[HD2 General] eaglesteve:
The Leo's large screen size, capacitive touch screen, and the fast processors were the three factors that had long attracted me to this device, and I've been patiently waiting for it to come to Australian shore. On the 19th, I rushed to one of the Telstra shops and spent a good few hours playing with this exciting phone. Finally, a capacitive touch screen that would rival iPhone. Finally, I found a good replacement for my beloved 5 inch HTC Athena which I so much loved (See my review.)

I was surprised that I was the only customer in the store having any interest in the device, as I though there must be hugh interest in it. There was a guy wearing an HTC T-shirt ready to help with any questions on the device. I shall call him the shop assistant here. The shop assistant told me he has used 3GS for 6 months, and he thinks Leo beats iPhone in every aspects. He was given a unit more than a month ago, and if I had heard it right, he was sent to Taiwan for training, so I had the chance to clarify my doubt with him whenever a need arises.

Here were my findings:

POSITIVE

Screen size and clarify

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The screen size and clarify is amazing. I had expected that to be the case, and I was not disappointed.

I was also not detered by the size of the device. It is really small compared to my Athena. It is extremely pocketable. The device is also very thin and comfortable to hold.

I love the fact that HTC has removed the bezel to this extent. Well done, HTC.

Camera

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The resolution was good, and the speed was fantastic. Did'nt have to wait for spinning colored wheels while saving.

Speed

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This is a fast machine. Absolutely no doubt with that. However, I also find moments when the device seems to be pausing and busy with things instead of responding to me right away. This is on an empty demo unit.

Overall Build

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I give it a high mark, based on my initial impression. The screen is grease prone compared to iPhone, but this is expected.

NEGATIVES

Keyboard

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Being used to the iPhone keyboard, I have to say that the HTC keyboard performs extremely poorly. This is despite the shop assistant's insisting that it is way way superior to iPhone "because of the larger keyboard".

I typed with the speed that I normally do with my 3GS, and here are samples of what I got:

I invited the shop assistant to demonstrate his typing on his own Leo, and he too was making lots of mistakes. So much for a keyboard that is "way way better than iPhone's".

Camera

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Having used so many HTC camera in the past, I was not expecting too much here. I was surprised though that it was extremely fast - in fact faster than iPhone's. BUT, the pictures were all having an ugly pink patch in the centre!

When I discussed this problem with the Shop Assistant, he mentioned that his phone does not have this issue, so may be it is just the demo unit having the problem. He then offered his own Leo to me to try out. When I used his camera, it had exactly the same problem, and yet, the shop assistant insisted that he cannot see any pink patch!!! I spent some time pointing his camera to the floor, asked him to focus on a specific part of the floor, then move the camera from left to right, and it was obvious that the floor which was yellow/brownish in color turned pinkish when the centre of the picture frame moves across it. He was silent after that.

Web browsing

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When I used the www.smh.com.au website, I noted that the webpage was still wobbly throughout the rendering and only stabilised toward the end. The top part of this webpage keep changing rather than having the final layout fixed throughout the rending. I found this disconcerting.

When double tapping on a webpage, I was expecting the text to reflow such that it fits exactly to the screen width.

I was disappointed that it does not. I showed this to the shop assistant and he told me that double tapping has been patented by Apple, so HTC is not allowed to make it work!!??? He said I must use pinch zoom to achieve exact fit! Hello???

Finger gestures

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Many iPhone imitators tend to think that pinch/zoom, scroll, and double taps are the only gestures required to make their device friendly. I knew that they are way off the mark by such thinking, and wanted to see if HTC Leo understands this.

- The first thing I wanted to know is whether the excel spreadsheet has a way to select cells. In iPhone, we do a double tap, then without lifting the finger, drag the finger. I was trying to see if this has been copied over to Leo. I was disappointed that it has not been. In fact, I could not find any way to select the excel spreadsheet cells. Not out of the box from what I could see. I tried looking for ways to change the scroll mode to selection mode but it does not exist. I tried holding my finder down until the "T" sign appear to see if anything there lets me select the cell, and there wasn't.

- I then tried to see how easy it is to select text precisely. In iPhone, press and hold will bring up a magnifying glass showing where the cursor is so it is very easy to precisely place the cursor. With Leo, my finger covers the text, so I could not see where the cursor is. The only way is to use the keyboard arrow key which is a little clunky. To select text, I noticed that I have choose the text selection mode in the pop up menu, to change from the scrolling mode to text selection mode. A little inefficient and unproductive, I thought. I also has great difficulties selecting the text precisely down to the last character, because my finger covers the texts itself. A rather poor iPhone gesture imitation, I think.

- The traditional scroll bar has been replaced by a more finger friendly opaque scroll handle that only appear during scrolling. This is similar to the quickscroll2 feature in iPhone, but unfortunately it does not work across all applications like in iPhone, where users could instantly jump to any part of the webpages, or applications instead of having to keep swipping to the right spot.

Task switching and closing

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Out of the box, I could not find any easy way to switch between active task. The task manager that the shop assistant demonstrated was way too impractical as a task switching tool. It really needs something like Kirikae or Proswitcher in conjunction with Backgrounder of iPhone for multitasking.

I used to have WKTask but I'm not sure if it still work in this version of winmo. Without something like that, I would find it extremely frustrating as a user, whenever jumping from task to task. Multitasking with my iPhone is fabulous at the moment.

The shop assistant argued that I could only have such a feature if I jailbreak the phone which is too complicated and it also voids the warranty. This, of course is nonsense. Jailbreaking on iPhone is just downloading BlackRa1n.exe, run it and click on a button with iPhone connected to the PC. It takes about 30 seconds to complete. Also, unlike in Android, anyone can completely reverse jailbreaking by merely doing an equivalent of hard reset to factory condition.

Due to time and a phone call from my wife I had to stop looking deeper into the phone. Perhaps I will return another day to take a closer look.

Anyone having advice or comments on the listed negatives are welcome to do so.

Cheers.