I have just ordered my HTC Touch HD to replace my HYC TYTN II. I do not get to pick it for another few days. I have been satisified the TN-II but have found HDPSA very lacking with a lot of signal loss or consistancy, I am really hoping this will not be the case or indeed not as bad! Also I have had mixed views about going for a touch screen only application. I am hoping that my chunky fingers will cope!

There a number of reasons I went for this phone over the iphone and i personaly like apple technology, but mainly because i really think windows has or is rising to the challenge of apple and I just think the software is far more flexible and can be really made to compete with the solid slick apple applications.

Technically although i do not have the phone yet I made my choice based on HTC as a company, as i think they are probably the only company that can rival apple on all areas, from build quality to competent usage and the ability to activate applications with ease.

I guess i will have to wait and see what the phone is going to be like but if anyone would like to respond or ask me anything please feel free, and feel free to give me any hints or tips.

Thanks

I am a Mac user and have never used a WM OS on mobile phones before. Will it fit with my Mac and is it hard to work with WM OS? I look forward to buy HD, but i am worried about the usage of it. Can anybody say, if i won’t be disappointed.

Thank you!

Thanks

Is there any chance you’ll be able to get hold of any of these (MM especially) and test them on the HD?

THANK YOU!!

this mobile is certainly moving in the right direction when it comes to listening to the customers for sure, well done HTC!! however, if you are reading this, please take the following into consideration…

- please add a flash or LED or xenon as its great to double as a flashlight
- landscape mode for sms etc. i mean really, how hard can that be?
- having the microSD card on the outside would be nice, hardly convenient buried behind the battery
- instead of competing for more megapixels please just include a nice 5MP camera with GOOD QUALITY, people prefer a quality 5 MP rather than 12 MP crap
- super high quality video is not needed but please, 640×480 at 30fps must be possible now…
- please integrate the volume button or similar into the camera! fingers should be pushing DOWN for stability, NOT IN or ON
- inclusion of a good media player would be awesome! WMP sucks big time, try bundling VLC or CORE
- FLASH support!! (although not a fault of HTC, so c’mon OPERA and/or ADOBE, get it together already)

and i have some questions for the review person…

does this mobile have aGPS?
are you able to test any third party software? something with ‘turn-by-turn’ instructions?
is it possible to install VLC player?
i have read the video recording is 320×240, any truth to that?
and is there any itunes compatibility? especially for play-lists? any 3rd party software that does this easily?

thanks again for the awesome review and hope i can get my answers on any further followups or on this message board…

Would like to see some camera samples and if you could shed light on the video playback issues- the boys at xda-developers are going nuts.

Thanks.

Or do I have to fish my phone out of the pocket and push on the screen for this effect?

Again – thanks for a great review.

So, after all you explained us in your great review, do you think is worth buying this phone?

It’s a lot of money to invest but right now I’m not sure about what to do :(

My advice would be to find somewhere you can test them both out, and preferably which will sell you one with the proviso that you can bring it back after a short while to exchange if not entirely satisfied. I think you’ll probably love either :)

Don’t forget to come back and let me know which you eventually choose!

Great Review!! I have a small problem. I stuck between the HD and the X1. I can only get one, but each time I either see a review on either, I want it and can decide which one. Briefly since you have used both devices, can you help me decide. I love them both, but I cant make the call. I trust you input. Thanks!!

I have Co-pilot 7 installed on the Touch HD and didn’t notice any problems at all with GPS lag, works very nicely.

HD can be used without the screen protector, and with wath real damages?

i asqed about auto (cars) charging becouse actual pda Glofiish x500 using a difrent mini cable usb for charging, wath we can do to keep the old cars charging? must change the usb cable?

merci

Now below are my impressions after using the handset for more than 24 hours. I do wonder if HTC development team reads through English review. They can be of immense help for future improvements.

Phone itself is well built and front panel appears metallic perhaps liquid metal but I am not sure about this. Back cover is bit plasticky. Looks nice but could be better. Screen protector is as good as you could get but no spare one in the box so apply carefully. In fact I suggest to apply the protector as soon as you remove the original plastic cover. Makes it hassle free.
Sleeve looks cheap but I suppose could deceive the thieves, nevertheless provides protection for this gorgeous expensive handset.

In my opinion a handset has to be a good phone in the first place and HD lives to this expectation. Quality of the phone is excellent. It picks up and holds 3G/HSDPA signals very well. This is much better than few handset I have recently including TYTN 2 and Skype S2. I had problems with signals with these handsets at home but not any more thanks to HD. Previously the use of Nokia N95 silver was hopeless experience as regards to signal and call quality.
In my office where I could not pickup 3G signal constantly the HD did quite well and a test on few down loads from the web was perhaps as quick as my laptop.

