vB Easy Archive - HTC Smartphones

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HTC Smartphones
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Posted by: BrianGM

Hi

I've been into to a good few websites looking at the HTC products. I am so confused. There are so many of them. Kaiser, TYTN, Touch, Excalibur....and the list goes on. I can't seem to get my hands on a price list, list of all the products, comparisons between the various names in terms of size, hardware, prices, advantages, disadvanges (if there are any!).

Do HTC products sell under the HTC name or under other product names?

Thanks

Brian

Posted by: maevro

You can buy HTC phones, but they also sell them under Dopod and CHT, plus they rebrand them to carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile and now Sprint.

For example that excaliber you mention is the T-Mobile Dash rebranded.

There are a lot of online stores where you can buy HTC phones.

www.CTINYC.com
www.CTI-Miami.com
www.egagdetdepot.com
www.dweiniger.com
www.smart-mobile-gadgets.com
www.mobileplanet.com
www.expansys.com

I can keep going if you would like.

Posted by: BrianGM

Maervo

Hi. Thanks for your input. Are they as good as they write. Do they have bugs and things like, for instance, Sony Ericsson's P110i? Don't like to make comparisons, but when it came out this was the next best thing to Granma's cherry pie. A while down the way it's full of bugs and problems. Are there any problems of, let's say, screen freezing up and having to soft reset at least once a day? Or battery or memory leakage? These are things that I have read happens to other Smartophones. I really don't know much about HTC.

Thanks

Brian

The HTC's seem to be packed with everything

Posted by: ChInEsE ChIcKeN

yes htcs are very good phones and there genrally packed with a lot of stuff and the latest if i may add. there very relieble... i have been a HTC fan for about 2 years and dont have complaints

Posted by: BrianGM

Thanks Neil. Bit of a turnaround don't you think?

Brian

Posted by: dsigma6

Freezing and whatnot has little to do with HTC, and everything to do with Windows Mobile. I never heard of them before I got the Dash, and now I've had 3 from HTC. Very good devices.

Posted by: jleecong

HTC makes a great product. I've been using a 5600 (Audiovox/AT&T rebranded) for years now.

Best phone I have owned!

Posted by: BrianGM

Hi again

More questions to you about HTC and in general:

- What's with the TouchFlo? Has it actually hit the market? With all the bugs and all that one hears about other revolutionary ideas, is it a good idea to buy one? Why not wait for it to work out the bugs and buy something further down the line? By then it has either strengthed or fallen by the wayside.

- About buying Smartphones, Pocket PC's and HTC in particular over the internet? Is it a good idea to buy one from a website? What about transport overseas? In particular to the Middle East? Does HTC have an international warranty and insurance once the warranty has expired? HTC may have an agent in Israel. If not, what do I do if it needs repair work, etc?

Do you know of any shops in the UK and the US that stock HTC?

Thanks for allowing me to pick your brains, guys.

Posted by: BrianGM

Hi again,

Question about the HTC's. Why do they have such small processors as opposed to Pocket PC's? It's 201 MHz as opposed to 400 MHz? Is this normal with all Smartphones?

Thanks again.

Brian

Posted by: chuckknight

Some of their phones, the AT&T/Cingular 8525 for example, do have 400MHz processors.

I think the choice is made because of battery life. The difference in performance for an average user will be minimal, but the battery life is significantly extended with a slightly lesser processor. The brand new TMobile Wing has the 200MHz processor, and is actually newer (to the US market) than the 8525.

Most HTC devices can be overclocked, if you so wish. The procedures are discussed on this forum, and others. I'll let you do the search.

-- Chuck Knight

Posted by: hylton

Some of the 'new and upcoming' Smartphones (i.e. WM Standard) will also have 400mhz CPUs like their PPC (i.e WM Pro) counterparts. The HTC Wings/Juno, Erato, and a few others I seem to recall are all 400mhz devices. But the battery life (as mentioned) will suffer somewhat in the trade-off to get better performance. Unless you really want blazing performance, overclocking a 200mhz CPU works really well on most of these devices and will more than compensate for the lack of speed @ 200mhz.

Regarding the whole purchase process. First, pretty much anything you buy in the US that is NOT carrier branded (i.e. HTC, Qtek, Dopod) will carry some kind of warranty, but getting coverage under it may or may not be easy. There used to be only 2 authorized distributors of HTC products here in the US, that may be down to 1 now, I seem to recall something in the news about that recently. And if the retailer/e-tailer isn't dealing w/ those distributors and/or promising to handle any warranty related issues w/ your device, you may have to deal w/ overseas shipping and associated costs. Just something to consider and get clarification on when you are buying.

My recommendation would be, if at all possible, to buy a carrier branded device.

