The camera, with its protruding lens, promised that it could be something of a departure for HTC and might turn out to be not bad. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case and we found the same problems that we always have with HTC camphones – flat colours, poor handling of bright exposures and fuzzy edging.
The camera looks promising, but the results are astonishingly bad
It has autofocus and a double LED flash there's not a great deal in terms of additional features. The touch focus option sounds nice but doesn't seem to have much effect in practise, there's only a 2x digital zoom and the panorama option which allows you to take three consecutive pics and stitches them into a single widescreen photo was very hit and miss. There's no timer option either.
Video quality wasn't quite as bad as we'd feared, delivering 640x480 pixels and 25fps, which isn't bad, but it still suffers massively in comparison with similar spec’d camphones from Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and LG. Even the iPhone’s movie capture stands up well in comparison.
Watching video clips was much better than filming them. It can handle WMV, ASF, MP4, 3GP, 3G2, M4V and AVI files and they come up superbly on that bright, clear (and did we mention it was huge?) screen. There's an option to expand the clips to the screen's resolution too, which is extra impressive.
HTC's music player is preferable to the now very old-looking Windows Media Player – it looks better, and seemed to be able to accept a wider variety of audio formats, including AAC, AMR, M4A, MIDI, MP3, MP4, GCP, WAV and WMA. It's backed by a graphic equaliser and there's FM radio too.
Sonic boon: plays numerous formats to avoid the silent treatment
The HD2 is a very busy handset, and we were pleased to see that it's running a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, which seems more than capable of handling multiple programs simultaneously. Moving between menus and apps happens at quite a lick as well, and there never seemed to be any hint of it slowing down.
COMMENTS
Dub thee "king of the geek hill"
For the proverbial 15 minutes, this device is king of the hill. Got everything and some.
Currently happy on WM (a lowly and tiny HTC Diamond I), long time Palm user, dabbled in iphone and nokia s60. But willing to ditch WM for the next one, never loyal to any platform. It's useability and capability and tweakability that's important to this geek.
WM may need some tweaking upon occasion, but works for me. It's the only platform to have decent desktop sync (PIM as well as generic files). Would try Android, intrigued by WebOS, but no decent (and configurable) out-of-the-box desktop sync, no go. Cloud can take a hike for all I care. Nice to have, but too paranoid of me, I guess.
Other than that, all modern mobile OS'es can do to web/mail/music/gps stuff in some fashion. iphone is lovely - cool games, nice hardware. But too hobbled and crippled to live with, sorry to say: no bt/wifi/usb file transfer? No multitasking? What gives?
The HD2 is the closest thing to the killer device for me: add a keyboard too, my credit card is yours. Or just add some more RAM, bolt the CPU and the capacitative screen on the Pro2. I can always get the new TF3D=Sense from xda-dev.
Spreading more FUD
@IT Specialist
Where's this long list of problems you speak of? Seems the pink aura problem only occurs on some devices and there is a software fix on the way. No biggy.
The fact is you can get this phone for 40 pound more than a 3GS and it has way bigger screen (4.3" vs 3.7"), better resolution, faster processor (1GHz vs 600Hz), sd expansion, replaceable battery, better camera (5mp, LED flash vs 3mp, no flash), completely open software market, etc.
Regardless of the FUD spread buy WinMo hating trolls, this is THE best phone you can buy at the moment. period.
Would love to see Android on this hardware, just have to wait until someone over at xda does a port ;)
One more fault... a defective camera
Just one more fault to add to the long list. The HTC HD2 has a defective camera. The problem causes a pink aura over the centre of every photo.
But you don't have to believe me. Just Google the following words:
HTC HD2 camera pink
You'll find many accounts of this defect in the HD2.
I wouldn't think that Microsoft would do something so low as to pay HTC to keep the Snapdragon processor away from Android. Would The Borg do such a thing? Besides, the next HTC phone, called the HTC Passion, will be out soon. It's got the Snapdragon. And it's running Android. Hurray!!!
WinMo Apologists crawl
... out of the woodwork.
When a phone appears with ground breaking hardware and ball breaking software, its not difficult to see the missed opportunity. Pretending that WinMo is anything but the final throws of Microsoft's mobile strategy is bit like saying Bing will kill Google Search.
When Microsoft have to (allegedly) pay HTC to keep the lovely snapdragon processor away from those nasty android people, you know things are getting pretty bad. When android devices running said processor mysteriously disappear from trade shows overnight in order to better showcase WinMo you understand the beast is back.
The most glaring shame about the whole HTC HD2/WinMo circus is that if the device ran Android, it would sell like hot cakes on a frosty morning, and peace and love would fill the airwaves.
Been using WinMo for years ... Soon no more!
I just bought a TomTom, that's my first step in moving away from WinMo (I used TomTom for WinMo with a Bluetooth GPS receiver). I got tired of the constant Bluetooth problems and not being able to use my SW when I need it most.
WinMo used to be the most advanced Mobile OS out there. Slick, with more functionalities (remember the clunky but stable Palm OS?). Well, no more. Now it's a relic of how bad Micro$oft manages the maturing of its software. There are now plenty of other OSes to choose from.
Ultimately I am going to be waiting for this HW to be available on Android.
