[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III General] ghl10000:
Hi all,

thanks for your profound assessments !

Basically initiatives like that htcclassaction.org wouldn't really be successful on the legal level.

Now checking information material (press releases, brochures) I received when I visited the Gitex in Dubai last fall, they really always spoke of the Kaiser as a "business device". There was never ever any mention of multimedia or gaming; at least they did not put this in front of the curtain.

Actually now it seems to be HTC's strategy - they made a press release these days in Taiwan commenting (mainly to their shareholders) on the accusations of htcclassaction.org and other websites - to refer at just this: "the device is not using the multimedia hardware functions as it is a business device" and adding like "but we will launch multimedia devices in the future".

This is really a very smart wording, probably worked out by their legal consultants.

And it could be - in addition to some other "evidence" I mentioned above - used in front of any court in order to - most probably - successfully defend themselves.

(I can, but sadly, only recommend to htcclassaction.org not to try to file a class action against HTC. They'd be very likely to lose that game.)

So it might be hard if not impossible to find any evidence that HTC was lying.

But maybe they were cheating or simply (and intentionally) skipping information thus camouflaging facts that might have been taken in consideration before buying this device or simply doing marketing at the fringe of legality. Neither of this is a very friendly practice nor is prone to deepen customer loyalty or trust into HTC as a customer-friendly manufacturer.

But I'd doubt if any court would judge that illegal.

On the other hand the point of view of HTC reminds me of the following:

Let's take a car manufacturer, praising its new model as having 6 cylinders and even though being only a bit more expensive than any other 6 cylinder cars.

And after having sold 100.000 of the model, people start complaining that the performance of the model isn't exceeding in any way that of any other 4 cylinder car, which is cheaper than the chosen model.

And the car manufacturer responding: "We can prove that our car has 6 cylinders, so we always said the truth about that. But only 4 cylinders are used. We never said that 6 cylinders are actually USED, but in the future we will design and sell real-6-cylinder cars. Anyway the car is a very nice car, you can call it "business car". And business people shall drive carefully and rather slow down, so they won't even need the power of 6 cylinders."

It's a weird example but wouldn't you just agree that this is how HTC would act if they were a car manufacturer ;-)

Working myself in IT industry I'd assess that the complete development (or let's rather say "customization", as clearly Qualcomm has the source code for a generic driver design) of such drivers would cost appr. 100.000 EURO, incl. testing and logistics.

For a company like HTC this wouldn't be really much, but definitely (a) a cost block and (b) a project. (b) definitely is the more crucial thing about it. Assuming HTC never intended to provide these drivers they are then simply not on their roadmap. Roadmaps are only replanned in case of significant changes.

I cannot imagine that HTC regards the "protest" of several thousands of people (though these people are clearly kind of opinion leaders in the "Windows Mobile community") a significant motif.

Maybe also they are too arrogant for that looking at the numbers of devices they sell to T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone and others.

People here said like "I will never ever buy a model from HTC". There was one sarcastic response "Oh, you will !" and maybe this is the point.

The TyTN III (I'd strongly recommend HTC to continue their TyTN series, like Intel did with their successful Pentium series !) might then come as business + multimedia device.

Maybe the drivers will then really be in, but poorly programmed.

But the "never again HTC" community will buy the TyTN III and again - only afterwards - shout "the last time" and again buy the smartly marketed TyTN IV etc. etc.

Business means strategy and strategy means making (more) profit (than others). The customers are in between and cuddled only in order to reach the (company) goal.

Customers thus in 90+% of this game only fulfill a passive role. Theoretically they could have a massive power, but please show me any big customer revolution or any big revolutionists ?

To conclude:

The TyTN II is a very nice device and clearly the nicest and most useful PDA I ever had (my first PDA was a iPAQ 3xxx). I like working with it and enjoy the big 128 MB RAM quite a lot.

Overall my assessment is very positive. On the downside there is potentially powerful hardware which is slowed down "artifically" by "workaround" drivers, which are not suitable. Thus its overall performance is only mediocre.

As usually faster processors consume more power than slower ones, I'd like to know if e.g. a 200 or 250 MHz processor (with optimized drivers) could have given the same overall performance as the hip 400 MHz Qualcomm processor with these poor drivers. Or if the more Megahertz only eat up battery without anything in return.

Maybe this question can be answered by someone here.

Greetings from Europe,

ghl10000

Special greetings to HTC ;-) And try to improve and stay decent :)))

P.S.

Interesting to know how Qualcomm will react on this. Clearly this whole story is likely to spoil the image of their new processor. Any new model from any other manufacturer having this processor built in might now bear bad critics as it might be called "the processor with the lacking drivers". Poor Qualcomm... :)