[HD Mini General] bart3385:
Officially, these are the improvements:

1. The trimmer bar will slide smoothly while trimming the mp3.

2. Enhance the system performance and stability.

3. Improves the ringtone sound quality.

For me, only #2 and #3 are important.

I've just finished flashing the phone. Have to wait for start up and bring all my personal setup and data back to the phone.

Then i'll give it a test run to check for any noticeable improvements.

From the outset, HD mini seems to run smoothly already before the upgrade. Although i have some basic complaints about the new os and/or htc custom software.

1. Calendar from the Manila tabs is seriously crippled. When you slide to the Calendar tab, or jump to it from the Home link, it takes half a minute before the week's schedule comes up. Unlike the old WinMo 6.1 calendar or old 3rd party calendars that jumps right up without any delays. Secondly, there's no way to make duplicates of schedules. For example, i have a "corporate meeting" scheduled for today. After the day is done, another one was set for the following week. Normally, i'd just copy from today, and then paste into 7-days after. But that's impossible to do in Manila Calendar. I'd have to resort back to the WinMo Calendar, which thankfully is still lay hidden in the sub-menus, to do this very basic task. Third, it's fixed to show 7-days schedules only. Can't add more days to it. I hope HTC will take a look at this serious draw back for the otherwise wonderful phone. (This disability will frustrate business folks.)

2. Text Messaging is eye-candy. Which is good. Except, there's a huge trade off. First, the Text tab shows only last 25 messages, and not intuitive at all. It's shown in the ancient per message style. No threading. Although, you can click All Messages to go into the threaded format. Which brings us to the second biggest problem. It's extremely slow. You click on a person, and the messages will build up slowly, taking several seconds to come up one by one, depending on the volume of the conversation with that person. Third, and the worst worst part??? The old trusty speedy WinMo's own versatile text messaging app was killed off. So you're left with no alternative.

3. Contacts/People app is also seriously crippled. This used to be WinMo's ugly but super versatile function. The very attraction that draws people to WinMo. New Contacts app is either broken or buggy. You can't use cut/copy/paste functions in most of the fields, except the very basic ones. As an example, you can do the cut/copy/paste with Mobile Number, but not the rest of it, ie. Car Number, Radio Number, Home Number, etc. So it's very choosy. Of course, if you dig deeper, you're thrown back to WinMo's own Contacts app. Saved the day? No way. It's the opposite. The new weird looking WinMo Contacts do not allow any cut/copy/paste at all, except for the Notes section. I wonder why do they have to axe this very useful core functionality. But the nightmare doesn't end there. If you change a tiny thing in a particular Contact field, saving it will take ages. Basically freezing up the phone for maybe a minute or so. Most people would have probably pried open the back cover and took out the battery. (Because mini doesn't have reset button.) It really looks like the whole phone has crashed. Until, if you're patient enough to wait, and realize it's just super slow to save an editted Contact.

Apart from these 3 nuisances. The rest of the phone works wonderfully.

So, for now, i can only resort to Outlook editting on my netbook, whenever i need to work on the contacts and schedules. Then sync.

But this means, i can't do these basic stuffs real time, as needed, whenever needed. I'll have to remember all the changes of contacts and schedules for the day. And then do my homework when i get home. It doesn't happen everyday. But still a big drawback. Information tends to get lost along the way.