HTC Touch Pro 2 in 2022: A Guest from the Past

I have a strange hobby: studying English. I love digging through dictionaries, sitting and reading the etymology of some random word, painstakingly tracing its history.

A long time ago, back in 2005, I bought myself Abbyy Lingvo CE. At the time I was a die-hard Windows Mobile user. I’d traded my Qtek 2020i for the very first HTC Touch, and a little later, on the strength of a new job, I decided to spoil myself with an absolutely outrageously cool phone and bought an HTC Touch Pro. I’d loaded Lingvo with all sorts of dictionaries, and for years it was my faithful companion in language study. But by 2010 it became clear the platform was finished, and despite all my attempts to deny that fact, I jumped ship to an iPhone, and then to Android.

A couple of years ago I was poking around on eBay and stumbled, completely by accident, on this beauty. At a price of about 3000 rubles (roughly forty bucks), the device looked like the perfect toy, and I bought it. And so, in 2022, I became the owner of one of the last Windows Mobile 6 devices ever made.

Welcome under the cut, where we’ll compare the HTC Touch Pro 2 against the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, have a camera-measuring contest, and run a competition titled “Who can launch the best port of Heroes.”

A Bit of History

So, first things first — a little history. Way back in 2002, practically for free, I traded a friend out of his Palm IIIxe.

The device was a bit on the dim side (a 16 MHz processor, 8 MB of memory, and a black-and-white screen at 160x160 pixels), but despite its simplicity, it delivered kudos by the gigabyte. Beyond the useless organisers and address books, I learned how to install actually-useful software on it. A book reader became an absolute must-have, and I’d while away my metro rides re-reading old paperbacks from the Mir publishing house.

Honestly, the only reason I later bought a Kindle Paperwhite was that it felt the same as the Palm IIIxe. There was something unbelievably pleasant about the way a tiny monochrome display could deliver countless hours of enjoyment.

But it didn’t end there. You won’t believe me, but this monochrome stub of a thing had an incredible multiplayer feature. And to join the game, your friends didn’t even need to own a handheld of their own.

University lectures (especially “Philosophy” — for some reason they taught it to programmers) went by much faster when my friends and I were sitting around trying to clear the gridlock in a parking lot. Sadly, I couldn’t remember the name of the original game, and I couldn’t find any mention of it on Google. But this here looks like what we used to play. Of course it was all black and white and crammed into a 160x160 screen. (By the way — hi @Lesatik and @mayorova, remember? How many hours did we sink into that?)

The Era of Indestructible Phones

Yes, the Palm was a handy and entertaining companion to a mobile phone. My very first Siemens A35 gave way to a Siemens A50, and after that I joined the club of indestructible-phone enthusiasts. When I started university, my parents gifted me a Nokia 6610. Back then the Palm was a great supplement to plain phones with tiny screens.

While we’re at it, let me note that the 6610 brought into the world of multiplayer games the wonderful Snake. There is nothing more polished than Snake on a Nokia. The perfect marriage of rendering speed and control responsiveness. Once again — a high-score-and-time-trial competition among the kids in our university group.

But in my second year I became the proud owner of a Nokia 6600. This 122-gram monster was equipped with a 176x208 pixel screen, a 0.3 megapixel camera, 32 MB of RAM, and a 108 MHz processor. Compared to the Palm — this device won on every front. Most importantly, when its battery ran out, unlike the monochrome runt, it didn’t dump the contents of memory. So you could fairly call it a major leap forward.

What’s more, in those ancient days the world was divided into several camps. There were Nokias, there were Sony-Ericssons, and there were Motorolas. A genuinely pressing question was which model to choose so that your charger matched the chargers of your best friends. And this Nokia ran off the standard “skinny” Nokia charger, which were everywhere you looked.

But the Nokia’s virtues didn’t stop there. It could do incredible things. With enough persistence you could even run 3D games on it. Because this Nokia carried inside it an exact copy of the guts of the Nokia N-Gage. One of the first gaming phones in the world.

Here, for instance, is a playthrough of Tomb Raider on the N-Gage.

The main difference between the two models was that the N-Gage had a D-Pad as its primary control, while the 6600 replaced it with a joystick. And playing on that joystick was, to put it mildly, awful.

So I limited myself to installing piles of book readers, ICQ, and the at-the-time incredible “MP3 Player” application. I could listen to a choice of five whole musical albums! At the unbelievable quality of 128 kilobits per second.

