[pcwilliams]

(i posted this under the Pearl thread too, but thought it may make sense here as well).

I have a pearl 8130, & i wanted a global phone with qwerty kybd, non touch screen & wifi. Unfortunately, verizon does not currently have a blackberry that meets those requirements, so I began looking at wm phones. I eventually ordered an HTC Ozone. Since this looks similar to a blackberry, I thought I'd post my experience with everyone. Keep in mind, I used my berry alot for music.

Pros:
*QWERTY keyboard was pretty decent. Keyboard is small, but i found i didn't make too many mistakes while typing.
*The phone's size, weight, look, & feel were good (my wife has a curve 8330 & as soon as she saw my phone she wanted one...lol). Fit well in pants pocket. Screen was nice too.
*WM6.1 was actually pretty stable. In the past i had a pocket pc 2002 device & the OS was very buggy...locked up mutliple times a day.
*Good coverage outside of US. I took it down to the carribean & had decent phone & data coverage.
*I liked how windows mobile keeps your email inboxes separate.
*SMS has a threaded view.
*Wifi worked well. I am not sure if it took priority over the antenna when accessing email/data tho'.

Cons:
*No 3.5mm jack on this phone. The only port on the phone is a mini usb port. The phone came with an adapter/dongle that allows u to plug in 2.5mm, 3.5mm, & the charger. The dongle is on the bottom of the phone & it is about 3 to 4 in. long, so carrying the phone in your pocket with the dongle wasn't very condusive.
*Windows Media player cannot be controlled when not in the application. This was very disappointing. If i happened to be playing music, & jumped over to check my email, if i wanted to hear a song again, i had to go back into the music player to do it. This was the same when the phone was locked. I had to unlock the phone to control the media player.
*The volume control changes volume for all sounds.
*Of course email, wasn't as good as the blackberry. For all Pop3 email, the most frequent you can set it to check for mail is 5 minutes & if the email was more than 10k, it will tell u that the rest of email will be downloaded the next time u check email....huh? so on long emails, I'd either hafta wait 5 minutes or go in & manually send/receive. Exchange email however was instant using their Direct Push technology, but there is a known issue that if you get a sharepoint update email, it stops exchange synch...huh? So of course i get sharepoint update emails...so i couldn't access my exchange email (i since learned that if u delete the sharepoint update email, exchange email will begin to work).
*The HTC Ozone does not have a trackball, but it has a 4 way directional pad, with a enter key in the middle. it wasn't bad until i used it for browsing. then u have to press the directional key each time to move in the direction. needless to say i missed my trackball (but i am anxious for the trackpad).
*Altho WM6.1 was stable, i was pretty dissapointed in that it didn't really look much different than Pocket PC 2002. I was expecting more.

Those are just some of the things I can think of off the top of my head. I will not be making that mistake again. I will be patiently waiting for the Tour 2/Essex or whatever it's name is. One positive that I took away from it is that the adjustment going from the compact qwerty of the pearl to the full qwerty was not that big of an adjustment. I was worried about that, but in a day or 2 I was typing without any issues.