HTC HD2

Ive had the phone for a round about 2 years now and it has been a rollercoater of experiences. But on this roller coaster the downs take you through the bottom of the Earth, and the highs, well are just mere pauses to the next down.

Once I first got my new HTC HD2 in 2010 I thought I it was flashy as! It looked great and touch screen, it was awesome. But slowly this facade of greatness wore away. The phone, first of all, takes an eternity to load once you turn it on, so once out your left with the difficult choice of turning your phone off and conserving life (And even than it can turn on unpreictably)or letting the battery die relatively soon. However you are always left second guessing the battery life, although around 3-4 hours is a good average.

Once on, I swear the manufacturer adds a poltergeist to the phone. I say this because, no word of a lie, I have turned my phone on to find 2% battery and 3 videos of the inside of my pocket. Also this phone lags so much! It is ridiculous. Its lag, ohhhh man, it can be worse than a talk talk connection! But 5 times out of ten it will run smoothly, the other five, well... it can take a while to load a simple sms.

To be fair the camrea on this phone is great, beautiful quality, personally I would say you could take proffesional grade pics on your phone, although the zoom is a bit of an issue. Its also tough. I dropped it down a flight of two stairs, around 20ft high, to no damage AT ALL. My mate Iain dropped an Iphone from 3ft and the screen was completly cracked.

I may not know any technical aspects of the phone, but I give you an honest first hand account. I may not make it sound bad, but I promise you, if anyone tried to rob my phone I'd hug them, give it to them and tell them never to return it

I had HTC HD2 for almost two years. It is an unusual phone because you can change the software from the original Win 6.5 to win 7 or the best, in my opinion, Android software. The phone transforms itself into a quality kit with android (I used 2.3 version). Unfortunately like with many phones it uses a micro usb port for charging and data transfer. With the regular use the port develops loose contacts due to physical vibrations. Eventually I send it for repair to the UK HTC repair centre. It was still under warranty. When I phoned the repair they told me it was water damage, and on return the indicators on the phone did show red. I am reasonably confident that my phone has not been in contact with water at all. Anyway the water damage as they claimed is just an excuse not to repair my phone, since the phone works perfectly apart from charging. They also returned me the phone with a small crack on the screen that was not there before.

I am disgusted with the service or lack of it. I took the phone to a local specialist who repaired the contacts (micro welding) and it works.

I bought this as a replacement for my Windows PDA to use as a handheld PC with an integrated phone. It is an excellent example of sleek, powerful hardware, but the operating system is patchy and cobbled together.

The big advantage over any other phone I've come across is it's ability to create, edit and sync with PC Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. It will print to a portable printer albeit in poor quality. It is a lot better than the old XDA and does not crash nearly as often, but it still does - aboyt twice a week for me. The touch screen is slick and responsive but difficult to pinpoint drop down boxes and positon the cursor ceret in the right place. Typing is erratic but the auto correct is quite good.

Tomtom runs better and slicker than anyting else (even the dedicated units).

All said and done, I would not get another intergated all-in-one device. It's a 'Jack of all trades', but master of none. I may have forgotten the inconvenience of having 3 or 4 dedicated devices to carry around, but my next phone will be just that - a phone. I'll get a netbook, and a camera too. It's convienient for sure, but the quality and usability is just not quite good enough to replace the dedicated units.

It does lack the vast selection of mostly irrelevent 'apps' offered for the iphone, but there are quite a few useful ones around.

Firstly, the hardware on this phone is very good. Despite already being at least 6 months old, the specs are comparable to the current high-end smartphones available.

It does everything you want it to and despite reports of software faults related to the camera and text messaging, HTC release updates not soon after I bought it on New Year's Eve so I've not had any problems.

The software itself is surprisingly customisable. Thanks to a website called XDA-developers, you can download apps, alternative user interfaces as well as improved software for the phone. When I first got this phone, I didn't understand why Windows Mobile was getting such bad rep but I did see that, despite working well, it doesn't get much support from a lot of companies so professional apps aren't as widely available Android or iPhone.

I would recommend this phone if you can get a good deal for it but if you're starting a new phone contract, I'd more likely head towards an Android powered HTC phone but it's a great phone none the less.

From promising start I loved this phone, my son was born on the 24th December 2010. I have been sending more than 100 text and MMS and looking up any information I needed in the delivery room on the Opera browser.

However it did not take me long to realise that this phone has SERIOUS problems. I wish I had brought an android based phone. List of problems follow.

1. SMS/MMS - Sent to outbox, are not delevered, tries to resend a default of 5 times. I am charged 5 times by my operator. I avoid using MMS and SMS. Service provider Tele2/HTC have not been able to fix.

SMS - FYI Friend has this phone, and resends SMS not to his girlfriend to but to his boss, that was embarrassing for him.

2. Browser Opera is constantly locking up, even on the simplest of sites. It just gets worse and worse.

3. Configuration of basic elements is very difficult to navigate your way around.

4. I bought the phone to develop on, Active Sync is required to do this in a meaningful way, you have no idea how fed up and irrited you can become when this does not work.