Speaking of ICQ. How many of you still remember which key on the phone you had to press, and how many times, to get the letter “Ш”? Yep — there’s your T9 for you.

QTek and the Arrival of Windows Mobile

Anyway, the Nokia thoroughly displaced the Palm from my hands. All the functions worked just fine, but something was missing in my soul. I don’t know how I managed to talk my parents into giving me one more present in 2004.

I was a regular on www.xda-developers.com, 4pda.to and www.ladoshki.com. The most amazing thing is that all three sites are still online. And while Ladoshki hasn’t been updated since 2015 (try opening it on a 4K monitor, have a laugh), xda and 4pda managed to make the leap to iPhone and Android. They even kept their old, lamplit posts about Windows Mobile PDAs.

Having read myself silly on reviews and stories of new communicators, I’d convinced myself I simply had to own a QTek 9090. With New Year approaching, my mother resolved to subject me to deadly torture. I was conscripted as her consultant on a hike through Gorbushka (the legendary Moscow electronics market) to buy presents for the relatives. There’s no other word for it but cruelty. I was to wander Gorbushka picking out the right versions of DVD players or carrying bags of gifts. Gorbushka, KARL! The very place where I would spend hours examining phone stalls or rummaging through software catalogues. I don’t quite remember how we ended up in one of the “mobile” pavilions, but I was utterly stunned when my mother told me, “Pick one.”

And then to my horror I discovered that there was no 9090 on the shelves. But my eye fell on a QTek 2020i. The lack of a built-in keyboard was compensated for by a slightly more powerful processor and double the memory.

So at the start of 2005, I began my journey through the world of Windows Mobile. And I knew I was already late to the party. By that point the OS had reached version 5. The pioneers with their HP iPaqs had already done all the testing and written endless quantities of software. All I had to do was go and pick. But the Qtek wasn’t just a PDA. A solid GSM module let me use it as a real phone and gave me access to the wonderful world of 3G.

Which is what I proceeded to do. Tens of megabytes of launchers, utilities, games and software. Finally I could properly chat over ICQ. I bought a folding Bluetooth keyboard to go with the phone, which let me chat non-stop while I rode the metro all the way out to Krylatskoye station, since the train often surfaced where there was internet coverage.

Parking Lot got swapped out for Bubble Breaker. Every time I reluctantly handed my device to a friend, I dreaded getting it back with my high score broken.

I have no idea why this game was so addictive. Be that as it may, dozens (if not hundreds) of hours of my life were lost to popping bubbles.

Games, Shells and Browsers of the Era

But the games industry of the Windows Mobile world didn’t end there either. The lack of GPU acceleration and the unimpressive built-in graphics specs made 3D game development on these devices a fairly tedious affair. On top of that, different devices had different resolutions. That made development even harder. One standard resolution was 320x240. Some devices delighted the eye with a doubled 640x480. And the last devices of the era flaunted 480x800. While the first two could be “patched up” by doubling the size of UI elements, the last one changed the aspect ratio and broke a fair amount of software.

In those days that was a problem. Today, mobile developers will just laugh at this kind of trouble. Three different screen resolutions? Big deal. These days any decent Android dev will rattle off more than a dozen “standard” resolutions without breaking a sweat.

Either way — there were games.

One of the most engrossing was the ported version of X-COM UFO.

Wizards from xda-developers got StarCraft and WarCraft running.

And in those wonderful times you didn’t dare leave the house without Worms World Party on your device.

Of course, when you have such a powerful device in your hands, you can’t help but appreciate the ability to play video. Almost everyone who liked watching TV shows on a PDA will remember this app. (As a matter of fact, that’s how and when I watched all 13 seasons of The Simpsons and all of Futurama in English, with the goal of improving my comprehension and building my vocabulary. Most interesting of all — it actually worked.)

The topic of alternative shells was, of course, not neglected either. Anyone whose processor could handle it slapped on SpbMobileShell without a second thought. That shell turned the boring, plain-vanilla Microsoft phone into a futuristic monster.

The default browser was always Opera Mobile. 3G internet (or, for the less fortunate, 2G) was wildly expensive, and you paid by the megabyte. On my Beeline plan, I was allotted an unbelievable 50 megabytes a month. Anything beyond that you had to pay extra for.

