So I’ve used this phone for the entire day now, spent a lot of time testing it, syncing data, loading new apps. And what I can say for sure is… It does look beautiful on the picture:

But… fancy looks don’t last for long. As soon as I plugged it in, tried to sync contacts with Gmail. It wouldn’t connect to Google, even though the web worked just fine. Turns out, for anybody who purchases the phone and puts in a different SIM card than the one it originally came with, a reset to factory defaults is required. Otherwise, it won’t connect to Google. It’s a common issue as I found out , but it’s not documented in the manual. At first, I thought that a firmware upgrade was required, but after a short research I was glad I didn’t flash the thing. Looks like the newest firmware, at the time I’m writing this post, is buggy and causes freezes :/
BTW, it’s not as obvious to figure out how to make the phone seen by the desktop. It gets detected immediately, but it’s not seen by the HTC Sync software, neither does it show up as a flash drive. It turned out, that the user has to open a Notifications tab on the phone and then manually enable the USB memory or put the phone into the sync mode.
Upon synchronization of calendar & contacts I spent a few hours playing with the phone and immediately run into a few issues:
- In the Phone application, contacts that only have Organization filled in (no first and last name) show up blank on the list (only phone numbers), you have to open them up to see the company they’re associated with - this has been an ongoing issue for almost a year. Luckily, this issue doesn’t exist in the People app. So every time you want to call a company you have to go to the People app (extended version of the Phone app), open the contact and then initiate the call.
- Search capabilities are very limited - if you do a search from the main screen, then it will search through everything but your phone data. (Meaning it will search the web.) If you initiate a search from the People app, it will only look through the full name and phone number, skipping the other fields, such as Notes. To me, this single “feature” makes this phone unusable. (I was ready to give up and return the phone, luckily found the app the free Star Contact app, that can be a temporary workaround, until they fix it - supposedly this is to happen with the new version of the OS: v1.6 Donut)
- The phone is somewhat slow. It’s supposedly much better with the new firmware upgrade, but since people say it’s buggy, I’m not installing it yet.
What’s also worth a mention is phone’s usability. It feels like often times a few extra taps are required. This blog mentions some of these Android-related problems.