5. .Net framework is compact, so compact that simple programming and database access tasks become depressingly long winded, with a huge lack of information or example to code with any significant speed.

6. Camera takes two versions of each photo and video, despite turning this off after turning it on.

I am just ranting about a small selection of the problems I have encountered, but this is my experience of this phone and operator. This phone was supposed to be an asset to my life, it has wasted a huge amount of time and cannot deliver on it's promises.

The HD2 is a very impressive piece of kit. The screen is massive, the software is quality (Windows Mobile 6.5 with HTC Sense) and the features are numerous. It takes amazing photos with it's 5 megapixel camera, has wifi connectivity, HSDPA support, GPRS, Bluetooth, GPS, standard 3.5mm earphone jack, crystal clear display...in fact everything you possibly want from a smartphone. Except a decent software keyboard. I got my HD2 at the beginning of January and I have just swapped it for a Palm Pre, simply because of the ridiculous problems with the software keyboard. Try tying a text and the thing will constantly input letters or words that you didn't want to. This makes emailing, texting and pretty much anything that involves actually writing a monumental excercise in patience. I can't even tell you the amount of times I wanted to throw the thing at the wall because it wouldn't write what I wanted. If you turn predictive text off, it gets even worse. Hold 'delete' down and it'll malfunction and start jumping the cursor all over the place. And it wasn't just my HD2 either - the one my friend has does exactly the same thing. If you want to text or email, do not buy this phone. If you want a cool gadget to impress your friends with, buy an iPhone.

I have to say, I was torn between the iPhone and the HD2 but in the end, after much research I decided to go for the HD2.

The biggest pulling point for me was the amazing deals that are around on this phone. I got mine from Mobile Phones Direct on a 24 month contract. The deal I went for came with 300 free minutes, unlimited texts and web plus 3 months free insurance on Vodafone.

Ordered the phone on the Wednesday morning and it arrived with me the following lunchtime, I couldn't have been happier.

The only slight issue I have with the HD2 is the battery life, I have a long drive into work each day and like to talk a lot. I have been having to charge the phone up each night, but saying that I think most phones have this same issue.

I love the photo quality and being able to connect it with my laptop, it is very easy to download the images.

If you are looking at getting this phone, I can highly recommend it along with Mobile Phones Direct.

This is a great phone, only downside it the battery if your using lots of applications e.g the internet it kills the battery very quickly and I've had the screen freeze on me a couple of times like I had on the Iphone but with this you just take the battery out to reset but with the Iphone you had to wait for it to discharge.....I've had the phone 9 days now and im still learning new things on it everyday.....This phone can ony get better once Htc decide to upgrade the software to windows 7.0 which i guess will be some time later this year....On the whole i am pleased with the phone and I think this is the Iphone killer.

I eagerly waited for the HTC HD2 having read a great deal about it online.

Its a funny one to review, as some aspects are great, some are very dissapointing.

Overall, the most annoying thing about the phone is that the HTC Sense interface has been slapped on top of the Windows 6.5 operating system in a fairly haphazard way. You regularly drop out of the Sense interface and into the Windows 6.5 interface which is a really bad experience in terms of continuity.

The other annoying aspect of the phone is that it appears to have 2 apps for everything - Windows 6.5 app and HTC's own app. On the face of it this would be a great thing, but as some of the apps are non-configurable from the homepage (or pretty much non-configurable) I spent the first week of ownership of this phone getting confused about which app I was in to read emails, view contacts, look at my diary etc.

Overall, its quite a confusing user interface which is a real shame - as the hardware seems fantastic. Its very smooth and highly powered for such a small phone.

The screen is beatiful and although its taking me a while to get used to a touchscreen (previous phone was a Nokia N95), overall the screen experience has been a very positive one.

Its a shame there are so few windows 6.5 apps out on the market right now - this is where I think the iPhone definitely wins right now.

The camera is pretty good - the time it takes from pressing the button to take a picture and it actually taking it is a little slower than ideal (better than the old N95) but quality of snaps is very good with the 5mp camera.

Battery life is so-so - better than the iPhone from what I can gather from other people - but these types of phones eat battery life much quicker than the 'old phones'.

Build quality seems excellent on this phone - it 'feels' expensive.

So, overall, some parts are amazing, some are sadly lacking. So far I can take the lacking parts as the package as a whole is good - however, this isn't the finished product that I was hoping for, which is a shame, as it seems to be down the rushed software rather than the actual hardware.

I wanted to get an iPhone as I was finally out of my old T-Mobile contract, but it was out of stock at all the O2 shops in my area! I went for the HD2 as I couldn't be bothered to wait, and I am SO pleased that I got it!

I was scared that it was a Windows phone, but the layout is still really clear, it's really simple to use and the screen is massive! There's an app store with loads of free games and software, and the camera takes much better pictures than my sister's iPhone!

Bad things are that it's a bit big for carrying around, and the battery doesn't last too long when I listen to music on it on the way to work, but it is easy top charge, and I am so happy that I got it!