[jah_rankin]

Not Quite



10 Nov 2007 by Mike Zotos

7.2 out of 10
I have to say I was anxious to get this phone once I heard it was on it's way (Thanks PhoneArena). Unfortunately I had to wait several days to activate it due to Sprint's backend upgrades this week. What idiot decided to make this major upgrade the same day they introduce a phone that was supposed to compete with I-Phone? Obviously their departments to not TALK to each other! This action left a sour taste in my nouth.

There are numerous flaws with this phone. First, and the most annoying, is that in standby mode the phone crashes for no apparent reason. At first I suspected it was due to one of the programs running in the background but after I closed all the running programs it still happened. This caused me to lose several incoming calls. Each time I didn't find out the phone had crashed until I went to use it myself. The worst part about this is that you cannot reboot the phone using any button. You have to take off the rear battery cover and remove the battery and then re-install. Very frustrating.

The second most annoying feature is the pop-up keyboards. On many occasions the keyboard hides the fields that you are trying to enter data into. This means you have to continuously go back and forth checking what you have typed to see if it's correct. How hard would it have been to move the whole screen upwards to keep the input field visible? Could no one at HTC see this problem? Wow.

There are other problems too. Too numerous to mention here. Let's just say that the blame for these problems should be disrtibuted evenly between Sprint, Microsoft, and HTC. I hope the first firmware update addresses these major issues quickly. You can also point the finger at Apple too. Because of the I-Phone manufaturers and service providers are rushing out phones before they're ready. To me the HTC Touch is a beta prototype at best.