[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III General] kilrah:
It's indeed pretty interesting to see what will bother people more than others. Personally the Kaiser is my 4th HTC phone and for me it's by far the best of those.

I think a good way to compare is to actually reply to what the others dislike...

Firstly:

Well.. The Kaiser is actually meant to be a professional device, it's even written "pro" on the box.. personally when buying it I didn't expect (and wasn't looking for) an entertainment device.

I wouldn't either expect from a QVGA PocketPC to play VGA video. In any case I'm recompressing the videos I intend to play on it to QVGA res and 350kbps DivX. It just seems normal to me, maybe that's because I'm too "old school" and have always been used to having to do that since I started using mobile devices. But it seems normal that low power devices that have a comparably slow processor would require such treatment. My Pentium II 450MHz-based PC I had a few years ago couldn't play full resolution high-bitrate movies either.

Recompressed videos play totally normally on my Kaiser, I regularly play some and have nothing to complain about. I can even send the video's sound onto my A2DP headset, which my previous devices were too slow for.

Funny, opposite for me. With my Hermes I was never sure if I had actually pressed the button or not as I wasn't feeling it. Not to talk about pressing 2 at a times, or the wrong one as you can't really feel and distinguish them without looking. On the Wizard they were better but too small.

Agreed, same on the Hermes. I preferred the Wizard's location at the top.

Agreed, but in practice it seems pretty robust.

I don't use a protection and feel OK that way, but I've never used one with any of my phones. I really like the shiny finish, and also the "weird" back cover even if it's pretty prone to getting dirty. What I like most is the screen that is close to the surface. On the Hermes it was buried deeper which didn't look as good, and especially made it difficult to click in the corners with the finger. Dirt would also accumulate in the edges and was difficult to remove. The Kaiser's screen is also brighter and with better colors. I find the Kaiser to be a pleasantly looking device while the Hermes was more of a brick. I also prefer the Kaiser's keyboard, and the tilting mechanism is just awesome. Try to browse a website on a Hermes while having a coffee, the device lies flat and is just so uncomfortable to read so you have to hold it all the time. On the Kaiser just tilt the screen and you feel like on a laptop (almost ;) ).

Impressive, for me it's soo much faster than the Hermes. OK, maybe theres "occasional sluggishness", but if I consider that then the Hermes then was a "constant snail" besides it ;)

With the Hermes, with no app running and after a fresh boot I would already get annoyed at the lack of responsiveness of each action. About common usage, if I was playing some music over A2DP I wouldn't be able to do anything, or just barely retrieve e-mail as it would take a couple of seconds to respond to each click. I would sometimes have to close programs or reboot to free RAM to run particular programs. On the Kaiser if I listen to music via A2DP I can also run 2 heavy GPS mapping programs simultaneously in the background, have both MSN and ICQ running (the original clients, heavy), have the mail open and browse the net... and still switch between the programs in less time than it would take to just open the start menu on the Hermes, and with more free RAM than I had after a reboot on the Hermes. I was VERY amazed at how fast the device was compared to all the PDAs I've had in the hand before. I was nearly enjoying doing current tasks on it rather than on my laptop. After a couple of days of testing I was really really happy about that thing.

This was confirmed when I had to send the Kaiser to service the other day... dang, need to take that Hermes out again, it was the last thing I'd have wanted to do. I hard-reset it and left it as such with only a couple of programs I really need hoping it would be a little less slow, but even then even if I normally spend several hours fiddling about on the PDA each day I don't feel like doing anything more than taking calls with the Hermes anymore. Can't wait to receive the Kaiser back, hopefully by the end of the week.

About the Kaiser camera - It's not good, but it's finally usable, and definitely better than the Hermes one. I now will use it if I want to take a shot of something as a souvenir, before I wasn't even thinking about it for the quality and also as the camera app would take 10 seconds or more to load...

OK that was way too long too, but with the impressive number of people who seem to say the Kaiser is a piece of crap/worst HTC product/etc, I will have to answer that with more than a month of daily usage behind me and staying within realistic expectations I would consider it close from being the ideal pocket device for my usage. I frankly don't see a point I'd judge as being bad/unsufficient.