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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars AT&T HTC Tilt 2: Hits the Jackpot, November 3, 2009
| By | W. Matsumura "1080 HD" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) |
You know how keyboard-less smart phones require that you access the search screen and then require you to switch screens to input your search criteria? No more with the AT&T HTC Tilt 2 because you've got the slide out keyboard.
And, I tested the Tilt 2 for 10 days--the battery life is robust! It lasted for two days of 8 hours of regular and varied smart phone use--internet access to check stock prices every hour and on the hour, e-mail updates every 4 hours, and constant phone use. That's 16 hours of use before having to recharge. And the Tilt 2 recharges quickly--a couple of hours max!
Most of all, you have the slide out full QWERTY keyboard. No more switching between search window and typing in your search criteria while blind. As you type on the slide out keyboard, your entries appear in the search field. You can correct typing errors immediately--so critical in finding the right Website--how many times have you typed "Help" when you meant Yelp!?! And texting is a breeze--u don't have 2 scroll through keys with multiple alpha and numeric values. There's even a separate key for the @ sign and the dot (.):>)
My Secretary even likes the way the Tilt 2 sounds when I use it in my car via blue tooth--she says it doesn't sound like I'm under water anymore. And because I travel the Highways from the California border with Oregon to Mexico and from Nevada to Texas, I know I've had no problem with coverage--I suspect Verizon's 3G coverage maps don't really matter. AT&T has the coverage where I need it and the connection is usually pretty fast.
The one knock I have which is really not noticeable if you're efficient in formulating your searches--the Microsoft interface limits your tabs to 3 or 4.
I've had about a half dozen cell phones in 3 years--including a couple of the early Sprint mini-computers--the AT&T HTC Tilt 2 is by far the best!
| 15 of 16 people found the following review helpful: 4.0 out of 5 stars Tilt 2 offers a lot for a road warrior,
Pros *Build qualify is overall excellent. The battery door could be more solid, but everything else including the slide hinge are top notch. *Great sound quality; equal to or better than my Blackberry Pearl. *Beautiful screen, very readable even by 40+ eyes. *Usable keyboard; not great, but decent and helpful when you need to actually type in a long URL. *Good Resistive display. Yes, you read that right, I like the resistive touch. No matter how good the little keyboards or on screen keyboard are, the are no match for decent handwriting recognition which is built into WinMo 6.5. It work great on this phone, I can actually take decent notes during meetings. *Plenty of built in useful apps like a real MS Word processor, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint, games, calculator etc. No need to spend $$ getting them off some app store. *Some halfway decent ring tones are also included. *Stable - it has only crashed twice, once and that was due to a 3rd part app which I have since uninstalled and the other was Opera. *Tilt screen- it really is nice. *Overall size is nearly perfect to fit in your pocket but still be able to use for video, pictures and reading. *Web experience is pretty decent to with the WinMo version of Internet Explorer. Of course I'm really waiting for the final version of Fennec. *Billions and billions of compatible apps. Well thousands anyway; many free and most aren't even about farts or boobies nice as those may be. *WiFi and Bluetooth are just fine too. Cons - I specifically wanted to read books on the devise, but all the book readers I have downloaded rely on hardware buttons that don't exist. I would love to re-purpose the volume up and down keys for changing pages, but can't seem to find a way. Hopefully software updates will fix the issue. - No 3.5mm jack! What's issue HTC? At least it does ship with a good adapter, and the MP3/WMA's do sound pretty good on it. - Still slower than I had hoped. Not a biggie considering I knew the iPaq actually has a faster core processor speed at 624 vs. 528mhz for the Tilt2, but still definitely not any better than the old PDA. It amazes me so little has progressed in hand-helds cpu in the last 6 years! - I don't get what the big deal is about the touch flow? Unless you are "simple", it's easier to use the Start Menu to find your apps. Then again, maybe I'm just a power user. - Won't sync with my XP desktop, though it syncs fine with the new Win 7 laptop. - Minor caveat; Opera Mobile isn't that great, but is set as default. IE is much better (and no I'm not a fan boy.) |
| 10 of 10 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Much MUCH better than I expected...but its a BIG phone.,
After some extended length issues, I got my replacement. Initially I pretty much expected a Bold as a replacement, hoping BIG time it'd be the Bold 2, but imagine my surprise when I was told whatever I was gonna get, it would be a Windows Mobile device. Oh NO! I have dozens of friends who have used Windows Mobile devices over the years and I know of just ONE that has anything good to say about them, the rest in absolute agreement that whatever they got next, it would NOT be Windows based. So with all of that to draw upon, I began to get nervous. I spent plenty of time viewing as many youtube videos I could find regarding the Tilt 2 and how it worked and the pro's & con's and slowly I began to get excited. After what seemed like an ETERNITY, the phone arrived. First impression: from looking at it straight on, it looks deceptively like an iphone. Seriously, I think its rather obvious what inspired the design. However, once you pick it up, it is rather obvious that this phone is hefty...easily the heaviest smart phone I've ever owned, and probably one of the biggest since They began to combining PDA's with cell phones. Don't let that bother you however, because all that aside, it is STILL a pretty dang good phone. I haven't noticed the size to be a genuine problem since unpacking it a little over a week ago. I have NEVER owned a phone that had SO much packed into such a device. Seriously, the Tilt 2 is essentially a micro laptop computer that can do almost everything a typical computer can do. I cannot tell you how many times I have opened up one program only to find another 3 to 8 programs inside of THAT. It can make finding some programs a bit difficult, but remember, its Windows based, so if you are already familiar with a PC its kinda like navigating a smaller version. They have included games, software for checking the weather, push websites to your phone at whatever interval