[Mogul, XV6800 General] ponicg:
So I'm going to respond to your questions... Sorry I haven't done so earlier. First, though, I'd like to thank you for actually having a nice, reasonable, civil discussion. I actually am enjoying it, despite people chiming in saying I'm wrong. This is a forum at it's finest.

First, I'll talk about my 30 day experience. I bought the phone trial-unseen, fully expecting to use my 30 day trial. One of the first things I noticed was that the change from portrait to landscape (and back) took forever. I whined at Sprint twice, who told me that it was just part of Windows Mobile, and therefore wasn't correctable. Cool. I can live with that for some of the other features of the phone. I kept it at this point, since according to the information I have, it wasn't an HTC or Sprint issue, but rather Windows Mobile. I figured someone resourceful here might fix it, and if not, then it was live-with-able(yeah, I'm tired - sue me for using crappy phrases like that:-p).

Secondly, I'd like to address the fact that you seem to believe that I'd like to sue HTC. I don't. I'd like to work through proper channels to get them to come up with a driver. I've called their support line(and Sprint's) to get this worked out. I've also contacted the WinMo team @ MS. I don't think a class-action lawsuit is in order, nor do I believe it would be effective in doing anything other than greasing the pockets of some lawyer, somewhere.

So - moving onto the capabilities being advertised... You're right. I was never told(either in an ad, or directly) that the MSM7500 in my phone was providing hardware acceleration for the video. That being said, I believe I was still misled. By not telling us that the video was software accelerated vs hardware accelerated, after revealing the MSM7500 to be the video processor in the Mogul, HTC effectively lied to us. I think you're right, though, we do need to get away from car analogies. Let's try a computer example though. If Dell advertised their newest PC as having Intel's latest northbridge(which contains onboard video) and sold it with said northbridge, but would not provide drivers to enable hardware acceleration of any graphics(meaning 2d desktop as well as games)... Customers would flip. Add to that the fact that Intel wouldn't (or couldn't, being as it's a Dell PC with Dell Customizations) release a driver that would run the chip in graphics accelerated mode and you've got a recipe for trouble. By not revealing to us that the video was software accelerated, we were led to believe that video hardware on the MSM7500 was what was doing our video processing. After all, they don't list another chip or chipset for video. I think that's where the confusion lies.

Let's also look at Intel's practice of using one production run of processor for various different slots. They've got the right idea. Intel sells the Core 2 Duo line of processors. What most non-tech people don't realize is that when the cache size is the same, the difference between a 2.0 GHz processor and a 2.2 GHz processor and a 2.6 GHz processor in the same family(Core 2 Duo E6x00, etc) is simply manufacturing control. If Intel labels a chip 2.0 GHz - that's the maximum frequency it is guaranteed to achieve. Intel does not sell all 3 chips as Core 2 Duo E6000, but rather E6400, E6600, etc. By correctly labeling the chips, customers know what they are getting just by the product name. Some people are claiming that the hardware is unsupported by our MSMs, which I think is most likely false based on what you've stated, what I've stated, and what I've read.

Also, bakntyme, I understand the point you were trying to make by drawing out the analogies to the extreme. I'm not asking for that however. I'm asking for a driver to accelerate the video using video hardware that is in my device. Had someone told me it was going to be software accelerated, I might have thought different. The problem isn't that it isn't performant - it'll get the job done. The problem is that it isn't as performant as it should be with this chipset. Until recently, nobody knew why it was so slow - now we've come to realize that they aren't providing adequate support for their product and hopefully we can work out a resolution with them. HTC doesn't seem like an unreasonable company.

I have one last thing to say in this post though. Can we stop the name-calling? I made a concerted effort to keep my humor light("a bit retarded") but perhaps it was tacky and pedestrian. I apologize if anyone was offended by that and I'll try a bit harder to not do so in the future. bakntyme, I look forward to continuing this discussion and to your responses. I'm open to the fact that I may be wrong, but you haven't convinced me that HTC isn't obligated to provide proper software support for the hardware they've provided. Dell doesn't tell you specifically that their laptops use hardware-based video acceleration - they simply state that they're using this graphics card from nVidia or that chipset from Intel.