[HTC Vivid, Raider, Velocity] Cor-master:
I'm still pretty satisfied with mine. I was having my doubts with battery life issues, and pandora overheating it but ever since i discovered slacker I've been pretty content with it. I just grabbed an external battery and a 32gig sd card for it to play music with now, and I got it paired with my arctic sound bluetooth stereo headset. I paid $200 for 2 Vivid's, one for me, one for my wife, and we both love them, and I sold both my captivates for $250 on ebay, so the cost of my 2 Vivid's were -$50. I knew the one x was coming, and I knew the S3 was coming when I got it, but I came to a conclusion: The new hardware really doesn't matter much as android is pretty much topped out for now, and my Captivate could run nearly any game on the market anyway, and from what I've seen games run flawless on it, though I use my flyer for games anyway, I really don't play much more than words with friends, and angry birds space on my vivid.

The Vivid for the most part lives up to my claim. It does suffer from minor lag occasionally, and I do believe most of its lag is due to the extremely bulky Sense UI over top of Android 4.03. I was iffy on sense at first too as it definitly takes away from the overall ICS look, but its grown on me now, and its beautiful in its own way. It doesn't look the same as ICS but the added features make it most likely more fun than a Galaxy Nexus. I love the big text message and missed call notification previews it leaves on the lockscreen. And the app shortcuts are very handy, especially since i was used to having them on my captivate from CM7 anyway.

I have to say when I got my Captivate I was dying for an android phone, and it was a proud moment when I walked out of Best Buy in 2010 with a Galaxy S phone in my hand, but quickly it became disappointing especially seeing how my iSheep friend's iphones were quick and snappy and my captivate was slow and laggy, and web browsing quite frankly sucked compared to the iphone. I had a custom rom on it within a month of ownership to boost performance where I could. And I became a crack flasher with it, I bought titanium backup pro to switch between roms easier. The best performance I could get from it was with CM7, but it still was slow for my tastes. Ok correction I did run an early build of Team SGSICS on it, and it was real quick and snappy, but it was an early build, and within 4 hours of use I rebooted and hung on the startup animation, and I was back on stock afterwards.

Where I'm going with all that, is I have owned my vivid since March, and I still haven't put a custom rom on it. Its fine the way it is. It's not the best android phone hands down, but it is what I wanted my Captivate to be. And I don't regret it at all, especially playing with the One X, that's only slightly better. Yeah it benchmarks a ton higher but does that even matter? Not at this point, and it probably won't matter till the One X is long forgotten.

I also really don't care if this thing ever sees another major android update, but I do hope they release a security and performance update that updates it to 4.04, and fixes battery life issues, adds voice dialer back in, and fixes the other bugs with it. If I have one complaint is the thing seemed pretty rock solid on gingerbread, but its buggy on ICS. Nothing I can't live with, but still.