you'd like so when you want to navigate a site you visit frequently, it'll load MUCH faster, which I think is a pretty cool idea. The phone actually comes with 2 pre-loaded web-browsers, both of which are light YEARS ahead of what I had on my Blackberry (and even further ahead of my older Palm phones). You can choose Opera mobile or the pocket edition of Internet Explorer, both of which work pretty great to be honest. While researching my Tilt 2 before I received it, I discovered a free download called Skyfire which is even better still as an internet Browser--I believe it rivals even the iphone to be totally honest. Pretty impressive all the way around. The Touch Flo 3D screen is quite amazing. My old Bold had easily the best screen I had ever seen up to that point, but the Tilt has an even brighter more clear screen--not an easy task considering how LARGE the screen is, but it really is amazingly clear and brite. The resistive touch screen certainly takes a little getting used to, the learning curve took me about 3 full days of on-and-off use before I got the hang of how to flow through images without accidentally choosing one that I really wasn't looking for. You may learn quicker, but it certainly isn't difficult to be honest. I held up my Tilt next to an iphone and the other owner seemed genuinely impressed with the overall design and operation. Don't know if that means anything, but I thought I'd throw that out just in case. The camera at just 3.2 megapixels doesn't seem all that more than my Blackberry's standard 2 MP camera, but holy COW do the pics come out amazingly clear and so much better than my Bold its actually embarassing by comparison. It certainly could've used a flash, but I won't gripe too much about that. Suffice it to say the photo capabilities rock--again when compared specifically to my Bold and previous Palm phone. The keyboard is massive. Take the keyboard off and the phone is basically the HTC Pure, which is actually a pretty small device next to the Tilt 2. But I NEED a physical keyboard being the texting-centric person that I am. I admit that the on-screen virtual keypad is much more difficult to work with my fingers (its much easier with the included stylus), but if I need to write something with only one hand, that seems to be the way to go because with the keypad out, well, let's just say its difficult to operate with just one hand. I kinda wish the keys were a little higher, but again, that is a minor problem to be sure. With so many keys to get used to, it's nice to see dedicated keys for things I use often like periods, or comma's. Let's just say for texting and emailing, the Tilt 2 is probably unmatched. As an emailing device, this is where the Tilt and the Windows platform falls WAY behind Blackberry--to an almost embarassing degree. Instead of getting my Yahoo and Gmail 'pushed' to my phone, I have to program it to go 'fetch' it once every 5 minutes. It features Direct Push technology for microsoft servers, but the set up is--for THIS user anyway--a bit complicated, especially compared to Blackberry. I still haven't got it worked out. For the more technically savvy folks, this may be a non-issue, but for people like me, who I honestly believe outnumber the techno folks by a large margin, well, it can be a bit frustrating. As a scheduler, the Windows Mobile 6.5 is awesome. Beating my Bold in this area by a significant margin. Very info-oriented with plenty of options that just weren't available with BB devices. The Palm was great in this area as well. The Today screen is also quite nice to deal with, especially if you have plenty of appointments to keep track of. As a multi-media device, so far I am again impressed. I haven't watched movies on it yet, but I will. As for listening to music, well, this IS one place where it's nice, but not as convenient...there isn't a dedicated 3.5 plug for headphones, instead you plug in this awkward-looking adapter dongle and then you can plug in headphones, but it is so big and bulky that attached to an already large phone just makes it much less easy than it ought to be...and its a real shame seeing as the phone has a built-in FM tuner with Radio Data Service meaning you can see what song is playing on the screen if you're listening to a station that has the technology to begin with. There are other versions of this phone on other networks where a plug WAS included, making this not just a bit of a head-scratcher and more of an outright snub to us AT&T users. As a phone, I have ZERO complaints. The signal strength once again compared to my Blackberry Bold is MUCH better. In places where I simply could NOT get a signal big enough to surf the 'net, my Tilt 2 has NO problem navigating the web at pretty quick rates--even when not in 3G service areas, another BIG plus if you ask me. There is more I could write, and I probably will do an update in a few more days or weeks, but my only BIG piece of advice is this: before you buy, take the time to actually go into a store and SEE it for yourself. The photos just do NOT do it justice, and since it ireally IS a big phone, you need to know what you are getting into before buying so you don't regret your decision. If big isn't a factor, than by all means I can endorse the HTC Tilt 2 whole heartedly. A well-built device that by all standards in my opinion works wonderfully (at least so far anyway). Kudos to HTC for the design...now if they can make this same thing half as thick, well I think I'd buy another in a heartbeat. *****UPDATE***** Okay, it's been almost a week now, and I ran into my first snag...while receiving a text message from my wife that happened to also include a photo, my phone simply crashed in a way that was quite odd. Over the course of the next 3-4 hours I tried everything asked by the HTC website, other postings at the TILT 2 forums and even tried a few that I thought up myself. NOTHING worked. Faced with the prospect of having to perform a hard reset, without being able to entirely sync all my calendar and contact information which had taken HOURS to transfer via the small keyboard, I put it off 'til it was obvious the ONLY course of action left was one that I seriously did not want to take. But take it I did. I performed the hard reset (which by the way you can perform by holding BOTH phone keys at the bottom of the screen and pressing the power key on the top at the same time). Voila. Literally now I have a like-new phone, without ANY of my previous info on it at all. Oh well. The phone seems to be working just fine, but I wonder now if/when it'll happen again. I've had this phone now for less than 6 days and while I really like the phone, I can only endorse it IF it doesn't crash on me regularly. Once again, I'll come back and update further in a few days/weeks with anything relevant. |
