Don't let her enormous display distract you: She's worse than syphilis.
It looks and sounds like it should be gorgeous – but just like a girl with an ample array on display, you’ll realise that beneath her HTC interface, she is actually a developmentally-delayed vacuous strumpet with a hideous, mischevious heart.
The most embarrassing problem (yes, there are so many that I categorize them by kind) is the social awkwardness prompted by two factors: Unreliable text messaging and hang-up lag time.
The text messaging is strange because some messages just sit, somewhere hidden in the phone (no, not in the Outbox – I said hidden), waiting to be sent. Then, with a restart or a network dropout, and they’ll all send, up to a day or so late.
It’s a problem because when you’re messaging a lady, meaning is inferred by how long it takes for replies to appear. If quick, then the other party is excited and devoted to the task; slower could imply nonchalance or avid interest resulting careful writing and re-wording of a text; too long and it’s disinterested or busy; no reply and the prognosis is bad, doc.
So I send a message, and the clock starts. I can no longer use the trusty ‘Read Message Confirmation’ – which I used to use secretly for great effect (your phone prolly has it – it tells you when the open the message) because they removed that option. I can’t know if the message sent.
Sometimes I fire off a few, which arrive with them in a quick flurry of messages of escalating frustration.
From the basic “Where are you?”
To the less certain “Are you coming?”
To the pathetic “Hello?”
To the passive aggressive “Well I guess I’ll see you round somewhere else then” – all within 20 minutes. Nothing says ‘stalker’ like floods of messages.
Thankfully I don’t send too many messages, because the keyboard is so temperamental and hides away randomly, then won’t show it’s face again without vigorous screen prodding, then it stops helping me spell my words on it’s bizarrely unusable keyboard.
The not hanging up caper is another game it likes to play, as did my last HTC Touch. You press the hang up button and the call keeps transmitting while the phone goes through the apparently excessive computations on it’s allegedly mega-fast processor required to run the command: End the call.
So while you are saying “That was …” they are still tuned in. I am aware of casting agent and one girl that have heard something. The casting agent called for a meeting (which clashed with lazy swimming pool time) and I hung up and said: “Uurgh, damn work.” And they heard me. The girl still won’t tell me what she heard me say – prognosis again bad.
So, thus far, with a review of the awkward texting and foot-in-mouth calling, the phone is doing badly. But it gets worse.
If I’m trying to set my phone to not connect to the internet while I’m roaming, there isn’t a blanket option for it. I twiddle through every app that needs the internet, turning them all off, but it still won’t help. It’s still determined to dial out.
The demonic beast’s internet settings have to be scrambled so it doesn’t know how to get on the internet, else it’ll continue to dial up like a horror film phone that keeps ringing after it’s unplugged. With that done, the snarling, talk-time eating, internet junkie phone, resorts to continually informing me that it can’t get on the net.
Like a junkie might nag for a hit, the phone pops up complaint box after complaint box about it’s lack of ability to dial out to find out what the weather’s like. I know what the weather forecast is like. I’ll tell you: It’s fucking hot until it starts pissing with rain in what we call monsoon. Forget the internet for now. Shut up and let me type yet another awkward text message!
You win phone: You’re more annoying than me in my sister’s dreams. Have your fucking internet. I hate you.
It has lots of cool options, but almost every one is just a bit buggered. Even when I go through the rather long process of quitting all the background apps it still runs slow, hangs or crashes so badly it needs to be defibrillated and soft-reset before it can get past some disconcerting colour bars and evil DOS-like glyphs.
You don’t understand how much I need this phone. I Google people (directors, other actors, funny guys or cute girls) as soon as I meet them, often while sitting in front of them – like a stealthy information-whore ninja. If someone tells me something amazing, I’ll verify their story immediately, and supportively defend them or batter their untruths into submission. I end debates about known facts in a ruthless manner. I ride to auditions guided with Google maps and the GPS, and Latitude tells me where my friends and family are. I check the News, Quote of the Day, Facebook and see what recent scientific discoveries have been made (Melt in place brain recording devices, apparently!). I have my show reel and my photos on the phone, along with Excel spreadsheets of my earnings, and load the show reel only production-house computers (if I brought the stupid sized cord they decided to use after the awesome mini USB one).
If it always failed to do that, I would have set it on fire, but it sometimes does those things, and sometimes just hangs, causing me to suffer that awkward ‘Should I try to press close again now or will that cause both this window and the one under it to close when it starts responding again?’ Bam, bam: Fail, you quit out of maps. Too bad.
Then (finally) I contacted the HTC website to ask them if I just had a shit handset, or if all they sold was shit handsets, and guess what: Their website, specifically the bit that records problems, is experiencing problems and won’t let me complain. Well they’d better read this.
