[Touch Pro2, Tilt 2 Windows Mobile General] markgamber:
The Expo looked good on paper and I bought one. Unfortunately, as I write this, I'm boxing it up to return it to AT&T. It's not a terrible phone but there are a few things I just can't overlook about it:

1. The UI is awful. I read about all these great things LG did to improve the UI but all I found were a couple apps of marginal interest. HTC's TouchFlo is much easier to use, much more inclusive and is very finger friendly compared to the Expo UI where it seems like you need a dozen taps to do anything. Which leads to...

2. WinMo requires a stylus on occasion and the Expo's stylus is actually pretty nice which is probably why there's only one, unlike HTC which makes a cheesy stylus but includes a spare. It's sort of like a little lipstick case which means it doesn't attach to the phone! There's a little plastic string you can use to thread through a hole in the body of the phone that used to be used for wrist grips but I had zero confidence in the thing lasting any length of time. Worse, if you do attach it in that way, it ticks against the body of the phone as it flops around. I bet I would have no stylus within two weeks. LG's Incite was widely panned because of the stylus. It's a real shame they didn't learn a thing from that.

3. Battery life flat out sucks. I thought that chart at the start of this thread was a typo but no, it really is that bad. I had the phone sitting on my desk running Google Maps and in 45 minutes the battery level went from 92% to the first low battery warning. 45 minutes! I was dumbfounded! Imagine how long that battery will last with the projector attached! Note that the screen auto-offed itself after whatever the default is...30 seconds? It would have been that much worse had the screen been on that whole time. I know battery life improves after a few charge cycles but it would probably require a miracle for this battery to become acceptable.

4. The Expo comes with AT&T's GPS app but I have my own which did not work. I've used the same app on a number of HTC phones and never had a problem but apparently something about the Expo's GPS is different enough that it didn't work. Google Maps worked eventually but I don't use Google Maps regularly.

5. The CPU speed isn't exploited where it counts. For example, I could bring up File Explorer and go into the windows folder in a couple of seconds. Try that with an HTC phone and you may well get gray hair before it finishes. Likewise, the phone booted to a usable state pretty quickly compared to HTC phones but how often do you boot your phone or browse the windows folder? Everything else...starting apps, running apps, browser rendering speed...stuff you do every day...was disappointingly similar to an HTC phone with it's much slower CPU speed. What's worse, even that crappy stock UI slowed to a crawl on more than a couple occasions. Given how fast it should have been given the specs, I was very underwhelmed.

6. The phone froze on me several times during normal use. Sometimes the screen wouldn't redraw properly when rotated, sometimes it would simply stop dead in it's tracks and sometimes you couldn't even turn it off or back on. There's a reset button inside battery compartment but I don't know of any way to "hard reset" the phone except by using a Settings item which may well be impossible to reach if the phone is so trashed that the UI never appears.

7. The phone is fatally disorganized. I have a set of beeps and buzzes I use for various events like incoming calls, SMS, MMS and so on. I went to the usual settings to set those sounds to find the only one available was incoming calls. There were a few other items, like ActiveSync connect and disconnect but all the real sounds were missing. WTF? After considerable digging around, I discovered that LG has it's own app that lets you choose from a set list of sounds. You know, like an iPhone. It was a pain just finding the app and I didn't bother setting anything because even that looked more difficult than the stock WinMo way plus, at this point, I knew the phone was going back ASAP and I wasn't putting any more time into "nicities". Sure, this is a little thing but it's just one example of what's wrong with this phone overall.

One nice thing about the Expo was it's camera. It really does take nice, big pictures and the LED "flash" was blinding in a dark room. But like most things on this phone, it fails on organization. I selected the SD card as storage and it simply dumped the pictures into the root folder of the card. This being opposed to every other phone I've ever owned....HTC, iPhone, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry, etc...where it at least put them in a folder. It also wouldn't suppress the shutter noise no matter what setting I chose.

I was so psyched to snap on the projector, bring up Slingplayer and throw a Phillies game up on the wall of the local minor league stadium when the local team did poorly but I grew to dislike the Expo so quickly that I returned it 4 days after it arrived. To their credit, AT&T took it back without any questions and I essentially traded it for the Tilt 2. The Tilt 2 is $50 LESS than the Expo and AT&T creditted my account for the difference. About 5 minutes after unboxing the Tilt 2 I knew I had made the right decision. I've certainly had my share of gripes with HTC and their occasionally stupid decisions but there's no way I can recommend the Expo after my experience with it. The real shame of it is that they seem to have done a pretty stellar job with the hardware but half-assed almost everything about the system and software. If I knew of a custom rom I could have thrown on the phone, I would have at least tried that before returning it. I can't see enough people shelling out that kind of money for that bad of a phone, however, so I'll be surprised if it's ever anything more than a niche phone used by people who spend their lives doing PowerPoint presentations and don't want to lug around a laptop.