Since March 2009, I have owned a HTC Touch HD smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system. The phone has a number of major faults that HTC have not been able to rectify, even with firmware upgrades, such as:
The most annoying problem is the on-going re-synchronisation fault. Quite often, sometimes up to four times per week, when the phone is connected to my computer to synchronise Outlook data between the two devices, this message pops up:
This entails a complete re-synchronisation of everything - files, emails, contacts, tasks and notes. This also usually takes the best part of one hour, so if I need to synchronise my phone just before leaving my house, I then have to either forgo the synchronisation and take outdated data with me, or hang around until the full re-synchronisation has completed.
But the worst part is that when this full re-synchronisation has completed, it has not synchronised all the emails, but only the Inbox. This process wipes the contents of every other email folder. That means that after the full re-synchronisation, I have to open Windows Mobile Device Centre and go to the "Change Content Sync Settings" section and re-synchronise all the email folders that the full re-synchronisation had wiped from the phone. This is another nuisance that causes unwanted and unnecessary work for me.
This has also caused much embarrassment on a number of occasions, when I was in meetings and wanted to show somebody some emails on my phone and because the previous full re-synchronisation had wiped all my emails in all my folders apart from the Inbox, I was not able to show those emails to my associates.
This problem has been documented by literally thousands of people using a variety of HTC smartphones and to this day, HTC have not been able to rectify it. This is truly amazing and even though I have been in contact with HTC over the years that I have owned my HTC Touch HD, HTC had literally abrogated their responsibility to rectify this problem and all the other problems that their products have.
This problem is not about the typical dropouts from weak cell signals. This is about the phone losing the connection to my mobile phone provider's system completely. Every so often, the phone indicates that there is no carrier present and it will not receive any calls. Of course this results in important phone calls being missed until I notice the little icon on the top displaying that there is no phone connection present.
Then I have to open the Connections dialogue box, switch off the phone section and switch it back on again, entering my password. Then when the phone eventually connects to my carrier's system, I discover all the missed calls and occasionally, loss of business because people could not contact me at the time this fault was occurring.
This really annoying fault has occurred more than once in one day on occasions. I have to constantly monitor the phone and check that I am still connected to my mobile phone provider, which is a real nuisance. The phone may be in my pocket for hours when I am busy and not checking it and thus important calls are missed.
The phone occasionally locks up without warning, requiring a soft reboot. When this happens and the phone is in my pocket, no phone calls are able to be received until I notice what is going on and reboot the phone. This has resulted in many missed calls and lost business opportunities.
My previous smartphone was a HP RW-6828 and although it did not have a built-in GPS receiver, I ran TomTom Navigator 7 software on it in conjunction with a Holux GPS receiver connected by Bluetooth. It was a fantastic setup, with the reaction time being as fast and smooth as the best and most expensive TomTom standalone GPS receivers.
I now run the same TomTom Navigator 7 software on my HTC Touch HD that has a built-in GPS receiver. The response time is very slow and the screen display is certainly not smooth - it is very jerky and most unsatisfactory. If I still had the Holux outboard GPS receiver, I would use that instead of the built-in GPS in the HTC Touch HD. There seems to be no way to make the GPS work better.
The HTC Touch HD has a backlight adjustment facility that is very comprehensive, however it seldom works properly. You can select the backlight to turn off if there is no activity from 10 seconds to 5 minutes or disable this function. However, it would be silly to do this, because having the backlight on for long periods will flatten the battery in no time. There is a similar function for turning the power off if the Touch HD is not used from 1 minute to 10 minutes.
The problem is that some of the settings do not work. Set the backlight off function to 2 minutes and often the backlight will switch off in 5 seconds. The same goes for the automatic power-off settings, where the Touch HD will ignore the settings and turn itself off if the screen is not touched for a few seconds. Often after a soft reboot, this happens and this is most annoying and aggravating.
On many occasions, the Touch HD will pop up a box stating that battery power is low and that the phone should be switched off and recharged, so that data will not be lost. This is despite the fact that the phone might have has just been recharged and the battery is at full capacity. The first few times this happened, I would switch the phone off and recharge it, meaning a deal of inconvenience, until I woke up to the fact that it was a false alert.
I subsequently learned to try and close this false warning and check the battery indicator, which invariably showed plenty of battery capacity. However, the phone often turned itself off anyway, necessitating a restart. In many instances, the connection to my phone service provider was lost during this bogus low battery status, so I was not able to receive calls. This is yet another stupid fault with the Touch HD and is a nuisance that should not happen.
Every once in a while, the HTC Touch HD randomly resets important alert tones, such as the ring tone for the phone and SMS, often selecting no tones at all. Thus when somebody rings, there is no indication and missed calls result. This can cost a lot of money if a missed call is business-related and I have suffered a loss of opportunities because of this fault.
Based on my personal experience and reading about the disastrous experiences of other HTC users, I strongly recommend that nobody should purchase any HTC smartphones. They look slick, they seem fine, but I can tell the world that so many people, including me, have had so many problems with their HTC products that they are simply not worth buying.
I know one thing - that if I had bought this so-called HTC Touch HD smartphone in Australia, I would be demanding a full refund and possibly a sum of money as damages for the aggravation and the important missed calls that have lost me money. I bought my phone from an overseas vendor, but it is exactly the same as the HTC Touch HD phones that were sold by local shops and they are fortunate that I did not buy it from one of them, because they would probably be on the wrong end of a lawsuit from me.
My two adult kids have iPhone 4 smartphones that synchronise to Outlook 2010 seamlessly and they have never had to re-synchronise their data like I have been forced to do with my HTC Touch HD. They don't have problems with their iPhones disconnecting from their mobile phone services. They don't have a problem with their GPS receivers having slow and jerky responses like my HTC Touch HD. They don't have to keep performing soft reboots because their phones lock up. All their friends have iPhones and none of them have reported the problems that I have with my HTC Touch HD.
I have no idea whether HTC smartphones using the Android or Windows Mobile 7 operating systems are any better than my HTC Touch HD, but I know one thing for sure. I will never buy another HTC smartphone again.