[HTC 10 Guides, News, & Discussion] jcracken:
If I preorder a phone in 2016 I'd expect to get it at the same time or before it launches in retail, not after. I know it's not close to shipping because they haven't sent shipping information or changed the status from "preordered" to "perparing for shipment." I paid $600 out of my pocket, it's one thing if it was like the Nexus 4 or Nexus 5 where the device was in severe backorder for months, hence why it took weeks, if not months, between order and arrival. But this phone is already on sale, in retail, in most parts of the world, and the fact that it's going up for preorder on VZW means they already have units and are either already ready to ship them out or are very close to doing so.

Like, others have said the same thing about how HTC only ever said "early May" and that there's no reason to get mad at them, but that's not a good excuse. There is no reason it should take a month to ship a phone in the US, one of the biggest single phone markets in the world, when a. other parts of the world (pretty much every other part of the world, for that matter) already has it both for shipment and in retail; b. HTC delayed the announcement of this phone for months after the traditional MWC/early March window they usually use to announce the phone; c. the phone has hit nearly every level of the supply chain, from carrier reps to retail conferences seeing the phone during the delay; and d. every other competitor not only announced earlier, but hit retail and shipped preorders on-time, after giving a hard date, well before HTC even announced. Add on top of all that that HTC has remained incredibly vague as to when they're actually putting the phone out (you wouldn't preorder a video game that's coming out soon, only to hear that they haven't even established a retail date other than "in a month, maybe, idk"). This is literally textbook how not to launch a consumer product in the age of the internet.

At the very least if you're going to take forever to get shipments out, have the courtesy to embargo reviews/wait to open preorders until a week or so before you hit retail, so that the hype the phone brings doesn't die out in the weeks while people wait for the phone to arrive. I've seriously gotten to the point where I might even return the phone, and just wait to see if the rumors about Nexus devices coming in the summer are true. That's how disenchanted I've gotten.

Edit: That sounded a bit ranty, but to be honest I actually don't feel that strongly about it. I'm just tired of companies ****ting on us in situations like this and acting like it's gold. I went through this for the AT&T Galaxy S II after Samsung decided to wait 6 months before bringing it to the US, I went through this with the HTC One M7 where AT&T wouldn't let me get the preorder bonuses because their business systems sucked, I went though this after AT&T made me buy a bootloader locked Galaxy Alpha for the same reason (only to open up Moto Maker for business customers later, which meant I had to sell my Galaxy Alpha a loss in order to get a Moto X like I had always wanted), I went through this for a 2012 Nexus 7 as stated before. I bought a Nexus 9 through Best Buy entirely to avoid this, and I almost fell for this stuff again with the Pixel C after Google took several months to put it up on the Play Store--it was only after reading the reviews did I sober up and not put down the money for it. Like seriously, it used to be only Apple could get their **** together--now Samsung, LG, and pretty much all the carriers have had smooth launches. Why can't HTC get it together?