One small difference is that opening the keyboard with any TouchFLO 3D application active causes the display to change to a program launcher screen, though we’re not quite sure why.

Despite the physical keyboard, the Touch Pro still comes with a choice of on-screen input methods – the usual Windows Mobile selection, plus three larger, more usable HTC-created keyboards (phone, compact Qwerty and full Qwerty). As on the Touch Diamond though, these take up a lot of screen space and don’t leave much room for typed text. Shrinking the default Windows Mobile text size helps here and characters are crisp even at the lowest setting, thanks to the comparatively high resolution 480 x 640 screen.

Although its specification is broadly similar to that of the Touch Diamond, there have been a few changes with the Touch Pro. Gone is the 4Gb of onboard flash memory, replaced by a far more useful microSD card slot. The ROM has also been increased from 256Mb to 512Mb, and RAM is up from 192Mb to 288Mb.

The Touch Pro’s battery has also been beefed up to 1340mAh – the Touch Diamond made do with 900mAh. Claimed talk-time increases to 419 minutes as a result (330 minutes on the Touch Diamond), but the claimed standby time is lower – 367 hours, compared to 396 hours on the Touch Diamond. Still, it would be churlish to complain – this still equates to 15 days.

We’re no fans of Windows Mobile, but we’re more tolerant of this fiddly, inconsistent mobile operating system when it’s hidden behind a nifty user interface and coupled with a great keyboard. No surprise then that we rather like the HTC Touch Pro and we certainly prefer it to the Diamond Touch. But it’s still not perfect – we’d like that glorious screen to be a little bigger to make better use of its VGA resolution, and we’d prefer a better loudspeaker than the hopelessly inadequate one tucked away at the back of the device.

We’d also prefer a lower price. The Touch Pro may be an awful lot of smartphone, but £495 is an awful lot of money for contract-free model and we fail to see how the addition of a keyboard (not to mention the loss of 4Gb of onboard storage) warrants a £65 price increase over the Touch Diamond.

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