For several years, HTC have been refining, slimming and improving the user experience of their Windows Mobile smartphones. The Touch Pro is the culmination of these efforts. Other phones might be thinner or more stylish, but when it comes to features and power, the Touch Pro is simply peerless.

HTC have poured in every piece of hardware and functionality, and wrapped it all up in a shiny, and relatively compact black case. And then, perhaps most significantly, they've developed their own interface TouchFlo 3D to make the phone easier to use.

TouchFlo 3D attempts to hide the ugliness and general unpleasantness of Windows Mobile from the user. Instead, it presents a shiny sliding strip along the foot of the screen, providing access to the most commonly used functionality such as the phone, SMS, email and web-browsing. It also includes some nice extras such as delightfully animated weather forecasts. It's finger friendly being navigated with a combination of presses, slides and 'flicks'.

The problem is that TouchFlo 3D is simply a beautifully designed skin for Windows Mobile. Once you try to actually do something (like writing a text message) the conventional Windows Mobile interface reappears and spoils the illusion.

TouchFlo 3D is certainly not a failure. It does make the Touch Pro easier and more pleasant to use. And it oozes style. It's just that it can only go so far in masking the deficiencies of Windows Mobile.

On the hardware front however, the Touch Pro is unmatched. Connectivity is well taken care of with 3G/HSDPA, bluetooth and WiFi. A small 'H' appears on the screen when in an area of HSDPA coverage, making browsing and downloading lightning fast.

Storage is ample with 322MB of space and a micro SDHC slot giving plenty of room for expansion. A phenomenal 288MB of RAM means that the Touch Pro can run all the applications you're likely to want, simultaneously.

The built-in GPS means that you'll never get lost. TomTom software is not bundled as standard, but it does come with Google Maps. In use we found that the GPS managed to get a satellite lock fairly quickly outside, but struggled indoors.

The Touch Pro's biggest party trick is its slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Of course, this isn't the first time that HTC have included a physical keyboard on their phones. But in this instance, they've added a row of number keys and made numerous refinements to the layout. The positive consequence is that it's now much quicker to enter numbers, symbols and non-standard characters. The downside is that in order to accommodate the extra keys and generally make the device less brick-like, all the keys are now slightly smaller. This can slow typing speeds especially in comparison to the Touch Pro's predecessors, the Tytn and Tytn2. Make no mistake though, the typing experience is in a completely different league to that of the iPhone. If you're frustrated with the iPhone's on-screen keyboard, the Touch Pro will be a revelation.

The Touch Pro comes with a nice software bundle. In addition to the standard Microsoft Office apps and Windows Mobile accoutrements, HTC have included Google Maps; a superb custom YouTube player, and best of all, Opera Mobile 9.5. Opera Mobile is huge advance over Pocket Internet Explorer. It provides tabs, full-screen browsing, javascript support and a finger-friendly interface. On a device with so much hardware connectivity built-in, it is difficult to overstate just what a difference Opera Mobile makes to the browsing experience. Finally, Windows Mobile can compete with the iPhone's Safari browser.

Opera Mobile also serves as an especially impressive demonstration of the Touch Pro's VGA screen. The 640x480 resolution provides four times the number of pixels found on a conventional QVGA (320x240) models. It's impossible not to be struck by how much crisper text looks, how much extra detail is shown in photographs, and how much more of a webpage can be fitted on to the screen.

HTC have tied in the phone's touch-sensitive D-pad to Opera, Google Maps and the photo album app so that it can be used for rapidly zooming in and out. However, we found it frustrating that HTC has limited this touch sensitive aspect to a handful of applications. It could've been put to better use as a method for scrolling up and down documents and menus. This is particularly pertinent as the scroll-wheel - previously found on the TyTn & TyTn2 - has been omitted from the Touch Pro.

The built-in auto-focus camera is a passable 3.2 megapixels and is augmented by a front-facing vga-resolution camera for video-calls. HTC's slick photo-album application complements it nicely, but this is unlikely to become your main camera anytime soon.

The g-sensors (which detect tilt in any direction) are fun for showing off with and useful for auto-rotating photos, but await the introduction of some creative applications that could really take advantage of them.

The Touch Pro does have some downsides. TouchFlo 3D often lags behind user input or freezes for a few seconds which can be very frustrating. We experienced several crashes which required the battery's removal in order to reboot the phone. The battery needs to be recharged every night - even under moderate use. And the clunky Windows Mobile interface is never more than a couple of clicks away.

It also lacks a 3.5mm headphone socket. This frustrating omission is all the more inexplicable considering how much effort HTC have clearly out into the handset's music player. The bundled earphones are predictably abysmal, and it's necessary to purchase a separate adaptor to use proper earphones.

HTC have largely succeeded in producing a feature-rich, powerful device that does just about everything you could want a mobile phone to do and then some more. The somewhat derivative TouchFlo 3D interface is neither as innovative nor as intuitive as HTC would claim, but it does put a friendlier more beautiful gloss on Windows Mobile.

If you're looking for a QWERTY-enabled smartphone that can do just about anything you're likely to throw at it, the HTC Touch Pro is the phone you should be getting.