Chris

Posted by: shawndh

Quote:

Originally Posted by BrianGM

Hi again

More questions to you about HTC and in general:

- What's with the TouchFlo? Has it actually hit the market? With all the bugs and all that one hears about other revolutionary ideas, is it a good idea to buy one? Why not wait for it to work out the bugs and buy something further down the line? By then it has either strengthed or fallen by the wayside.

- About buying Smartphones, Pocket PC's and HTC in particular over the internet? Is it a good idea to buy one from a website? What about transport overseas? In particular to the Middle East? Does HTC have an international warranty and insurance once the warranty has expired? HTC may have an agent in Israel. If not, what do I do if it needs repair work, etc?

Do you know of any shops in the UK and the US that stock HTC?

Thanks for allowing me to pick your brains, guys.

I just bought an HTC P3300 and I love it! Very smooth. It's only 200Mhz but it still does everything will. I have installed the battery status program to overclock it and it's every bit as fast as my old 400Mhz PPC.

HTC has a pretty good reputation as far as service goes. I haven't heard of too many nightmare stories. However, You'll need to research whatever phone you want to buy for problems. The new phones are pretty solid but some of the older phones have issues. The P3300 has been out for about a year now and didn't have any reported common issues. However there was an storage card corruption issue, but it was fixed by an official patch from HTC. Since then, no recurring issues. That was important to me.

Also, my wife has had a rebranded HTC phone (MDA) for a year now and it has not given us any trouble at all. It has preformed well and was the main reason I was set on getting an HTC phone before any other.

Posted by: BrianGM

Hi

A carry-on from my previous questions.

If I want to install 3rd Party programmes like the Ilium e-Wallet, etc would that slow the Touch down, with the 200Mhz processor?

What's with HTC Trinity? How's that as an alternative to the Touch? OK, so I'll do away with the Touch Flo. I'm a bit sceptical of this new technology and the 200Mhz processor, anyway. Also, having another battery as a backup if the existing one of the 416Mhz processor has to be charged more than the 200Mhz processor's battery? Isn't it? Does a fully-charged battery kept seperately loose power over a period of time?

What's with the Trinity the Cellphone PPC interface? Any problem with screen freezing? I just don't like to be kept out in the cold having to soft-reset.

Thanks

Brian

Posted by: kaiso

Battery life is use-dependent. If you use your device a lot, you will use up more battery. We may have the same device but if you use it more than I do, then you'll need to recharge sooner. Determine your level of use before making a decision. I have the Touch. Use it to receive and rply to emails, limited to no internet usage, no games, make 5-10 calls a day and charge it every other day. I'm not a power user. I'm happy with mu 201mHz Touch but would get the NIKE when it comes out because I want 3G. If the Touch had 3G I would not even change.

Posted by: LOMLFOML

You might like pdadb.net - they have reasonably current specs on all sorts of secret phones

Make sure to pull up the detail specs on each.

There was a LOT of talk about the HTC S630 vs the Dopod C730 (same phone, different branding, and REALLY confusing numbering since there are other devices with too similar numbers). Apparently there was a text entry problem, very serious to folks who used the function it occurred on (not all text entry). I'm not sure which unit has/had it. Search for this is you want to read some stories of a vendor seemingly ignoring a rather strange and serious problem. That said, I have an HTC Tmobile Dash and love it. I tried a Sprint Mogul, and did not like the slider form, though it took several days to realize it, but aside from that and the battery not lasting even a full day of doing nothing, I liked it. I am not an early-adopter of technology typically, and that has served me well. You sound the same. The other thing is, if you send a phone back to Taiwan or if a company does it for you, the only real difference I see aside from the shipping cost is possibly the company will have a replacement for you, but frankly, I doubt it. I may be wrong, but I don't think I've seen anyone advertising loaners! Good luck!

Btw, if you are inclined towards the Smartphone QWERTY type, find the specs on the upcoming HP IPAQs new lines - the 900 series (910?912?914? and add 'c' for camera version) appear to have absolutely everything including probably AT&T branding.

Posted by: mszkaren

are all the phones in the websites listed UNLOCKED? or only the ones they state.

Posted by: turley

Quote:

Originally Posted by BrianGM

Hi

I've been into to a good few websites looking at the HTC products. I am so confused. There are so many of them. Kaiser, TYTN, Touch, Excalibur....and the list goes on. I can't seem to get my hands on a price list, list of all the products, comparisons between the various names in terms of size, hardware, prices, advantages, disadvanges (if there are any!).

Do HTC products sell under the HTC name or under other product names?

Thanks

Brian

Two very good places to start are PDAdb.net and GSM Arena. Both sites have extensive technical details of HTC mobile phones, allow you to compare features between models, and at GSM Arena, read user experiences.

