[DAY 01 - Saturday]
Not a lot of free time today to get to grips with the D2 but none the less some things are worthy of notice.
The machine does indeed have haptic (vibration) feedback which occurs in various places; tapping a key on the SIP and when hitting one of the Touch 3d tabs. This can of course be turned off in the Touch Flo options.
Having used Itjes fine ROM on the X1 I was expecting Facebook integration to be implemented in the ROM, alas this is not the case. Fingers crossed HTC add this in a later ROM revision.
From browsing trough the accessories brochure it looks like HTC aim to produce a nifty looking desk stand for the D2 - I may well be tempted!
Be warned the casing is indeed a finger print magnet, the slightest touch of a greasy finger does show up on the black mirror plastic as well as on the silver fascia surround.
There is yet again a lack of customisable buttons, only the press and hold 'Make Call' button can be customised.
eBook reading. As many of you know I use uBook from gower point as my eBook reader of choice. This works wonderfully on the large hires screen. The only disadvantage is that there is no action button on the machine so that page control / options modes are a pain to navigate.
It may be subjective but I find the volume on the machine to be slightly quiet.
Zooming into large pictures in the album using the (-).....(+) control seems limited to zooming to a 1:1 picture ratio only. It seems impossible to zoom in to greater depths.
Push internet seems like it will be a useful facility whereby defined pages will auto-update in the background and be instantly available for viewing in Opera. I've set up the local BBC Weather as a push page and it looks to be a feature I'll use.
Weather in the calendar. If one navigates to a calendar day within the Touch 3d calendar that is within the range of the weather forecast then the weather for that day is shown on that days appointments. Cool!
The touch integration within Touch 3d does go to a lot of areas, as an example that of the Push Internet settings.
GPS sat nav lock times are within 4-5 seconds (once Quick GPS has been allowed to run.
The D2 is very light in the hand compared to the iPhone and especially so compared to the metal construction of the X1.
So still enjoying the machine in general so far. A few screen shots below to illustrate the above. More to report tomorrow!
[DAY 02 - Sunday]
Today has been mainly spent in the garden, but the D2 has been left on the desk with both the RSS Hub and Twikini (Twitter client running as well as the local BBC Weather set to push updates to the page every hour. As per usual Exchange e-mail has been also receiving e-mail and calendar updates all day. The machine has been used for around 40 minutes eBook reading and for checking the weather forecast. This was done to monitor battery life and connectivity in a minimal use situation. So......
Battery life after having being fully charged at around 9:10am and left in the above condition until 5:30pm. The battery has a charge of 65% remaining (as measured by Spb Mobile Shell 3). Not too bad considering what was going on in the background although one may have expected this to be higher considering the size of the battery.
I had occasion today to soft rest the machine after a program load and unlike when the machine was first booted this time the code for the SIM PIN was requested - weird. I'll have to check in the PIN is requested next time I hard reset.
Screen alignment, as this not performed when the machine was originally configured I decided to recalibrate it manually. This has resulted is improved screen / finger accuracy in applications like uBook, so may well be worth doing after a hard reset.
Radio reception, again it has been noted that this is definitely worse than on older WM devices (maybe 1-2 blobs less than the original Diamond) and even when at it's best around home (2 bars) the connection tends to waver in and out, frequently dropping to zero bars. Lets hope HTC can fix this with a radio update.
One annoyance with the new Touch 3D notification system (which works great for e-mail) is that if one wants to check the battery life then one cannot tap on the notification bar / top tray as this just opens the notification window. To check the battery you have to go 'Start/Settings/All Settings/System/Power icon' - not that user friendly!
Push Internet - despite that being a little slow to carry out the first update this morning after the phone was turned on (it took 2 hours 40 minutes to do the first push update despite being within the allowed scheduled times) it has since updated the page every hour with no issues. This is proving to be a useful feature for me at least.
Camera - The camera (5MPixel) was tested out today for the first time. And I must admit that the quality was much better than expected. HTC's history of fitting poor cameras to their devices may be over. Needless to say as time permits I'll experiment more with the zoom capabilities. However for now click on the thumbnail below to view the full sized picture of 'Mac in the garden'.
[DAY 03 - Monday]
Guys today has been a bit of a downer as far as the D2 is concerned unfortunately. Work has been hectic and I ended up going out at lunch time so not really a lot of time to play with the wee beastie. In addition at the moment I'm running the machine with a paltry 1Gb micro-SD card on board, so not a lot of room for applications, music files, movies, etc. Tomorrow my new 16Gb card arrives so hopefully from then on there will be enough storage space to do some decent testing.
The only things I can add is really about the battery life. I made three 3-4 minute calls today, read about 20 minutes of an eBook and refenced my PIM data for about 15 minutes. Again with the Push Internet and email running constanly in the background. The working day 'on battery' cycle started at 7:40am and ended with the first charge at 5:01p. By this time the charge had gone down to 83%. It took from 5:01pm until 5:43pm to recharge to a full 100% battery. The Xperia X1 as a comparison is usually down to about 68% charge by that time.
One annoyance I hae noticed today (unless I'm missing the obvious) is that in the stock file manager there seesm no way at all to select a certain group of files from within a displayed list of files. The Edit option includes select all, and the Touch system allows single selection but there seems no way to select any multiples.
Anyway tomorrow I hope to run with the WiFi connected and turned on all day, we'll see what differences that makes to battery life
Now talking about the Push Internet, here's a screenshot showing it in operation full screen, with the tag showing when it was last refreshed, which ios pretty cool! Also unfortunately accompanying it is a screen show of Twikini showing some screen corruption. This is the only application I've seen with any such issues so it may be down to the application itself.
[DAY 04 - Tuesday]
Another apologetic day today guys... the micro-SD card did not arrive from Mobymemory, so we're still limited in the testing area.
One or two things I did manage to do though..... I did run through the working day with Wifi turned on all day. Within the same working period as yesterday the battery life was down to 65%, but this did include only two phone calls and around an hours eBook reading. Still pretty impressive. To recover back to being fully charged took an hour and 20 minutes.
The other thing was to test out
Spb Mobile Shell 3 to see how that performed on the machine and I'm happy to say it performed flawlessly, smooth in operation and extremely functional. Definitely a 'keeper' application for the D2!
More thoughts tomorrow when (if) the the SD card arrives!
