[spacious]

Ok - So after almost a month here are my thoughts on the US Cellular HTC Merge.

First I should say this is my first android phone coming from years with several Windows Mobile Phones, most recently HTC Touch Pro 2. I flashed alot of WM custom ROMs and even tried my hand at building ROMs myself.

The battery door was twisted/bent a bit and didn't really close completely, but I just twisted/bent it to where it should be and all seems well. Battery life seems excellent after calibrating it (charge completely - unplug - turn off - charge completely while off - turn back on).

The keyboard is OK. Keys are spaced a bit far apart and there's only 4 rows. I was spoiled with the TP2 keyboard. I suppose I'll get used to it, but I find myself using the onscreen keyboard quite a bit on the Merge, something I pretty much never did on any WM phone.

The Merge is FAST and STABLE compared to any Windows Phone I ever had with any ROM I ever used. I always felt that I was trying to fix WM. "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is now a thing of the past.

The GPS is lousy. It won't get a lock at all unless the Wi-Fi is on. I've never experienced this sort of thing before. Anyone know an app like QuickGPS (WM software - it downloads satelite locations from the internet and speeds up GPS lock) for android . I always got a lock in a few seconds on my TP2 with QuickGPS.

HTC's FriendStream, while a great idea, started Force Closing from the first day I got the phone. I contacted HTC and they told me to clear the cache, and if that didn't work to delete and re-add the accounts that it syncs with. I thought this sounded like a poor response, but their suggestion helped a bit, even though I'd already thought of, and done that. It's the only app that's FCed ever so far. Hopefully they will update it soon, I'm not going to hold my breath.

Apps2SD, needs to be implemented for more apps, as it doesn't fully move them to SD card, only parts of some of them. I'll run out of room on the phone eventually. I'm used to being able to install all software on SD and leave the phone pretty much empty. There is a lot of space on the phone though.

This phone - probably android in general - uses A LOT of data. I'm a bit concerned about my 5GB data plan, something I never worried about with WM. It seems that a bunch of apps that came with the phone, that I never use, are using quite a bit of data, even though they are set to not sync or update data automatically. The HTC People app seems to be using the most data though, and I haven't figured out what exactly it's doing.

I've also noticed that several apps are restarting themselves pretty regularly, even apps that I don't ever use. I keep killing them with Advanced Task Killer, but they come back almost immediately. I'm not used to this sort of app behavior coming from WM, and it's a bit frustrating.

Root access is needed. Then I can remove some of these stock apps that are sucking data against my will and restarting themselves. If we can get root, and a custom recovery I can maybe try cooking/porting ROMs for the Merge.

Overall I'm quite happy with the Merge so far, and am patiently waiting for someone to achieve root access. I'm doing as much research as I have time for on the subject, but as a nOOb to android, I'm not making much progress - so far.

I'll update this post as I form more ideas, or learn new information.