Breaking news: MS Mobiles reports a fix for the TyTN II may be available as soon as next week. Read more...

Breaking news: All About Phones also confirms update is coming. Read more...

What to tell HTC

Just telling the support personnel the drivers are underperfoming and you demand new ones is likely not going to be much help. Support needs clear issues to enter into their systems for escalation in the support hierarchy. It seems many people have done just that though, and it seems the only thing that has now somewhat gotten through to them is the video playback issue. Remember that though the engineers and technicians that build these devices are likely to know, that does not mean it is useful for the support personnel. You must explain it to them in such a way that they can easily reproduce these issues. You may also wish to give them the URLs to the videos listed under navigation to the right.

Following is a list of things you can tell HTC and probably the best way how, so support personnel can actually deal with them. Try to speak from experience, do not simply restate what is said here. Try to reproduce them yourself first.

Slow drawing operations in normal software

Try reproducing this first. It really helps if you have an older device where this works fine. You could for example tell them that the buildup if program screens is really slow. Often you can literally see the application window being built up; menus are also shown slowly. If you have a large selection of programs installed, try going to your Start --> Programs screen and scroll through the list. You should be able to see the icons being drawn. Older devices like the HTC TyTN and HTC Wizard do not have these issues (tell them this if you happen to have one of those).

On a side note, these things work nicely on older devices, and these have menu and window animations turned on - taking more processing power - while these newer devices have them turned off by default for better performance. If this is wise to tell them or already too technical, is something you will have to decide for youtself.

One great example for the slow drawing, also with a comparison to an older device, is the TomTom (TyTN II vs Magician) video.

Video playback

When telling them about your video playback issues, you should include which software you use, the resolution of the videos you play and the file format.

An important point here is that you should only use Windows Media Player or other HTC supplied video playback software, or they are likely to respond that the issue is related to your third party video playback software.

What is also important is the resolution. Most small 320x240 videos play with hardly any issue. The problem is that these devices should easily be able to handle 640x480 videos and complete 350mb TV-show episodes, without having to convert them. After all, both older HTC devices as well as competitors devices based on the same hardware can do this. Again here it is important, if it is possible for you (you have one of those other devices), to provide backup for that, like "My HTC TyTN (I, the original TyTN) plays these videos fine!"

Games

Try some different games, preferably both 2D and 3D games - as many as possible, and freely available or games with trials if you can find them! Tell them how slow these games run, or even not at all. If you are technically savvy yourself, you could say that it seems only software rendering is used and/or DirectDraw (for 2D games) or Direct3D / OpenGL (for 3D games) isn't supported.

Camera

These issues are very easy to reproduce. Just try taking a picture of a moving target, this is almost impossible and results in very blurry pictures. Even taking a picture of a static object is difficult, due to the the slowness of taking the picture, you have to have a steady hand for a long period to produce a good image. It gets even worse if you are not in a brightly lit area, like in a somewhat dark room or at night. Taking videos with your camera results in videos of about 5 - 10fps (if you're lucky), which is way less then you would expect from such a modern and expensive device. Tell them about the experience you had with this.

Touchscreen

This issue isn't relevant to everybody experiencing the issues mentioned above, as not all these devices actually have a touchscreen. Also, this one is not that easy to reproduce as the other ones. We can tell you it slows down the device because of 100% CPU utilization, but this is not so easy to see. For a lot of people touching the screen while playing a video slows the video down considerably. A good one is also touching the screen while playing a game. It all comes down to using the touchscreen while the device is already doing something else that takes a lot of processing power. Reproduce this, and tell HTC about your experience.