[SweetBearCub]

Kinda rambly, you've been warned..

I first got into WM devices with a Sprint PPC-6700. I thought it was the neatest thing since the beginning of time. So neat to be on a cross-country bus trip (don't laugh, much easier since they can accept power wheelchairs fully assembled) and be able to pull up streaming radio, surf the web, doodle, and watch a crapload of TV shows. Heck, I even used some app (I forget which) to warn the greyhound driver of heavy traffic ahead on his route so he could detour.

I though the 6700 was the absolute best thing ever made, except for the antenna bulge. In my entire time of owning it, I never expected it to have good video performance, and never asked much of it in that department. I honestly don't even remember how well it did in that area.

Then I heard that the 6800 had been released, so I headed to a Sprint store to check it out. Smaller. GPS capable. Used modern memory cards. And had a dual core processor? Sold! About that time, I found out that these phones had a large hacking community, so I started exploring. One big thing I found was how disappointed people were with the complete lack of performance in the graphics department, even though the chipset had ATI graphics accelerator hardware on-board. As I recall, after much threatening and gnashing of teeth, some small amount of improvement came from drivers ripped from another phone, and incremental ROM performance improvements.

Several months ago, my Mogul took a nasty fall when I was out & about, and after bouncing/sliding a ways on the ground, it was quite damaged. Asurion replaced it with a Touch Pro. I dug into it with interest, hoping that the graphics performance had been improved. Nope. Still abysmal.

Now we are facing the imminent launch of the Pro 2. As far as I know, the phone's internal hardware is mostly unchanged, aside from the addition of a larger screen and keyboard, among other more minor changes. Now granted, the software it runs is mostly all new, and in fact will likely get a semi-major upgrade by next year to WM 6.5, and maybe even 7 if we are just too lucky for our own good.

Who here thinks the graphics performance will be just as bad as the Mogul and TP though, if not worse, since the screen resolution is increasing from 640x480 to 800x480?

If that's the case, and the graphics performance is still in the dumps - Why do people still buy these devices? Why not do as many people have done with MS and stick with an old 2001-era OS while they wait on something proper to be released? Why encourage HTC's shoddy practices (of not licensing the needed driver code) by rewarding them with your cash? I have a feeling that if HTC saw their revenue fall off of a cliff and they heard people clearly saying that the reason they were not buying was due to a lack of hardware performance, the driver code would be licensed and distributed pronto.

I only hope the forthcoming Tegra-based handsets don't suffer from these same issues...