[HD2 General] pgamble:
Funny how everyones views are so different. I suspect many people's (including mine) are tarnished by preconceptions ... it took a long time for me to convince myself I no longer needed hard keyboard. Even though I was constantly worried by the massive increase in complexity of the TyTN, TyTNII and TP2 around all those buttons and ribbons and tilt mechs etc .... I still thought I'd miss it. I also spent many hours over a year or so looking at my apps (which I have a lot of) to see what would genuinely be affected by not having a stylus.

Eventually I took a leap of faith.

Now ... completely pragmatically ... for me ... my views have changed.

Typing on the HD2 .. once you've learned to be really really light ... is a dream. It is for me definitely a faster two thumb typer than the TP2 ever was. It is also more accurate.

Also .. with this huge screen ... if you still have a stowaway BT, it enables pretty much full desk top equivalent Word, Excel, PPT, browsing etc ... I've tried it all ... and it's amazing.

Yes there are apps that some need ... and there are some games which are not well supported. These are very few in number in my view though.

One thing everyone ought to do is to load Dutty Task Manager, Gyrator 2 and Zooomer. These together make a huge different ... and resolve all the initial mild frustrations I had. Gyrator2 allows me to auto rotate everything and can be disabled easily.

Task manager for me is best for it's task switching ability ... there is so much memory .. closing stuff really isn't much of a driver ... again ... for me. I had over 20 apps open yesterday including YouTube, mPlayer / Coreplayer (streaming Top Gear), Softmaker Planmaker and Text Maker (big big apps !), CPL8, CO2008, RSS Hub (Illium Newsbreak) ... etc ... and there was no slow down on any of them ... switching at will.

Now ... Zooomer is interesting. In some early reviews people talked about this pinch and zoom on standard apps giving a little pan window at the bottom middle. Whilst this sounded interesting, the rumour was it only worked for viewing ... the app / screen you were zooming was inactive so you couldn't mark / cut / paste, select, press buttons etc ... Not only that ... but it didn't appear in the released versions.

Well ... Zooomer appears to enable this pinch and zoom for standard apps ... I suspect it is simply switching on a latent ability which HTC bizzarely disabled ... but it does it beautifully ... and the best thing is that everything is active when zoomed. You can do the cut / paste / mark / select / button press etc ... and it is instant ... and contrary to initial information it doesn't just work with user installed apps, it works with everything (settings / RSS Hub etc).

So ... for any kind of interaction ... this gets around any concerns about manipulating small objects with a finger.

The only outstanding issue is for those that actually need to draw on the screen ... and yes ... currently that doesn't seem possible. I don't know if a stylus would help ... what I can say is that I've select the finest pen on Photo Viewer and used that to draw in both unzoomed and zoomed mode (using the native zoom and the pinch zoom - both work) ... and it actually works quite well :-) It's never going to replace a stylus though.

With Zooomer installed ... can anyone think of any other reason than those that need to do fine tech drawing or art where the HD2 would fall short ... ? I can't.

Paul.