[Touch Pro, Fuze Themes and Apps] ducklord:
Well... This is a personal rant and I've already seen a lot of similar messages. It usually starts with an "my iPhone is better" and the answer always seems to be something along the lines of "ah, it sucks, our Touch Pro is way better, you'll be coming back crying", yadda-yadda-yadda. Here is my take - and I don't mean to offend anyone... I write this because I'm totally dissapointed with MY Touch Pro. Maybe you feel good about yours, it does whatever you needed/wanted, you simply love it.

iPhone is better. A heck of a lot better. I wish I had chose to buy one instead of this piece of crap that calls itself a "smartphone". Why? Well... I came to the world of Windows Mobile with a Tytn, a great all-round phone that had some problems but mostly did what it was supposed to do. The friendly guys and gals in this site managed to squeeze every ounce of life, speed, features and durability from it, making me totally love it. Custom ROMs made it faster and faster, added new and useful features... but... But then came "the new phones". Theoretically, they were faster, they had more memory, "they were better" in every single category. And Touch Pro was at the top, so, after lots of thought, loving its design and hating the fact I had to use an external GPS device with my Tytn, I splashed the cash and bought a brand new, shiny Touch Pro. More memory. More speed. Better screen. Better graphics. Better sound. Better GPS... NOT.

Even with custom ROMs, my Touch Pro crawls like a snail when compared with my Tytn. I mean it, and I tried more than 10 different ones (and I don't count different versions, but different cooks). The device simply seems unable to cope with its official interface, Touchflo 3D, whereas Manilla 2D ran screaming on the Tytn. Touch Pro has more Ram, theoretically making Opera usable. Goodbye ol' crashes of the Tytn, with Touch Pro I can finally browse the Internets happily! Or can I? Opera seems to totally suck compared to the iPhones Safari, and that doesn't come from an iPhone lover - I hate almost anything Apple ever created, including the iPhone. BUT... Whenever I'm with a friend of mine that has an iPhone, browsing the net through it is pure joy compared to the nightmare of Touch Pro. Appart from feeling more "fluid", iPhone is a lot faster when changing from portrait to landscape. Yeah, the online keyboard sucks, but so does the hardware keyboard of Touch pro compared to the one in my old Tytn (I know, "it's my opinion", never said it's a global rule).

The slow-as-hell problem applies to every single function or application in my Touch Pro. I'm with the afformentioned friend and we want to tweet something? Perfect. In ten seconds he's taken a snapshot in his iPhone, opened Twitter and posted a message, picture included. I'm still waiting for a Twitter app to load. We want to take some notes? He taps, writes, saves. In 5 secs. I'm taking out the stylus, for the interface buttons are too small for my fingers. I select Start>Utilities>Notes, wait for the Notes app to load, wait, wait, after it loads hunt the tiny "new" somewhere below the screen, wait for a new note to open, open the keyboard, wait for the screen to realign, type, wait for the characters to appear (and yes, I have applied the TX9 tweak but the keyboard is still painfully slow), save the note, close the keyboard, close the notes app, wait for the screen to realign. Ah, what a joy.

And the apps! Oh, those glorious apps! We have ten unusable RSS readers, 5 different commercial programs that try to improve our phones interface (each failing miserably in different ways), and... Well, that's it. We then have about 10 different calculators and stopwatches. And we call this, THIS, "a productivity device"? WTF can we do with this brick? What is it useful for? Taking photos? Even that is slow-as-hell compared with Tytn, after trying every-single-tweak. The subject of the photo has to be perfectly still, or else everything is blurry.

And the insult is that whenever I search for something new and useful for this brick, I find new fonts, new wallpapers, new manilla tweaks, some scripts or mini-apps that change the new WM6.5 chromes appearance! These are our "apps", when iPhone has new note-taking apps, new task managers, new VNC-like applications, emulators, games, anything... And yet we bash it as a kiddie phone and we hail out Touch Pro as a "serious" device. What's serious about a phone that cost me more than my wage (yeah, it costs -that- much in Greece where I live) and all that I can do with it is stare at slightly-different-colored-menues-than-the-default-ones? That's all there is to it?

Sorry for this, and sorry for coming out as an angry SOB, but I'm up to here with it. I'd really like somebody to come up and give me some advice or tips on how to make HTCs brick useful in some way, show me that I didn't actually throw my money away on a useless gadget. 'Cause I paid for an almighty device that in theory could do almost anything. It's as "smart" as my Tytn, it's slower than it in GPS and taking Pictures, there's no touch-friendly software for it (har-har, and it's called "Touch Pro", yeah, right)... WTF am I supossed to use it for? Paperweight?

I'm all ears people. Anyone wanting to tell me how they actually use their pricey device? Why you're happy with it and wouldn't change it for anything else? Does anyone -not- have the problems I have, and what did he do to avoid them? Am I totally wrong - and why?

Best regards

Ducklord