HTC mobile phones are available as HTC branded, GSM only, and carrier branded, GSM and CDMA, devices. The advantage with going carrier branded of course is price: carrier branded devices can cost 25% or less than the equivalent unlocked HTC branded device, and carriers usually add software extras that may be important to you. On the downside, carriers sometimes disable features like GPS or leave off features entirely like WiFi. When going with a carrier phone it's important to realize the device may not include all the features of the HTC branded phone.

The Touchflo UI was introduced with the original GSM Touch about a month before the iPhone went on sale. Touchflo runs on top of Windows Mobile 6 and provides enhanced access to phone and multimedia features. Touchflo isn't a replacement for WM6, you don't have to use Touchflo if you don't want to, and certain features are still only available through the WM6 UI.

I've found the WM6 OS very stable, though occasionally I have to do a hard reset. HTC phones are really small PC's for which there's a huge amount of third party applications available. The phone's stability and battery performance will depend greatly on personal settings and the applications you run on it. If you use an HTC phone as just a phone, stability and battery life will be excellent.

Finally, keep this in mind when looking at the various HTC offerings: they're basically identical under the hood. For a generation of phones, HTC standardizes on a basic platform and then dresses it up differently for specific models. The current HTC platform of choice is the Qualcomm MSM7200 (for GSM) and MSM7500 (for CDMA) chip sets. Also, HTC has mostly standardized on 16-bit electroluminescent-backlit QVGA displays, arguably the weakest hardware feature of HTC smart phones. So it's the other features that should decide which phone to get, like keyboard, keypad, or Touchflo, or WiFi or no-Wifi, etc.

Posted by: BrianGM

Hi Everyone,

It's been a long time. And it's a long story. Thanks to all your input I decided on the HTC Trinity. And I decided to buy it through a website www.easydevices.co.uk. Bought it on the strength that it was in stock and paid BP6 for next day delivery to an address in the UK. Then came an email to say that there would be a slight delay- still coming from the suppliers & like to wait for a few orders before sending them. Assured me that it would arrive. After 3 phone calls and similar excuses it turned out that after a week of waiting I would still not get it. And, now: Wait for it. The reason was actually that the Trinity was being fazed out. It was going to be discontinued. Since this was Wednesday and my friend was flying out from the UK to meet me on Thursday there was no way that I would get it.

From requests to send it by courier on their account (with the possiblity of being slapped with an extra expense of BP150 import duty plus 15% VAT) to threats of going to consumer rights organisations in the UK I finally had to accept defeat and cancel the order.

I am pissed off. Really pissed off. I was so looking forward to the Trinity. If you have gotten so far. Pleae go on. What now? Is this true of the Trinity being discontinued? How can I believe these companies when they say that the phones are in stock and they're not? When there is no mention of discontinueing the phone?

Help me guys. I need your support.

Thanks

Brian

Posted by: turley

Brian.

The Trinity is pretty old by smart phone standards, and yes, I believe it's being phased out. However, it still may be available through some dealers.

As far as discontinued model announcements go, don't expect HTC to make an announcement until there's some certainty that the retail channels are empty. Also, to reduce cost and risk, most retailers don't actually stock the products they sell, instead relying on large wholesale distributes and drop shippers. Unless a retailer is diligent in regularly checking on a product's availability, many are not, the true availability is only determined when the product is ordered.

It may sound like I'm defending the practice, but I'm not. At least many retailers have the courtesy not to charge me until an item ships. It's the ones that charge me right away then leave me in limbo as to the ship date that get my goat.

You probably can get a Trinity if you still want one. It may take a lot of leg work on Google though. Also, check PDAdb.net for every alias of the Trinity; you might find it available under another name. Finally, check eBay and other auction sites.

By the way, I just put an order in for the HTC Touch Cruise...

Posted by: BrianGM

Turley

Thanks for your reply. This was my first real dealing with a internet purchase and a bit of a letdown. I'll be back on my feet again. The Touch Cruise looks great. Understand why you're clapping! I've actually being looking at the TyTN 11 as an alternative to the Trinity. That's a few good steps ahead. I have never had the slideout keyboard. Don't know what to expect. Never looked at the Cruise, but that looks like a good alternative if the slideout doesn't work for me.

It is important, therefore, to look closely at the introduction date? What is the average life span of a phone? What with replacement parts, service etc once a phone is about to be discontinued?

Thanks again,

Posted by: turley

A more logical successor to the Trinity might be the Eten Glofiish X800, looking just at features...

It's hard to say exactly when a particular product is being phased out. Obviously when the last of a particular model is gone from the retail shelves is the hard limit. I tend to look at carrier sites to see what they're still offering. Also, if a manufacturer such as HTC is introducing a pack of next-gen models, like the current MSM7200/7500 based models, you can bet the previous-gen models are on their way out. My feeling is that for bleeding-edge devices like smart-phones at most have a product life of 18 to 24 months. As for the operating life of a particular phone, they can last as long as you care to keep them and can still find batteries ...

