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I have owned my HTC HD2 for about seven months now, and just recently (a week ago) changed my operating system over Android from Windows (more on that later), so this review will probably be a bit split in two, as I feel like I got a new phone when I switched over from Windows.
Features/Specs: The screen is rather large: 4.3 inches to be exact, with 480×800 resolution. This will tend to make perfectionists like myself, perpetually irritated by its smudge-attracting properties. I bought a Skinomi and applied it; this seemed to cut the smudges by 50%. The screen is also very responsive to touch; there was no worrying about sensitivity.
The camera is lovely, taking pictures comparable to a nice digital camera equaling out to 5MP, including widescreen capture, digital zoom and 2x LED Flash.
Battery life is about what you expect from a smart phone with such a large screen. I found it could last about a day round the clock, with light usage before it completely conked out.
Music storage organization is quite nice, and the quality of playback is lovely, which is one thing I can say this phone does quite marvelously. It came with a 16 GB MicroSD card, and I can safely say I am nowhere near maxing it out.
Windows: From the beginning, I had major frustrations with the HTC HD2, most of which I now attribute to its native operating system. The standard version of Windows for this phone is WinMo 6.5. This immediately presents problems, as Windows refused to offer any Windows 7 upgrade for it. Certain applications, like Twitter and Facebook for Windows, stopped working seamlessly (and then not all), shortly after I got his phone as a result of this mismatch in programming. Point blank, the phone was outdated the minute I opened the box. L
The phone’s navigation was smooth and intuitive, but it frequently got stuck on random different screens, and I spent a lot of time hitting the end button and starting whatever I was doing all over again. Windows has a “Market” for applications, but I found that I rarely saw anything I was interested in downloading much less paying for, and none of my vendors offered any applications for the Windows OS. So, therefore it was useless to me. Opera mobile client (default, although Internet Explorer is also buried deep in the apps) doesn’t support Flash, which I found incredibly frustrating, as the whole novelty of the phone was the ability to see web pages on a humungous screen.
Another handicap I faced was that I could only get 2 out of my 3 email accounts to work on the phone, and then a couple months ago, one of the accounts (my work one and the most vital) just stopped sending emails out. I took it to my techie guy at work who could not figure out what was wrong with it. To me, this was a deal breaker, so I started looking at the rumored “Android Flash,” for the HTC HD2. It took me awhile to find a proper program to use to transform it, as well as properly clear instructions on what to do with it. I finally found one on the xda developers site (discussion board with any answer to any tech question you can think of) and found it relatively easy to accomplish (I am happy to share this link with anyone who is interested).
Post Windows: Changing the OS over on this phone has saved its life, as far as I am concerned. Time will tell how much I like this phone, but the processes have already improved tenfold. The phone rarely freezes up, and *all* my email accounts work. The navigation offers more personalization; there are several screens that you can use to customize according to what apps you like. Speaking of apps, Android Marketplace *blows* Windows’ marketplace away. You can get most of what you need free and most every vendor is on there. The only downside I would say is the battery life decreased exponentially from flashing the phone to Android. I am looking into an external battery to fix that problem.
