[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III General] Bertokamus:
Oh man you asked for it #1

Alright- I typically use this site SOLEY for reference/assistance/troubleshooting/brainstorming, you get the idea...

And for that, it has been INCREDIBLE! Thank you all!

However, I will now take this incredible opportunity to gripe about how much I hate my new Tilt (Kaiser) vs. my old 8125 (Wizard).

Two days ago, I finally wore the mini USB port solder points out on my Wizard, leaving me with no way to charge my battery other than (and this is what I did) disassembling the Wizard, slipping the port on the charger plug, and holding it defibrillator style against the printed circuit board where it had previously lived. This got me enough juice to make it through the last couple of days, and sync it one last time in order to dump over to my new Tilt. In the last 3 hours with my new Tilt/Kaiser, I have come to these conclusions:

1. The keyboard now slides open in the opposite direction. I officially hate this. On my Wizard, I would slide the keyboard open, browse the web in landscape mode, and use the D-Pad and 2 softkeys between the screen and the D-Pad to navigate. This was beautiful and worked wonderfully. Now, the D-Pad is on the left side (I'm right handed) and not only does this suck balls for my left thumb, but it is compounded by the soft keys which have now migrated farther south (along with the messaging and IE buttons, as if it wasn't bad enough) to make the D-Pad area so freaking congested that even I, with my nimble fingers, have a hard time discerning one button from the next. Roll all this in with the fact that the charging port is still essentially in the same place, and browsing with the keyboard open using the D-Pad with the charger plugged in is essentially MADDENING, while it was *quite* feasible, before.

2. The power button has moved. Why? Top seems like a great place, always was- and what could the congestion issue be? The MicroSD slot has already been moved beneath the D-Pad so the top has to have a little breathing room, I'd think!

3. As mentioned in 1., the messaging and IE buttons have been moved to the D-Pad area. For what reason? This now makes one-handed use to quickly snap messaging/IE open a total pain in the ass, and quick/reliable motions in the D-Pad area HAZARDOUSLY hit or miss. I mean, lets REALLY think about this. 13 buttons in an area about as large as 3 United States postage stamps. WTF?

4. The volume *slider* has been replaced with a wheel. I'm not entirely certain how I feel about this, yet- but already I've noticed a few times that I've *clicked* the wheel and rolled it at the same time, while I can't recall ever sliding the Wizard's slider when trying to click with it. I liked sliding up and holding, or sliding down and holding, as opposed to rolling, and rolling, and rolling... Also, while petty, it's worth mentioning that the profile of the wheel on the Kaiser is *just* slightly larger than the slider on the Wizard. Not really a major issue, but noteworthy.

5. Where's the Comm Manager button that used to be above the volume slider? Oh wait- there is no Comm Manager button anymore- just a PTT button I have absolutely no use for. While I feel certain there's probably a hack/mod out there to permit me to re-map this to Comm Management, I see nothing built in as of this post. Perhaps HTC has assumed we all just leave our Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on all the time (plugged into chargers, of course, as otherwise our batteries would be deceased in no time...)

6. MicroSD? Aww man... I won't rant on this one, as it's just a given that any time I buy a new phone I'll need new cards, but Jesus, man- First it was SD, then it was MiniSD, which I was just starting to actually use in other devices (yay for cross compatibility and the potential to use cards to their max!) when, now, I'm out another 20, 30, 50, WHATEVER, dollars for ANOTHER new card. MicroSD. "Whoopee." Not to mention- what the hell is the deal with this magically gravitational force that's pulling EVERYTHING to the freaking D-Pad!!?? What was wrong with the SD port on top???

7. Voice Dial button. Okay. Now seriously. This is flat out retarded. Finally, we were getting to a point in telecommunications hardware where many devices were actually beginning to sport a dedicated voice dial button, and HTC pulls it off of the Kaiser. ::slaps forehead:: I'm at a loss. Is this, again, because all of us Kaiser users are supposed to be using stereo bluetooth headsets with voice dial buttons integrated on *them*? ::sigh::

8. Black keyboard (almost). This keyboard is AWESOME! Well- permit me to elaborate- the COLORATION, on 30 of the keys, is AWESOME! The silver numeric keys are a complete travesty, and a throwback to a sometimes difficult to read (under certain circumstances) Wizard keyboard. Also, why, exactly, HTC felt the need to move symbols around on the keyboard, coupled with numbers moved around on the keyboard, coupled with entire keys being relocated on the keyboard, I will *never* know. I haven't even checked to see if the Kaiser has the same idiotic keyboard backlight timeout issues that the Wizard had, but if it does, it's going on the list!

