Review: HTC Tilt 2

This is a fairly-early-in-my-time-with-the-device review, but I think I’m almost done getting it set up close to how I want it.

Last week, Wednesday or Thursday I think, I carelessly didn’t pay attention getting into my car after work and shut my phone (that was in my jacket pocket) in the door with enough force to pop the battery out bending a plastic support piece. The outer display screen was completely shot — still lit up, but nothing was displayed. The inner display was only about a third shattered, but that third was more than half of the area used to display info. So I quickly went online and ordered a new phone.

I had looked at the HTC Tilt 2 (also written as Tilt2) a time or two in the past, but decided that it wasn’t “100%” what I wanted (probably due to the price) but it was “close”. So, since that was the only phone that AT&T offered that was anywhere close to what I was wanting, I ordered it.

I’ve not been as disappointed as I thought I might be.

The photo display program seems to ignore the orientation of the phone, opting instead to try & display everything as if I’m holding the thing on it’s side. That sucks for vertically oriented shots, as they’re then displayed with their long edge being on the phone’s short edge.

Error reporting (on crashed programs) was turned off, but it just popped up… so there’s a bug.

The file explorer doesn’t appear to have access to the microSD card and if there’s one in the phone, Windows 7 wasn’t letting me get to the phone’s memory itself… just the microSD card in the phone. However, without the microSD card in the phone, Windows 7 was able to detect the phone and has installed the necessary drivers… Now I’m able to get to both the phone & the storage card, but the storage card is no longer mapped as a drive. :shrugs: Whatever, all I wanted was access to both and I have it in some fashion at least.

For some reason, Opera was set to the default browser, even though IE was on the device. (Personally I don’t like IE, but Opera has pissed me off as a company due to their whining to the EU about just Microsoft… hell, Apple and Mozilla are both giving away free browsers and that’s basically the root of Opera’s bitching.) Firefox Mobile (aka Fennec) sucks, but that’ll have to be another review.

TouchFLO 3D — which I don’t know if it’s a Windows Mobile or an HTC component — is neat, but not really all that useful and it doesn’t use the “system” wallpaper. But it’s what I’m using, because the alternatives (either the “Windows Default” or just displaying items, like Date, Calendar, etc.) aren’t growing on me at the moment. (I can’t find where to configure what’s included in the “Windows Default” selection of programs, and the other looks like my last PocketPC did about 10 years ago and I want something “new”.)

The touch-screen works pretty good, even with my big ole fingers, but I’ve found myself using the stylus more.

The stylus that came with the device (and fits nicely in the device) is a wee bit short, so I’ve found myself using a stylus from that older Pocket PC PDA (a Compaq Aero 1550) since it’s about 3/4-inch longer and more than twice as heavy (the phone came w/ a spare).

The new phone is (guessing here) about twice as heavy as my old phone (a Samsung A707) and so that’s taking some getting used to. As for dimensions, the (new) HTC is about 1/2-inch wider and about 3/4-inch longer, but the same thickness as the (old) Samsung. So I’ll probably wind up getting some sort of belt-clip for it, but we’ll see how it goes for a while.

The screen is, in a word, nice. It appears that it is 16.7-million colors, but I don’t really know since HTC is kinda mum on that topic on their site. AT&T claims it has 16.7-million colors, but 3 different review sites all claimed it only had 65k-colors. Yeah, it’s got more than 65k, that’s for darn sure.

Google was nice enough to work out with Microsoft so that us die-hard Google users can sync our calendar, contacts, and mail through the Microsoft ActiveSync tool on our Windows Mobile devices. That went slowly, but smoothly. If you’re a Google Apps user, you’ll have to go into your Google Apps control panel and enable that ability before you try, or else you’ll get an error. I found that I needed to sync a couple of times before things were all sync’d up, probably mostly because I’d pulled my old contacts from my old phone via the SIM card — which cleared a sh**load of info.

The contacts app on the phone is nice enough, it even has a sync w/ Facebook and is able to use the Facebook pictures for your phonebook… but it only does that with Facebook. If you’re wanting the same thing with MySpace or (even better) Twitter, you’re SOL. One problem that I’ve been having w/ the contacts app, however, is that I keep accidentally hitting “call”. Perhaps the wording or position is slightly off how my brain is thinking it should be… or perhaps I’m expecting a confirmation prompt instead of it just doing it. So, if you’ve gotten a single-ring call from me, SORRY.

Wi-fi seems to be a bit finicky on this phone. It also seems to take freakin forever to connect and if the phone “goes to sleep” it kills the wi-fi connection, thus needing another eternity to connect when you wake the phone back up. That’s not really all that big of a deal, but if you’re setting the thing up for the first time, you’ll probably want to keep it plugged in and to adjust the sleep time-out. I know I’ve had problems with my Windows XP laptop in the past where it just seems to not want to connect, but that’s been a fairly rare problem. I’ll have to play around a bit and see if I can find a “solution” as I feel it should “just connect” if there’s a full “4 bars” of wi-fi signal. On a lighter note, it wasn’t difficult at all setting the WPA passphrase for my secured network.

Battery-life isn’t something that I’ve really concerned myself with — yet. Why? Because I’ve been using it a whole lot more than I foresee myself actually using it during this whole get-my-data-on-it time.

Mobile Remote Desktop is just plain cool. It works even. I mean, how cool is it to be able to remote into your home box from your phone.

All-in-all, I’ve got to say that I think I’ll be able to live with this device for the next 2-years w/o a whole lot of bitching. That’s not to say that I’m thrilled or annoyed with it… it’s just to say that I’m having a huge learning-curve/adjustment-period.

I will say this, though, I’m seeing a few things that my previous phone had that I’ll be missing. But those’ll probably be quickly forgotten.

Would I recommend this phone? Maybe yes, maybe no. The jury’s still out on that one.

Update: I forgot to mention that the camera on this phone is only 3.2mp. There are lots of other phones out (some only overseas at the moment, though) that have 5mp or even 8mp cameras. And there’s no flash (which doesn’t bother me all that much, since I really don’t like flashes, but since the low-light abilities suck, a flash is needed).

Update2: Google Calendar only seems to be syncing your “primary” calendar via ActiveSync, and there wasn’t any place I saw in the config to specify other calendars. That stinks if you’re like me and use multiple calendars to keep (for example) your personal and business appointments separate.

Update3: I definitely left off a big part of this phone: user input. The keyboard slides out on the side and is the nicest cell phone keyboard I’ve ever used. The keys are nice and big and there’s plenty of space between them so you don’t accidentally hit the wrong key. The only problem I’ve noticed with it so far is that the key with the ‘ and 1 on it seems to require a slight bit more pressure than the others.

Also, the on-screen versions of the keyboard are pretty easy to use, but I’ve mis-typed a few times when using my fingers.

And the best part of this is that the phone — since it’s Windows Mobile — has the absolutely lovely Transcriber program available as a selectable input method. Transcriber is a handwriting recognition software tool that recognizes printed and cursive and is pretty easy to use — and can be customized if you’re finding it doesn’t recognize this-or-that letters in your handwriting.

Update4: This is very weird, but the file explorer is now showing my storage card — after I’d deleted everything off it via my Windows 7 computer. :shrugs: