G-Sensor by HTC) that enables the phone to sense the orientation of the screen and switch between landscape and portrait modes.
HTC has also added a proximity sensor, which allows you to flip the phone over when a call comes in to silence the ring or automatically activate the speakerphone mode when a call is in progress.
It's no surprise to find that there's no 3.5mm headphone jack - as usual with HTC phones, you have to purchase an adapter to plug in your own - but in recompense there's a TV-out facility via the phone's ExtUSB socket.
Despite all this, and no matter how good this phone's keyboard and screen is, or how good the speakerphone, how sumptuous the design and the engineering, there's simply no getting around the Touch Pro2's bulk. Indeed, with all of this power at its disposal it could justifiably claim to be the ultimate corporate smartphone. But, before you buy, make sure it will fit happily in your pocket.