[HD2 General] lorin.bute:
I have the device for 5 days and i went through every little corner of it so i would like to share this with you and maybe help others make a decision to buy it or not.

Hardware:

1. Very good build quality. The rubber coding and the metal plate feels good.

2. Its incredibly thin!

3. The camera has sharp edges which scratches my desk. I always put the phone on top of the leather pouch that came with it so i don't scratch my desk.

4. The screen is impressive. Having a capacitive 4.3'' screen on a WM device is like being in haven.

5. The earpiece does a good job. Its better than my (sold) TP2, but not too loud (as some have reported).

6. The speaker is decent. Not too loud and not to quiet. Having a device so small i guess its impossible to put a better speaker.

7. The 3.5 mm jack entry is so enjoyable. I always struggled with charging and listening to the headphones at the same time. It was impossible on my previous phones without some big, ugly adapter.

8. Finally we have a standardized port for sync/charge. Unfortunately i can't find a microUSB cable anywhere. The only way to get them is to order them online.

Software:

1. HTC Sense is very well done. Having a 1GHz processor it moves along panels and menus very fast. When i took my TP2 in hand after playing with the HD2 i felt like trowing it away. Once you played with the HD2 you never go back.

2. HTC skinned most of the settings of WM which is a good thing and a bad thing. In some cases the skinned settings don't show every little option in that category so its annoying, but i managed to get a shortcut for the windows mobile settings in my start menu.

3. The facebook integration doesn't let me choose what i want to update for my contacts. On my TP2 i would get asked if i want to get the contact's photo and his birthday. Now it doesn't ask anything and if the contact doesn't have a facebook photo but it has an outlook photo (set by me) it deletes the photo. After getting back my contacts i stopped using the facebook integration. SOLVED

4. The twitter client is OK, but i expect an update from HTC in a future rom where lists are implemented. Otherwise its useless.

5. Doing pinch to zoom in Opera is a joy. Having a large screen, web browsing becomes a pleasure. Now i can say that i can always rely on my phone to do web browsing.

6. Google Maps and iGO 8 work fast and the GPS signal comes in about 10 seconds with the proper tweaks.

7. The FM Radio just doesn't work. I only get static and its not like i'm in the middle of a field. I'm in a 4 million people city.

8. The Audio Manager does a good job but there's a problem with the Audio Booster which doesn't stay on after the first song you play. There's a solution for that but its ugly. Once you start the audio booster don't press done, just leave it running by pressing the home button for example.

9. The camera takes very good pictures. I applied the super fine tweaks. I own a semi professional camera and i have some experience in that area and the pictures taken by the HD2 are pretty OK for a phone camera.

10. In regards to the SMS issue: i don't have it. The device already came with the GSM only selected as a band for sending text messages. The only downside is that i tried once to send an sms to 16 persons and i got around 5-6 undelivered messages. I know it has a limit but i applied the tweak to make the limit go to 50 but no result.

11. My Location works and doesn't work. It gets my location but when its time to get the weather it fails. It shows and error message that it cannot retrieve the weather. So i disabled it completely.

12. The unlock screen is useless. I always set my phone to turn off the display after 1 minute. Watching a movie resulted in a lock. I removed it and installed S2U2 which accepts exceptions and it works great on the HD2. It's like it was meant for this device.

13. HTC Album creates a rather large cache on the main storage resulting in a decrease in available MBs. That is not acceptable for me so someone from xda modified the exe file (changed the path of where the cache is stored) and i installed it and it works great so far. The cache is now in My Documents folder on the storage card.

14. I changed the icons in the start menu using the reSTART application and the iReflect icons found on xda. Now my start menu looks very clean and beautiful.

15. I can type really well on it. I just have to trust the keyboard. I'm not using XT9 cuz i don't have my language there but with the ABC mode i'm quite fast. Its not always perfect but that's to be expected anyhow. I make a lot more mistakes on my brother's iPhone than on the HD2 (and the iPhone keyboard is famous for its accuracy).

There is a downside to all of this: the battery life. It's a little disappointing. I feel like i use an iPhone now. I usually get a full day out of it with moderate use. I plan on buying a desktop cradle and a spare battery just in case.

I'm running the 1.48 version and judging by my experience so far i'm almost certain that there was a batch of phones that was bad, that's why some owners state problems with hardware or software.

If i missed something let me know, or if you have any questions fire away.