9. B = BM. No no, not bowel movement, "BM." Every time in the last few hours I have touched the "b" key, I have been given "bm." I will be wearing out my backspace key quite quickly at this rate. I've already noticed another post which seems to revolve around this issue, but I have been too busy ranting here to actually read *that* open tab. <Update:> That post was about something else (keypresses repeating)- BUT: I'm hoping I simply received a lemon Kaiser with a flakey keyboard, as multiple keys (4-5, actually) result in random additional keypresses, including (most annoyingly) B = B + M, V = V + SPC, and L = L + OK, or some such nonsense... Typing softer/harder doesn't seem to entirely alleviate *or* reproduce the problem. :-( Crap!

10. Tilt. Wow. This is certainly the AT&T "Tilt." Because- the screen tilts! Wait- why? I'm sorry- not to crack on HTC's brilliant ingenuity, but perhaps I was the lucky one of the thousands who simply *never* had any desire whatsoever to tilt the screen of my Wizard for any reason... While this is certainly a snazzy Sidekick-type feature, I have zero use for it, and simply cannot fathom any other reason why AT&T would market this high-powered XDA as a "Tilt" than to directly market-oppose the Sidekick. Oh wait- now I know why it's engineered this way- obsolescence! Surely this thing is bound to snap off in the next 6 months (if I can stomach it's unfriendliness that long)... Just... I don't know- seriously stop and take a few seconds to yourself, and truly think about this amazing device, and then think about the name it was given. Shame on you, AT&T. Shame. What would have been wrong with 8925? 8125 was good enough for Cingular 2 years ago! This "Tilt" business is like branding the Acura NSX the "Acura Car with 4 Wheels!" Nevermind the 400MHz CPU or WM6Pro capabilities, to say the least... Bah, ingenius AT&T marketing... How patronizing- to a device- LMAO!

11. Where's the other speaker? And for that matter, where is this single speakers balls? Were they neutered out with the other speaker? Oh wait- I know- this all comes back to the fact that I'm supposed to be using stereo Bluetooth- thaaaat's right- silly me! Except for- oh- wait- wanting to hear my phone ring across the room. Perhaps HTC never thought of this, but- speaker duplicity lead to much more reliable notification audibility. News flash! When your device is in your holster, pocket, whatever- typically on the Wizard *one* speaker was covered, but another was still revealed. Eureka!

12. Mini-USB? Really? Because it looks like some bizarre, mutated Mini-USB charging/sync port to me... what the hell was the purpose of this, other than to make you do a double-take the first few thousand times you plug a cable into it?

13. Where's my flashlight? I'm a king of successfully using things for their entirely "not-intended" purpose. And the flash on the Wizard? About as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it came to pictures. But looking around an engine compartment? Searching a backpack? Inspecting a PC tower's innards? (The list goes on...) That little "flash" kicked some major ass for an always available flashlight. Goodbye, little flashlight... :-(

These gripes are all primarily hardware related, and I doubt I'll have many SW gripes to append later as I've been using WM6 off and on my Wizard for a few months now, and have markedly few complaints that can't be alleviated with some mild hacking and modding.

Alright, that's all I've got. Again, these were all conditions of the phone publicly present before I purchased it, so I'm not harping on HTC, entirely, just posing the perspective of one DEVOTED Wizard owner who thought he was going to super-upgrade to a Kaiser. At this rate, I'll be soldering my Mini-USB port back onto my Wizard's PCB, or making a reluctant leap to the iPhone. It is *quite* bad ass, but I've absolutely adored my Wizard for over a year and a half (a feat unmatched by any cell phone in the last 10 years, for me... I usually roll over every 5-6 months!) and as anti-establishment and group mentality as I am, slipping over to the iPhone side was something I was trying to avoid!