Blog ala Vidar

It’s almost Christmas time and therefore I had to buy myself a couple of presents. One of them was a new phone, HTC Touch HD2 aka “LEO”. For technical specifications click here. I also bought a 16GB microSD card, so I can use it as a podcast player while I’m commuting from and to Ølen. I’ve been playing with the phone for a couple of days now, and I must say. I’M IMPRESSED! I’ve had 4-5 different WM (Windows Mobile) phones, and they’ve all been struggling with performance. This is now not a problem anymore. They’ve put a 1GHz CPU in it in addition to 448MB RAM which makes it fly. The best performance test I’ve got is importing contacts. On older phones, after I’ve imported 1000 contacts from Omega’s contact register the phones have been very sluggish and to be honest, useless. After doing the same “performance test” on this phone, it was still quick! You can see a video of it here and here.

It’s a big phone. A bit bigger than iPhone. I’ve wanted an iPhone for some time now, but I’m anti-Apple. If you want to discuss apple, go find someone else. I’ve played with my uncle’s Mac, and I don’t like it. My uncle loves it though, and for his use it’s probably pretty good. I don’t do videos, pictures and stuff like that. I work with SQL Server, Visual Studio etc and when that’s available on Mac, I’ll give it another chance. Till then, I’m not interested in even hearing about how much YOU love Mac 🙂 Oh, and btw. iTunes is one of the worst performing applications ever made for a computer 🙂

So, enough about Apple. No, not yet. Let me just say: this phone kicks iPhone’s metal shiny ass, 5 times! I’ve always liked qwerty-keyboards on these types of phones, but Leo only has a touch keyboard. Even with my big thumbs this is actually pretty good. After a couple of minutes I got used to it, and typing with both thumbs makes it really fast. This was made possible by some new display type. You can run a knife over the display and it doesn’t leave a mark! Just check this video. Turn off the volume, since he’s only speaking gibberish. I’ve tested this myself, and it works 🙂

Trygve recommended a couple of applications that makes it even cooler. Here’s a quick list of the ones I found most useful:

• BsB Tweaks – Application that enables you to change “hidden” settings in the OS
• S2U2 – Slide 2 Unlock 2
• TorchButton – Application that uses the flashlight on the back of the phone as a torch

So, to conclude: This is the best WM phone I’ve ever tested. It’s even better than my old Nokia 7110! I really recommend this phone for everyone. Maybe not my mom, but everyone with an computer-IQ over average should own one of these!