You actually used the browser on the phone fairly rarely, mostly because of the cost of traffic. Plus, in those days mobile-first design didn’t exist. People were only just starting to talk about “elastic design.” On the very coolest sites you’d get an automatic redirect to the mobile version. Less cool sites just offered a mobile version at a separate link you had to click through. Otherwise you sat there trying to poke a stylus at a tiny button on the screen. Browsing was not particularly comfortable.

Who could imagine life back then without a beautiful six-digit ICQ number? 996121. I remember it like it was yesterday. I won it in a contest on pcforum.ru back in 2004. I think it was nicked off me around 2009, but by then everyone had moved to messengers, VK and Skype. Whereas in the cosy 2005 days you couldn’t function without QIP. ICQ didn’t gobble resources and was extremely thrifty over the network. With my folding Bluetooth keyboard, the chat was endless.

The mobile platforms also got a lot of book readers. Without Haali Reader the device was practically useless. The reader was running constantly. (Though in my case it was always a black screen with beige letters.)

And of course you didn’t only read endless collections of FB2 books. RSS was a hugely in-demand technology. In faraway 2005, having Wi-Fi at home meant you could sync feeds onto the device and read them while travelling on the metro.

Sunset of an Era

And everything I’ve described above is just a fragment of the enormous heritage of Windows Mobile 6. These were the last years of brilliant software and a cosy, well-loved infrastructure.

On June 29th, 2007, Steve Jobs presented the world with three new devices. A new iPod with a touch interface, a phone, and a personal computer. All three devices were assembled into one device called the iPhone.

Palm had already ceased to be a popular platform by then. And Windows Mobile took a serious blow. The near-monopolist of the communicator world surrendered its position to the new platform within two years.

Everything released after that date was just an attempt to hold the market.

In June 2007 the HTC Touch hit the market, which is what replaced my Qtek 2020i. The device itself was about the size of a Motorola Razr. Despite the much smaller screen, it had a snappier processor. More importantly, this was the first Windows Mobile communicator with a screen that wasn’t recessed into the body of the device. The glass and digitizer sat flush with the case. At the time, it was a worthy “answer” to the iPhone. Because in those distant days the iPhone didn’t have an app store, and the device was just a pretty toy. The Touch, on the other hand, had good support for a huge number of apps and gradually nudged Windows Mobile into the world of touch interfaces. The OS itself had been tweaked to support finger gestures.

But, all the same, the device came with a stylus. Windows Mobile simply could not pull off a full touch interface. The old software and keyboards just didn’t work well. Beyond that, the very construction of the screens themselves had been designed primarily for stylus use. Capacitive screens came along a bit later.

A couple of years after that, when the iPhone got the App Store, and Google decided not to be left out and released the first version of Android, I — by that point more out of stubbornness than anything else — bought myself an HTC Touch Pro.

The device had a 640x480 screen and shipped with the built-in Touch Flo shell. This was HTC’s last attempt to remain in the Windows Mobile market. What’s more, unlike most Androids and every iPhone, the device had a built-in keyboard.

It was lovely and could do plenty of useful things, but, as anyone could see, it was falling behind the competition in both power and convenience.

The last HTC communicators on the Windows Mobile platform were the HTC Touch Pro 2 and the HTC HD2, both released in 2009.

Both devices had a 480x800 screen, since anything less was useless. By that point the iPhone and Android had already raised the bar.

The HTC HD2 in particular was simply gigantic compared to any other Windows Mobile device. A 4.3-inch screen felt absolutely impossibly huge. (Yes, of course, they couldn’t have imagined back then that anyone would want to hold a seven-inch giant like an iPhone 13 MAX or an S21 Ultra.)

But all of these attempts were futile. In 2008 the Apple App Store and Google Play Store appeared. Those were what cemented the platforms’ victory. For Windows Mobile, centralised stores simply did not exist.

All the attempts to release Windows Mobile 7, 8 and 10, as well as Steve Ballmer’s attempts to merge Windows for desktops with Windows for phones, came to nothing. But those were different times and a different platform.

And in 2010 I surrendered all my positions and switched to an iPhone. Fairly quickly I realised I’d made a mistake, and by 2012 I was on Samsung. And starting from 2015 I tried just about every Samsung Galaxy S phone there was.

A Guest from the Past

And then, recently, I was looking for something on eBay. And out of nowhere I saw a horribly familiar picture. For just 3000 rubles I could buy a brand new HTC Touch Pro 2. In its day, in 2008, I’d paid 33,000 for its little brother. It’s a deal, it’s a steal, it’s a sale of a f***ing century. We’ll take it, wrap it up! A week later this beauty was in my hands.

