[Touch HD General] mooro1973:
I was due an upgrade from Orange, after having used a n95 for the last year or so, which was a device I liked. Works straight out of the box as a phone, with the features you would expect a modern phone to have aready implemented in a user friendly manner. Also has the capability to be updated and personailse as you see fit - mine had orange o.s. ripped out within a day of arriving.

Knowing an upgrade was due I spent an afternoon on the net wondering what to go for. Seriously consider decamping to O2 for an iphone, mainly because of the data tariffs there, but had my eye turned by this new Touch H.D. gizmo. Now partly because a few of my mates already have iphones, and partly because I enjoy being contrary, and also because I hate the way "Apple" are trendy and Microsoft hated, the H.D. it was.

Haggled away with Orange and managed to get 1200mins, 500 texts, 0.5gig data for 45 quid month. So in went my order.

The HD arrived the next day. I excitedly opened the very sexy packaging (I have a very sad affection for gadget boxes and keep them for years - even after the device has packed up!), had a quick read of the quick start, plugged her in and off I went.

Nice looking skin,quick to where you want to go. Seems good.

But then things got sticky. I wanted to find out how to bluetooth contacts over to the H.D. Nothing in the quickstart nor the pdf. I know, I know, I could of stuck me old sim in and copied the contacts over, but this is a new toy and we like to play, right? After a couple of hours got an answer over the interweb about how to do this. Phew. Then did the sensible thing of copying these contacts to the sim for safety. Uh oh - the dreaded duplicate contact showing problem.

Then I decided to try the browser. As per another post I could not connect to wifi for an age, then it suddenly started working. Furthermore, I was getting a constant "xml parsing error" when trying to connect via Orange Internet. Had had the phone six hours now, and had only managed to get duplicate contacts on! Arrggghh, fustration of the nation.

Sent a text to a mate, only had I? No sending confirmation. What is going on? Oh, all messages--->sent. Mmm, hardly immediately user friendly.

I was getting tired, so set the alarm. How primitive thought I. More primitive than I realised when I was awoken and finally worked out that three button presses were required to get the alarm into snooze mode. Three! And only then if you had randomly pressed the alarm icon in the top bar in the hope it would do something - couldn't see this advice in any instructions anyway.

So by my second day was getting very dubious about this hardware, even allowing for the mandatory new device learning curve. Happily I stumbled across this place. Installed all the recommended softwares.

Klaxon - hey, my alarm now works like all the other alarms on all other phones.

Adavance Config - hey now I get an sms sent confirmation, and my phone is faster.

Backup -copied my contacts from the storage card, after running this programme, to my pc, deleted the sim contacts and hey presto! No more duplicate sims, and a safe back up.

I then played around with the advanced connection setting and the connection wizard and bang - my browser now works!!!

Suddenly I start to like this phone. Nay love it. It appeals to the very big geek inside of me. Its hard to use, you have to batter away at it to make it user friendly. It's more like a p.c. than a phone - ding dong! It is more like a p.c. than a phone.

And here in lies a problem I believe for the majority of users who will gets this phone and will be flummoxed by it and bin it back to Orange.

It needs to be set up as a phone first if Orange are flogging it as a phone, and not a p.d.a. as they do Blackberry. Little things, like a decent alarm clock, sms confirmation, instructions for contacts, turn off sim contacts option. A much better wlan interface - akin to the N95 would help. On that device selecting the browser gives you a pop up which gives you the option of orange internet, or if one is available a wlan. A simple click on the wlan you want and you're in. All very easy, and in contrast to having to open up communication, wireless lan, wlan, advanced, to swap to a different wlan.

None of these things would take too much effort to implement, and would make the Touch HD excellent for a beginner out of the box.

Your average user though will find these irritatations unforgiveable in some circumstances, and if the rumours of high returns to Orange are right, I bet the above bug bears have a large part to play in this.

However, once the phone is personalised, and once it is accepted as a computer, then I think it is fantastic. It's gorgeous to look at and hold, there's lots of nice little features- cover flow in favourite contacts is good eye candy for example.

And now I realise Ive got another piece of Redmond in my pocket, I'm even happier. This phone is a geeks dream - the "chic of tweak" perhaps? After four days with it I love it. I'm going to love it even more in months to come when some clever peeps get Android running on it, or when WM6.5/7 comes out.

A fantastic computer that does phone calls, as well. But out of the box, not a fantastic phone.

Just my 2p's worth.