I so wanted to write about the awesome features of this phone and how it makes the iPhone look like a feminine pointing device, and the HD2 is like a wicked, black, beast of burden, like a shiny stamping stallion with huge nuts. But instead it’s a retarded Shetland pony with truck-nuts gaffer taped under his tail.
The phone sucks.
Other problems (I couldn’t even attempt to make then readable): Text message times are all screwed up so I apparently reply to messages I haven’t read yet, or new messages will arrive yesterday; The WiFi is weak, the Router causes the no-sleep function to stay on after the Router is switched off, the screen occasionally goes funny safe-mode-esque purple colours; the google search function doesn’t work in opera while google page still loads; the slide to unlock sometimes sticks and needs a battery-pull, the WiFi forgets network passwords and forgets to connect to networks, and at medium power mode it can barely see my router through my wooden door; the task manager is now less useful and a bunch of others I can’t remember.
I’ll admit that this phone is frustrating at times, but i still love it. The pros outweigh the cons for me, i just needed to tweak it to my liking so that i am finally able to use it with little frustration. One feature that is annoying is that when you insert a new simcard it resets your bookmarked quicklinks and as I gave my other phone to my mother as hers was stolen, switching between the two numbers i have can be troublesome and repetitive…
Overall, i still love the ridiculous size of the phone, the functions, the fact that it is unique and furthermore that you are the only other person i know that has this phone… When people with iPhones and Samsung Omnias so proudly pull out and play with their phones, they are in awe of the size of the HD2 and so intently look at what brand and model my phone is. Because in this case at first glance, bigger equates to better… Well that’s the general thinking of things. We are too reliant on technology and demand more and more, I remember the days when we used to scream at the speed of a 2x CD (not DVD) burner and dialup download speeds… Anyways i digress, in the world of mobile/cell phones… the HTC HD2 for me is unique and thats what i’m about.. standing out, not being a trend whore. Yes there are many pros for the Apple iPhone, but just the fact that every second person has one and it is what people define these days as having a ‘modern/good’ phone, turns me off the idea of owning one.. Does my HD2 frustrate me at times? Yes hell yes, but so does my ridiculously new/fast laptop, so does my massive LCD televsion, my mass of consoles, so does my unnecessarily large (for Vietnam roads) sports motorbike.. We can find flaws in everything, as no one product is perfect in any class of technology…But think about how far we’ve come with mobile phones, i remember when SNAKE was oh so wonderful to have when everyone had a nokia 5100 or 3210 (yes that was your FIRST PHONE HARRY!!) Now i don’t have one single friend that i can recall that owns a Nokia..Then it was colour screens and QWERTY keyboards… Now we’ve moved on to touchscreens, which DEFINITELY needs some getting used to.
Regardless of the HTC HD2′s frustrating instabilities (which for me now are few and far between), its flaws, its cons, its pitfalls, its limitations, I would still choose the HTC over and over and over… especially over the iPhone. Here’s just hoping that they port over some of the software/games etc that are available on the iPhone to windows mobiles… And i haven’t even really gone into detail about the pros of the phone either… I’ll leave that for another day..
Hale, I still own a Nokia. I live in a house of iPhones and HTC’s but I still have a freaking Nokia. Sure, its only a year old and has a cool slide function with buttons I can actually press, and yes I’ll probably end up being a sheep and a consumer whore when the new 4G comes out, just so I can laugh at Dave who has the old 3G and har har MINES BETTER but still. I’ll keep using my Nokia that was paid off quickly and hasn’t broken on me yet.
And Harry – nice blog of admittance that you were wrong about it, heh.
ps. Get to London already.
Awesome!
My wife has the HD2 and I’ve seen some of the issues you describe. I have a different Windows Mobile phone (the touch pro 2 – not the HD2) and the weird text messaging issues and constant “can’t connect” errors do not happen with it.
Maybe the HD does come with a demon.
You sir, sound like some very freaky tool of a man. I think you should see a shrink or maybe get a phone ment for slower people.
Thank you for your concern kind gentleman.
Yeah I think it’s Win Mobile that’s the culprit rather than HTC, I’m actually eager to try their Android version. Well I would have been if I hadn’t spent a bazillion rupees on this one.
Sorry to hear about your luck…I never really had a chance to experience any of the out of the box problems with the phone because as soon as i got home with it, i started flashing new ROMs onto it, and tweaking the device any way possible. This may not be your cup of tea, but I am certainly enjoying my device more and more each day the more i dig into it.
If you know how to pimp phones – supposing I’d lost the receipt of this one, what would you suggest I do to make it turn into an actually workable phone?
