[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III General] TommyCP:
@Digitaltigre, GSLEON3, borealcool

From what I've understood from your posts, you're aim is to getting good video drivers. Let me say this then: what if these drivers aren't what we want. Agreed, hardware accelerated video playback would make video playback at high resolutions and bitrates much better than it is right now. But, from what I've understood from the HTCClassAction website, we want much more: we want the Kaisers overall screen performance to be better than it is right now.

My take on this is as follows: if the device is underperforming and I want it fixed, I don't care how it is done. New drivers, optimized software, maybe even hardware replacement, I don't care. I just care about the result, not about how it is done.

Why this reasoning? Well, when I got my HTC Wizard, it was pretty slow. On screen drawing was slow, application loading times were disappointing, etc. However, when the ROM was updated from WM5 AKU 1.0 (or was it 1.1?) to AKU 2.0, the device already performed much better. When I later switched to AKU 3.3, I experienced another improvement. Suffice it to say, the newer ROMs made the Wizard much faster.

Now, the experienced speed-ups with the newer ROMs are of course partly due to Windows Mobile being optimized. If I'm correct, WM5 used a new version of Windows Embedded which probably had a lot of room for improvement with respect to speed. However, I suspect that the speed improvements I experienced didn't just have to do with the higher version number of WM5, nor with newer drivers that *might* have been included into the ROM. My guess is that HTC also did quite a lot of optimizing. This would fit into HTC's strategy, which someone else already pointed out in this thread: push really hard to be the first to release a certain kind of device and don't care too much about optimization of the ROM.

Thus, what I expect is that the current Kaiser ROM has quite some room for optimizations. These optimization might be included in a next ROM release, but they might also never see the light of day. Hence why I think it is important to not mention the drivers itself: if the Kaiser's performance can be increased by HTC, when then specifically ask for drivers? After all, we don't know which aspects of the Kaiser might benefit from better drivers (video playback for sure, but what else?). Maybe some screenrelated problems need improvement in other areas.

But, I've your main concern indeed is to get better video playback capability, than pursuing the correct drivers indeed seems to be your best bet.

On a side note, I'm still not convinced that the 3D-acceleration can be enabled as it is not uncommon for chip manufactures to deliver special versions of their chips (HTC: "Can we please have a batch of your chips without the Imageon part for a discount?" Qualcomm: "We just so happen to have a batch of chips in which the Imageon part is defective. You can have these.") Also, we have XDA-Dev guru mamaich stating that the Imageon part is missing, although he hasn't provided a good explanation (yet). This of course doesn't matter in court, after all the point is that the promised 3D acceleration is missing, but please consider that if you're hoping on getting the right drivers, you might get disappointed.

@PhilipL

Agreed, the Hermes does a slightly better job, but don't forget that the Hermes also has a powerhouse CPU on board (400 MHz Samsung). Maybe it performs better than Qualcomm's 400 MHz CPU in some areas (like TomTom?)? I'm not saying that this is case, rather I regard it as a possibility. But then again, my Wizard with its 200 MHz TI OMAP performs pretty good too, so the TomTom video *might* show that hardware acceleration is missing. In any case, I don't think a court will find the video convincing enough.

PS Just got back from a friend who introduced me to some really good brands of whisky I've never had before. So, if my post is unclear and/or doesn't seem to make sense, please let me know. :)

Edit:

@Digitaltigre

I agree with that HTC has lied, I've seen their press releases boasing Qualcomm's finest too.