HTC TyTN II review

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HTC TyTN II user reviews

June 17, 2009

Posted by: olliric

"I want to like it, but I don't"

What I like:

Tom tom

What I don't like:

Most things

Review:

After over one year of use I just wanted to write few lines about my impression of this PDA.
I travel a lot and I thought that a PDA could be helpful to keep in touch and do the IT chores while on the go. I was very wrong and I regret having bought the damn thing. The device tries to do many things but none of them well. In retrospective it sounded too good to be true.

At the beginning I did make a point of using it to its best potential but after a while I got so tired and annoyed with it that I have recently used it mostly like just any other phone.
I thought I would give myself some time to get accustomed to the complexity of the device before jumping to conclusions.
Over one year later and I still find it cumbersome and totally user unfriendly. The guys at HTC should go to Apple to get a crush course in making something user friendly and intuitive.
Here are just a few things. The list is way longer but I would have to go back and try most functions to recall all the flaws.
- It's super slow. I am no super fast teenage geek but I am always waiting for the stupid thing to react to any command I give. It is very annoying and it's like stepping back to the time of the 286 PCs. The speed is archaic. For example it takes 4.5 sec to switch from the vertical screen to the horizontal and back.
- The buttons controls are very difficult to feel with the touch and are very cumbersome to operate. Especially the side ones. I am sure that even blind people would have problems using them.
- Windows mobile is as bad as Microsoft gets. It's slow, counter intuitive, user unfriendly. Early Vista at the power of ten!
- Window media player is a joke. I have been using the PDA to listen to music in the car and it's a miracle I have not crashed while trying to select some music yet. To get to the card MP3 files it takes a very contorted and long way.
- The touch screen is also very bad and difficult to use. A lot of the commands are way too small for a man's finger while using one hand. It is very difficult to select something on first attempt with your thumb.
- To open a running program is difficult. One has to press the top right menu and than select what is running by touch only. The bar is about 4 mm high and it's very difficult to select using one hand. One cannot select by using the scroll bar and button.
- During phone calls the screen goes out quickly and to get it back one has to look for the hidden button on the side, very, very bad.
- Voice recognition sucks. Since the controls are so bad I now use the voice recognition most times. It's rare that the damn machine get it right on first attempt. Repeating the name twice helps but not always. I end up having to raise the tone as if I was yelling. It is very embarrassing in public.
- The GPS takes a long time to get the satellites even when the data has been updated.
- Active sync is a disaster. The guy who design it should be shot. I have given up on it altogether. I had to buy small software to access the data in the PDA and memory card.
Active sync could just not do the most elementary operation in a simple and straightforward way. You simply cannot plug into a computer and access the PDA like a USB stick. You have to buy a program for that. Isn’t that a joke?
- The booting upon starting is the longest I have ever seen. Switching it off is also a chore. I just live it always on.
- The battery capacity is way too small. Some applications will run down the battery in no time.

The list goes on but I am getting annoyed just to think about it all. This is the first and last product I’ll ever buy from HTC. Unless you are a geek that gets pleasure messing with IT devices do not buy it. Its use will take an unhealthy amount of your time. It will not help your life, it will waste a lot of your time and annoy you in the process.
In the first few months I tried to fix it and make it work to an acceptable level by downloading ROMs that improved the performance and instal