The device was carrier-locked to the now-defunct American provider Sprint, but that bothered me very little. The main thing was that the hardware worked and everything booted. It actually sat in my drawer for a whole week, because I had to track down a mini-USB cable, and you can’t find one of those for love nor money these days.

The keyboard slid out as it should and everything worked beautifully. Time to power up!

I couldn’t help being delighted by the sheer fact that the device just turned on. In those distant 2009 days, bloatware was only just beginning to take off. Aside from a couple of programs for monitoring your provider account balance, the little machine wasn’t carrying endless megabytes of junk.

The built-in memory on board is an unbelievable half a gigabyte! That was enough for a vast amount of pretty much anything you could want. You could lug around 20 favourite music albums in MP3, several episodes of a favourite show, a couple of games, and a practically infinite number of books.

Better still, the machine has an SD card slot. That slot would happily accept two-gigabyte cards, and the amount of data you could store tended toward infinity.

Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do was load up some of my old programs.

And Heroes launched right away. The Russian version of this program is still available on Ladoshki (unlike the English version, the Russian one runs for free and doesn’t ask for registration). It boots with a kick and works splendidly at the new-fangled screen resolution. There are, of course, some quirks. The program is rotated “upside down” relative to the keyboard. So if you slide the keyboard out, the device sends the OS a signal to rotate the screen, and Heroes crashes no less spectacularly than Windows 95 having a CD yanked out from under it.

But honestly, the game itself didn’t really interest me. (I sank only 100 hours into it. Facepalm.)

Of course, the HTC Touch Pro and Pro 2 were among the first Windows Mobile phones with an accelerometer. Not to be missed is the very cool and unusual-for-its-time game Teeter.

I connected the device to Wi-Fi, and it worked. But there wasn’t much point. All the certificates have long since expired, and nothing would open. I crawled to the only non-HTTPS site I know — taco.com. It rendered in Opera, just as it should. Practically unreadable and very small. But that was what the UI of mobile devices in 2009 looked like.

Back to the Dictionary

Right, messing around with bubble-breakers and Heroes is all well and good. But I actually had an idea about what to do with this machine. Back when I still had the Qtek 2020i, I bought myself a license for Abbyy Lingvo Mobile with support for a whole pile of dictionaries. The license key and the dictionaries had been forgotten in the depths of my Google Drive for many years. But they had survived.

I decided it was time to dust off the 15-year-old key file and download Abbyy Lingvo Mobile. Unfortunately, the installer wasn’t on Ladoshki, and the Abbyy site itself only points to the new-fangled Android and iOS versions.

So I did something Abbyy didn’t see coming. I wrote to their tech support. And asked for help locating an installer for the program. I don’t know how your tech support staff would react if someone came to them with a request for software that hasn’t been supported for fifteen years, but Abbyy responded with class.

An anonymous engineer looked at my key, took a look, and gave me a direct link to download the licensed file. For which I am grateful. I was finally able to install my favourite dictionary.

The catch is that finding a good etymological dictionary is hard. And I have no idea where this file came from or who originally published it, so I can’t trace its origin. If anyone has any ideas — please share. Here’s one entry as an example.

I couldn’t skip the camera. Here’s a comparison of shots taken on my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and the HTC Touch Pro.

By the way, answering the question of which device launches the better port of Heroes: the HTC Touch Pro 2. Purely because I’m biased to the bone. But if anyone wants to brag about their achievements in the comments, please do.

The device sits pleasantly in the hand. Pressing the physical buttons triggers genuine delight, and people around me reach over asking to play with it.

As I said earlier, Windows Mobile couldn’t compete with Google and Apple. But the HTC HD2 stayed in service for an incredibly long time. The devices were unlocked and yielded easily to modification. I was running Linux as far back as the Qtek 2020i. And on the last flagship people managed to run every version of Android up to and including 7. That was the last gasp of devices from a fading era.

Although the very last Windows Mobile device has found its place in geeky 2022 and is still going strong. It brings me no end of joy and is a fine excuse for cheerful conversation and reminiscence. It’s also extremely handy when I need to look something up in a dictionary.

P.S. If anyone wants to see a working version of their favourite program on this device, by all means, hit the comments. The device is ready for further abuse, I can launch programs and shoot video.