HTC Imagio

I purchased the HTC Imagio (on Verizon) the day it came out.  I had been steadily following the reviews and it looked like the perfect phone.  Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, Verizon’s 3G network, FM receiver, huge touch screen, and TouchFLO, HTC’s interface to Windows Mobile.

I wanted to love this phone.  I just couldn’t.  Returning to my iPod Touch was like being reunited with an old friend.

I thought it might be useful to give a detailed review of what worked for me and what didn’t; why, in the end, I returned the phone.

The Good

HTC’s TouchFLO interface is generally very well done.  The front screen, shown above, is really nice.  You get a nice big clock, the weather, call information, and upcoming appointments all in one place.  Along the bottom you can quickly see if there are emails or texts waiting to be read.

The screen is beautiful.  It’s large so you can fit quite a lot on it.  It’s vibrant and colorful.  It’s easy to look at.

The phone itself just feels good.  It’s the right size and weight, and the case is solid.  There’s a 3.5mm jack for using normal headphones (more and more common these days, but still nice).

The on-screen keyboard was fine.  Friends who tried it out didn’t like it, but I had no problems.  The XT9 technology makes typing on virtual keyboards basically painless.

The TouchFLO contacts integration is very well done.  Information such as profile pictures can be pulled from Facebook.  You can see in one place all text messages you’ve shared, all emails, appointments, events for each contact.

I loved the camera and I especially loved the video recording.  I’ve never had a mobile camera (that was any good anyway), so this was a new experience for me.  I could get used to it.

The Bad

Here’s a list of my grievances:

1. The processor in the phone is ancient and it shows.  Opening applications takes forever (notably, mobile outlook), switching applications takes forever, and sometimes the phone just isn’t responsive.  You can never tell whether you’ve pressed something incorrectly without just waiting.  Scrolling in any context – text, websites, pictures, etc. – is slow and jerky.
2. I really dislike the overall email solution which is sad given the importance of email to the whole smartphone experience.  As you can see in this picture (from pocketnow), the TouchFLO email interface is an envelop with letters sticking out.  This seems fancy and slick, but there are some problems.
   • The slanted edges of the envelope hide text from the middle of sentences and makes previewing the email annoying.  To read the full email, you have to open mobile outlook.  SLOW.
   • The character set is messed up so that HTML email messages and anything else other than standard text will show the uncomfortable-looking empty box-characters for unknown ASCII codes.
   • The direction for flicking your finger across the screen to move between messages is opposite in the email interface what it is in the text messaging interface.  This may seem trivial, but if you flick the wrong direction on the first email, it automatically loads mobile outlook – and outlook takes forever to load.
   • There is no way to mark a message read from the preview screen (you have to open the email in mobile outlook – recall yet again the bit about it being slow.  Seeing a pattern here?).
   • Mobile outlook is just painful.  It’s slow both to open and operate.  It’s not finger friendly.  It is painful on the eyes.  I couldn’t customize which folders held deleted messages or sent messages, and the default setting was different from all three of my email accounts – so, for instance, when I deleted emails on the phone, I had to delete them again in gmail from this new folder that just showed up.
3. I dislike the music and picture and video interfaces.  The visual media interface (like the email) tries too hard to be “slick” and ends up just taking up too much space and displaying pictures/videos that much smaller.  The music interface was just terrible.  I could never tell what group of songs I was playing from.  Because the processor was so slow, I hated trying to flip between songs.  The phone couldn’t even play music smoothly in the background while performing other operations – even the non-multi-tasking ipod touch can do that.
4. There are two competing interfaces for reading and sending text messages.  This wasn’t necessarily bad in and of itself; the problem is that it seemed completely random which one would come up.  The TouchFLO text messaging interface is really well done.  I loved it.  It was fast, it looked good, and it was easy to use.  The Windows Mobile text messaging interface is terrible.  It’s basically mobile outlook with all the inherent problems, including being slow to open and navigate.  Hard to believe HTC allowed that Windows Mobile interface to survive at all.
5. I actually had to get involved in memory management.  If I didn’t reboot the phone for a week or so, the memory baseline (e.g., all applications closed) would hit up around 85-90% utilization and everything would slow down (even more) considerably.  I cannot imagine a “normal” person (I mean non-nerd), for instance my mother, owning this phone and having to deal with memory management on a regular basis.
6. I really missed having a dedicated power button to put the phone to sleep.  I had to lock it (only available from the home screen, or depress the “end call” button for three seconds then select that option from the menu) and then just wait for the screen to turn off.
7. It is impossible to have the phone set to vibrate and the music playback volume set to anything other than silent at the same time.  This is very frustrating when you want to listen to music but forget that turning up the volume for the music turns up the volume on the ringer as well.  I got some nasty surprises from this issue.  Note that when you change the volume, you can change the system volume and ringer volume separately – so they can be at two different audible levels.  You just can’t have one vibrate and the other audible.

The End

In the end, the contrast between the TouchFLO interface and Windows Mobile was just too much.  It’s like living with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in your pocket, and never knowing which will appear when you wake up the phone.  This problem is only compounded by the slow processor, since mistakes generally mean you wait.

So, after nearly a month of use, I begrudgingly called Verizon and returned the phone.  To Verizon’s credit, it couldn’t have been easier.  The CSR gave me zero problems and was actually very understanding.  The return shipping label was included in the original shipping.  I put everything back in the box, affixed the label, and dropped it in a Fedex dropoff.  Several days later I called back up, verified the credits to my account, and everything was done.  The reps in every instance were respectful and courteous.  (This is the main reason we switched from Cingular back in the day, and it’s one of the main reasons we stay with Verizon – they seem to be willing to bend over backwards to help me no matter the problem).

HTC has another Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, the HD2, with supposedly much better specs – in particular, a Snapdragon 1GHz processor and a larger capacitive touch screen.  Considering my experience with the Imagio however, the slow processor is only part of the problem.  The real problem is an inconsistent user interface that plagues bottom-line usability of the device.  As nice as that HD2 looks, I’d be wary of the actual user experience.

The Future

So… Droid anyone?