Before I bought my current Blackberry I had an HTC Touch. I completely relate to the experience my colleague Robb Stevenson has had with his HTC Touch Diamond. Robb’s thoughts on his HTC Touch experience;
I remember buying this phone with such joy – I had researched the phone for months, and finally was really excited to have such a great and awesome and pretty device in my quivering hands.
I turned it on and it crashed – warning sign number one.
Over the past two years, what should be a pain-free experience (of using a cell phone) has been nothing short of torture, here are a few of my gripes:
1. Battery Life – the thing lasts half a day with regular use. That’s it.
2. Turning it on – do I hold the power button for 1 second? nope… 3 seconds? nope… 1.5 seconds? yup, this time. It varies. Variety, supposedly, is the spice of life.
3. Answering phone calls – apparently, with this phone, when you hit the green answer bar what you really mean to do is hang up.
4. Text messages – sending sometimes results in a bounce back of every single text message I’ve ever sent! Receiving sometimes works, when the phone doesn’t freeze when you try to access your new texts.
5. Email Syncing – waiting for network 24-7; you have to turn the phone on and off to get a few hours of syncing in before the “network” mysteriously goes away again.
6. Turning it on – after figuring out the cryptic power button, sometimes the phone manages to load the main menu in under a minute. Sometimes 5. Sometimes 10. Sometimes never.
7. Making a call – after entering 5 numbers of a 10 number phone number it will spontaneously dial. No reason, it just figured the person you were trying to call wasn’t really who you were trying to call.
8. The screen – three cracks after ordinary use.
9. Freezing – Seriously, who wants to be able to use a phone consistently and reliably, why not just stop working whenever the hell you feel like it.
10. Making a call – it should be noted, that before you can dial a call you actually have to get to the number pad; pressing the phone icon does not guarantee access to the number pad. The phone, in fact, may decide that the call you want to make is not urgent enough and simply refuse to load the number pad. Resulting in turning off the phone and attempting to turn it back on. Excuse me, Mr. Mugger, could you please hold on while I try to get my phone to work so I can call 911.
11. GPS – You could be standing next to a GPS satellite and the phone still wouldn’t know where the fuck you are.
12. Freezing to death – the phone, about every 6 months or so, will simply stop. No amount of begging, pleading, crying or fiddling will make it work. A hard reset is required. A reinstall of all the programs and apps is required. If you can somehow manage to make Windows Phone sync with Windows Mobile (touch and go) then you don’t have to reenter every contact by hand.
13. The screen – sometimes to access a program you want you have to literally crush the phone to get it to recognize your input. Other times, when you don’t want to access a program, the screen would respond to a mouse fart.
14. Browsing… what’s that?
I hate you. I fucking hate your black case, weak processor and shitty OS. I fucking absolutely hate you. I hate you even more because the sales guy at Future Shop gave me a choice between you and a BB Curve. And I choose you.