I totally think it’s a duff handset, I have exactly the same problems, every single problem you mentioned I’ve had except I had the added plesure of sending my phone off to HTC to try and get it fixed, however rather than fixed it they decied to smash it on the floor then hold it to ransom for 2 months, and charge me £94 ($150) to fix it, then promptly sent it back to me, neglecting to even mention in the repair letter the original fault I’d sent it off for!
Bla Bla, legal dispute, ongoing, HTC are the single worst company I’ve dealt with in my life…
I have the US version, which is helpfully 1.5mm longer so it won’t quite fit into 99% of the cases in production- previous to the HD2, I had the nexus one and nokia n900, both sent back for sucking in various ways and for hardware malfunctions, i.e., the nexus had touchscreen calibration issues, and the nokia was just turtle slow.
Also, it was the size of a bus. This, from someone who always loved the feel of a treo in my oversized hands. I just loved that solid chunk of technology filling my hand.
For some reason, they have disabled the wifi router function and also the business card scanner/OCR- please tell me those also didn’t work so I can feel better about this gyp.
I was dubious about windows mobile, but have come to appreciate its strengths, for a small business owner such as myself, the ability to just open my bluetooth keyboard and start typing instead of having to start up an app to enable that is a huge timesaver.
I miss the android speech-to-text, but I don’t miss the clumsy text-editing non-capability; you can’t highlight, copy, delete, etc. just one or two words, it’s everything in the text field or nothing. What?!
And as far as I know, you can’t use a bluetooth keyboard with it at all. That’s a smartphone?
For good or ill, it seems that the operating system that’s been around the longest has the most apps and is best suited for those trying to do real work with it, so WinMo.
I await your intelligent derision and hope to learn from your impatient instruction.
All that having been said, I’m on my fourth in 2 months, awaiting delivery of a fifth, and if that one has problems, I’m going to put it on ebay and go back to Sprint for the Evo. God help me.
good review. i still love my phone! screen is huge so yeah battery time is low and texting is hard. But the videos camera and facebook are awesome! great unlocked phone. surfing the net is easy and email is practical. it’s great for my business with my partner but at the same time it keeps the kids busy playing games and the htc apps are great for when their bored. 2nd best unlocked gsm phone this year in my opinion. got our last few at gsmallover.com we love them. 2 thumbs way up
Thanks for the details, I am really looking forward to the Samsung Epic 4G, despite the fact that I have constantly been really curious in gizmos, for a long time I have been searching for my first smartphone and I did not acquire it yet. The reasons are really simple: each and every several of months there is a revolution in the marketplace (tough to decide!) and prices here in Brazil are quite abusive. Maybe I would enter this world in wonderful style with a Samsung Epic 4G. I hope so.
I think your an idiot and should go back to StarTac but then again that might be a little difficult for you. This is by far the worst review I have ever read. You actually hurt my brain.. The HD2 does have it’s flaws but this was just dramatic. I manage a business with the phone and have 0 problems like you mention except for a occasional freeze up or a bit of lag. But hey one man’s trash is another mans gold. Maybe you will find some peace with Apple.
It would be a little difficult Eyesea. Digging up a StarTac and finding a working battery would be almost as difficult as… Hang on. What kind of name is Eyesea? Eyesea Weiner? Oh wow. That sounds like something totally different when I say it out loud. Has anyone ever told you that your name sounds like something dirty?
I am glad to hear that your experience of the HD2 has been better than mine. If I had zero problems except for two problems I’d be happy too, but I have zero problems except for about eight.
I bought my HD2 almost month in the past, already were given lot of apps on it however want more of course. Still want to to find higher PDF reader, with higher fullscreen mode and multitouch. Planning set up android on it but it’ll be not very soon.
Yes I need the weather on the house srceen with information updates, yes I would like contacts visable at any given time, I want a teach app, a flight app, a highway congestion status app and sure I desire a phone which will respond to my each and every command and not dangle/freeze or shutdown like my present Nokia E72 or my earlier Blackberry Bold.
good review. great phone. love the big screen, it’s light and easy to navigate. I don’t like the buttons on the bottom but so far these are my favorite unlocked world phones this year. i love the email and web browser they keep me in touch and help me keep in contact with my clients. my daughtter loves hers for the facebook and camera she always is on that thing. much better than our old unlocked android phones. stocks are easy to check and the processor is much faster than my old phone i love it. speaker phone is loud enough for me to use in the car and texting isn’t half bad. got my last couple unlocked new phones at gsmauthority.com very happy so far
Thank you for creating this blog and sharing your viewpoint. I like reading it during my lunch break at work. It is nice to take my mind off work even if for only 30 mins. Cheers
Cool post mate.
Nice review. I agree with everything, and would like to add that when someone hangs up just before you do, then the contact located at the spot where the hang-up button disappeared from is who you will be calling next.