Touch flow is good and gives you not only the choice of adding and removing the shortcuts but also you can rearrange them. However I think on such a big screen they should really have two rows with the bottom row being primarily active.

Touch HD is a beautiful handset. Screen is amazing only to blame is WINMO’s 65 K colour drivers for any shortcomings. However to me in terms of colours this screen performs nearly as well as my Toshiba M300 laptop(manufacture 2003) with Intel graphics unfortunately no flash though. This is a shame that HTC still not managed to make all of their essential program screens to rotate automatically. They need to hurry up and remove this minor fault. Touch screen is very much figure friendly but I think there is some compromise on the use of stylus. Stylus touch does not appear to be as responsive as Tytn 2 however, how cares as you do not need to use stylus as often.

Opera browser is excellent. Renders various pages well but on this large screen you still need to zoom in before the links are active for the touch. Hope they will be able to address this issue as you should not necessarily need this when you can read the links without zooming in.

GPS seems okay. But you cannot really assess this very well until you have dedicated and compatible software. I do not know how well TOMTOM or COPILOT live will work so I am still holding on and will buy after some reviews regarding their compatibility are available.
Camera not used that much but few photographs taken appear good for a mobile phone.

Lastly I think major fault lies with Microsoft. This giant is constantly behind as compare to hardware developers. Do not forget first WINMO WVGA hand set was marketed by Toshiba more than one and a half year ago which suffered badly due to poor ROM. I believe if Microsoft could provide slim operating system with out all the crap they include in windows XP/Vista the hardware developers will be able to catch-up and provide a handset with the same capabilities as Win XP. I wonder if in near future capable smart phone with large screen will remove the need of small laptops. So HTC and smart phone manufacturers do seem to have bright future.

I’ll try the longer-term 320kbps MP3 test this weekend, and attempt to get hold of a copy of TomTom to test. Video and photo examples should be up at the beginning of next week.

John, my review handset didn’t come with the screen protector, and I’m not sure whether it’ll be a smooth or ‘paper’ finish. Without knowing that, I really couldn’t speculate, sorry. I’ll see if my contact at HTC PR can shed some light…

I read through the manual and they do in fact indicate that there is an ambient light sensor- it’s on the right side of the front speaker, probably looks like an LED. Which is great news because that way we can use PocketShield, which looks to be a terrific piece of software:
http://pocketshield.netserver01.com/demo.aspx

If you could post some actual pictures/video taken by the HD, that would be fantastic!

Also, if you could post a followup regarding the GPS. Over at XDA some are saying it might be a software issue rather than hardware. Could you try to run TomTom and get back to us? TomTom 7 V7.451 seems to be working on it.

Thanks once again!

Thanks once again!

Thanks for the very in-depth review! I especially liked that you looked into the GPS-lag and functionality with Gsen. The comparison with Iphone and capacitive displays were very valuable too, it seems the HD is as reponsive as resistive screens go!

Regarding mp3-playback, did you try playing high-quality mp3s ~320kbit for any length of time (+10 min)? The Diamond has an issue where the playback glitches at least every 5 min or so. It would be very interesting to see if this issue has been resolved on the HD, as this seems otherwise a very good PMP.

Thanks again for an excellent, in-depth, unbiased and critical review! :)

The phone is locked/unlocked by pressing the power button. However, the phone automatically unlocks when recieving a call. To avoid picking up calls accidentally you can use a third party software (free), called S2U2. Using a function called S2A – Slide To Answer – you will need to do an Iphone-like slide to pick up a call. I use this on my Diamond and it works excellent. Current version is 1.33. Find it with Google. :)

Thank you for a Part 2 that lived up to the standard you set in Part 1. You have set a benchmark against which all smartphone reviews can be judged – and most will fail.

I’ve ordered a Touch HD and, judging by your review, should be well pleased with it.

I’m reading this on Saturday morning at 10:25GMT; so, I’m a bit late with my congratulations!

Thanks for your comments, all; I’m pleased part 2 was a hit!

neway thanx again for this wonderful review..

You have my apologies man. Seriously. I jumped the gun and it was totally uncalled for- the greatness of Part 2 makes me feel even worse. The paramedics are going to need to be called to get my foot out of my mouth.

I bow down to you, Sir.

Well done and thank you.

Great job.