No mobile phone is designed to be serviced. That's not to say you can find outfits that will do the work for an outrageous price. Occasionally, for popular phones, there are repair parts and kits available. However, be prepared for potentially delicate work! Practically, if you break it, replace it.

Posted by: BrianGM

Quote:

Originally Posted by maevro

You can buy HTC phones, but they also sell them under Dopod and CHT, plus they rebrand them to carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile and now Sprint.

For example that excaliber you mention is the T-Mobile Dash rebranded.

There are a lot of online stores where you can buy HTC phones.

www.CTINYC.com
www.CTI-Miami.com
www.egagdetdepot.com
www.dweiniger.com
www.smart-mobile-gadgets.com
www.mobileplanet.com
www.expansys.com

I can keep going if you would like.

I would appreciate it if you could carry on...........

I have finally decided that I'd like the HTC 3600i. I went onto the site of mobileplanet and the phone will be "Ordered on Request" was written for Availability. In their website forum I put the question to the members what exactly the meaning of that phrase was. And, I quote: "In most cases read 'Ordered on Request' as 'We cant get them yet and dont know when we can'.".

I've been into the sites you mentioned above and mobileplanet is the only one that has it. That kind of scares me. Also, on their site it is mentioned that the Introduction date of the 3600i was August 2007 and www.pdadb.net the date is August 2006. What is going on? Whom are we meant to believe? I cancelled the purchase of the Trinity on a website in England. At first their excuse was it was taking long to deliver the phone from the distributors and the the truth surfaced that there was a strong possiblity that it was going to be discontinued.

Am I being too paranoid about it? Is this normally what happens until one finds the "right site" to do business with? Are there any reliable sites that I can deal with?

Posted by: turley

Quote:

Originally Posted by BrianGM

I couple of thoughts:

I think the PDAdb.net datasheet is in error; it should read an announcement date of August 2007. I didn't even know that there was a Trinity Plus; HTC doesn't list it on their site. GSMArena.com lists the correct date:

http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_p3600i-2126.php

MobilePlanet was purchased awhile ago be eXpansys. Personal experience has led me to believe that now MobilePlanet is just a U.S. based shipping point for eXpansys because their delivery times on many items are just as bad as eXpansys, another retailer I've occasion to deal with in the past. Currently I have NC headphones on order at MobilePlanet; they were listed as in stock on the MobilePlanet web site. A MobilePlanet customer service representative told me a day after my order that the headphones would ship in a week as soon as eXpansys received stock. That was about a month ago and I haven't received the headphones yet. On the plus side, I haven't been charged yet either.

For more MobilePlanet feedback:

http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Mobile_Planet

Update:

Literally less than five minutes after posting this reply I received an email from MobilePlanet that my headphones had shipped! A few weeks late but I'll take it.

Brian -

I did some additional searching for the Trinity Plus. As far as I can see, no one has it. I did find a couple of very reliable dealers that have the Trinity, like J&R for $599, but no Trinity Plus.

Posted by: BigOil

Quote:

Originally Posted by jleecong

HTC makes a great product. I've been using a 5600 (Audiovox/AT&T rebranded) for years now.

Best phone I have owned!

same goes for me. 5600 was way ahead of it's time. Best phone I've owned. If it had wifi and bluetooth 2.0 I wouldn't be looking to upgrade for a long time.

Posted by: phonuzer

I had enjoyed the use of a SDA for nearly a year (two weeks shy) and given that the key/joystick input was showing signs of trouble I decided to do a warranty exchange; what a mistake!

The first replacement had a goofed screen, the second locked-up repeatedly and was terribly sluggish - same for the third and now I wish that I had never given up my original phone.

Did HTC and/or TMO do something to the hardware or software of the SDA to either save money or restrict those abusing services?

Note that I have less running on the replacement phones than I had on the original, everything is more streamlined yet the performance is terrible.

Memory leaks, frequent lock-ups, huge delays in the WM5 software response, etc.

What happened?!

I really wish to keep this style of phone (candy bar) and see that the closest new or current HTC phone is the s710 but this is not an option with TMO.

Thank you, in advance, for your thoughts/suggestions.

Best regards, Phonuzer

Posted by: tarch

Replacements through carriers are most often refurbished products and the most closest HTC to the SDA would be something like the htc mteor/s310/ or 2g smartphone

Posted by: phonuzer

Quote:

Originally Posted by tarch

Replacements through carriers are most often refurbished products and the most closest HTC to the SDA would be something like the htc mteor/s310/ or 2g smartphone

Tarch, thanks for the reply; I'm familiar with both.

It seems as though the phones from HTC supported (offered as an option) by TMO are of the wider type and not something of the s710's shape and capabilities.
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