Now that I have my phone number on the phone and I’m taking calls. I’m starting to notice the chinks in the armor. The sound management is non-existent. For years Blackberry phones have had sound profiles that you can select based on your current situation. These allow you to have audible alerts for phone calls only, change the volume for a particular caller, or create your own profile like all alerts off unless it comes from a particular source. With WinMo it’s basically all or nothing. You can’t change the volume for a particular notification, or the alert sound for a text message from a particular coworker, or choose to have all emails and text alerts to be silent, but phone calls to be audible. This really needs addressed before the 7.0. There doesn’t even seem to be a downloadable app to fix this!

I agree with Spencer that the email interface is a bit buggy and for me a little slow. I don’t know if I feel it’s better or worse than Blackberry. Simply having access to the various Outlook folders is very nice (this has never worked well with BB).

Despite having specified that I want all attachments to download, it still does not unless I select that on each email with an attachment. Even then it does not grab the attachment until the next time it receives mail (not checks for mail…it has to receive mail).

With Blackberry and our Blackberry Enterprise Server, mail arrives in Outlook on the PC and on the phone virtually simultaneously. My Imagio is tied directly into Exchange, but there is still a fair amount of delay.

I like that Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Acrobat apps that are preinstalled, that’s pretty huge. It has a built-in RDP client. I mean, freaking RDP! I was able to control one of my servers from my phone! That was cool. Not an easy desktop experience, but in an emergency it will do.

I could probably go on ad infinitem about the pros and cons. I think I’m going to give it some more time. With the BB Storm, it probably took 8-10 OS updates before I really felt the phone was usable, but I was pretty happy in the end. It’s my sincere hope that will be the case with WinMo 6.5.

That said, you are free to write about your experience, and it is certainly appreciated in this new age world. My outburst came about simply because I felt that the Touchflo 3D on the WinMo 6.5 platform deserved better than to be written off like you happened to do.

Was I wrong to do so? Maybe.
Was my assumption that you probably got a bad Imagio wrong? probably not. I say this because I test drove the HTC Pure at an AT&T store and then got one. Both perform just as good. On top of that, I have 3 email accounts loaded -1 hotmail with immediate refresh, 1 POP3 account and 1 exchange server that has my daily calendar synchronized and work email. When you say you had to “wait” for the email to show up, it indicates a few seconds at the very least. When I click on the envelope, my message detail comes up under a second. I agree it does not come up with the screen transitions that the iphone has. But slow? definitely not. That is why I felt deep down that this review was biased towards the iphone. Don’t take me wrong. I have nothing personal against you. I do applaud you however to take the time out to write a review of a product and contribute to the knowledge base of this vast internet world.

Thanks!

I decided to approve your comment for the sake of being open and engaging in a discussion that may be useful to future readers. I hope you will show more respect in future comments.

In that spirit, I thought I might just address a few of your points.

The Pure and Imagio do indeed share the same processor, a Qualcomm MSM7200A running at 528Mhz. From what I can tell (I hadn’t looked much at the Pure before now since it’s an AT&T phone) the Imagio runs a newer version of TouchFLO but otherwise they seem about the same. Outside of TouchFLO, it’s likely that the Pure offers a very similar experience to the Imagio, but I haven’t used one so can’t make any conclusions there.

It’s good that you are comfortable with the performance of mobile outlook on your phone; I was not. Unfortunately for me, I tapped on a message from the TouchFLO interface and had to wait a long time. Perhaps my “long time” is your “fast” – who knows. It didn’t work for me.

I never said the music wouldn’t play in the background. I did say it wouldn’t play smoothly, which was true. Music stuttered for me. (Never once had that problem on my iPod; granted it’s not a phone. I’d be curious to know if you’ve had any problems on your iPhone?). Another potential problem was playing music off an older micro SD card. Could be the card was just slow. That wasn’t the deciding factor in returning the phone, but it would be interesting to see if it made a difference.

I don’t have an iPhone; I have an iPod Touch (2G). Right now I don’t have any smartphone (including the iPhone). As far as people can tell, the iPod Touch (2G) has a Samsung ARM processor running at 533MHz (check Wikipedia on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Touch#Specifications). It’s impossible to compare apples to apples on that point since they’re completely different processors, but it’s not the newer ARM Cortex-A8 in the latest iPod Touch revisions. I certainly wish it were. It’s a processor that runs the same or similar instruction set at about the same frequency, introduced a year or so later than the MSM7200A. It’s likely that the iPod Touch processor performs slightly better on paper (I say that mainly because it’s newer), but I couldn’t find any detailed information from a quick Google search.

Regardless, it’s unlikely that my complaints regarding responsiveness are due to using a fast processor on my iPod Touch vs. the “worst processor” (your words…) on the HTC Imagio. My honest opinion is that the OS and firmware written for the iPod sacrificed functionality for smooth operation. Take for evidence that there is no task switching, no memory management, no status/messaging like the alerts in Windows Mobile, lack of very detailed control over radios, etc… the list goes on. It’s a tradeoff. It’s every consumer’s right in our economy to choose the balance of performance and features they will exchange for their money.

I take issue with your insinuation that I simply “love the iphone” and “flame other platforms”. I was careful to list both pros and cons of the HTC Imagio. There were a lot of things I liked. I’m not trying to “flame” anything. In fact, if you read through the rest of my blog, you’ll see several articles that defend Windows platforms (see http://blog.spencerkellis.net/2009/09/the-vastly-improved-windows-7-update-process/ and http://blog.spencerkellis.net/2009/06/a-short-overview-of-the-hp-ex485-mediasmart-server/). However, I’ve got no qualms about describing problems I’ve had with a product. Flaming in my mind is unsubstantiated rhetoric. My list of grievances was based on a month of actually using the device.

I bought the HTC Imagio because of my belief that it would be great smartphone; in other words, if anything I began using it biased *towards* liking it, not biased towards looking for problems and flaming the thing. It was in my best interest to like it and keep it. I use mobile devices for just a few things (I’m not a business user): wireless communication (email, text, facebook, etc.), music, games, and video. I hold to my conclusion that the Apple iPod Touch is a better implementation of mobile technology than the HTC Imagio in the context of these applications. If Windows Mobile 7 makes the substantial UI improvements it’s rumored to, I’ll happily accept it and use it.

i’m also curious where you read about verizon putting their hopes on palm. i’ve read about the droid sales (250k in the first week right?) which, while not iphone sales (1.6m), are actually pretty high and 4x what the palm pre sold (60k). and of course there are all the arguments of the user base, the apple brand recognition, etc… i guess i thought the droid did pretty well all things considered. i may actually get one myself.