Damn you HTC...?

I've always been quite keen on keeping the firmware of my phones up to date, so as soon as a new ROM image is made available I tend to install it at the earliest possible opportunity. This doesn't tend to happen very often, and is made worse when the phone is operator locked, however you can normally count on three or four updates during the first couple of years as long as the phone remains a current model.

My old Nokia N95 was locked to T-Mobile, so many updates never appeared, and those that did usually appeared several months after the generic roms had been released into the wild. This time around, my HTC Touch Pro2 is a geneneric unlocked device, so I'm at the top of the list when it comes to ROM updates.

The TP2 was supplied with Windows Mobile 6.1, and soon after the 6.5 upgrade was released I updated to this. Everything was working very well and the phone was very stable, 6.5 looked fairly impressive. A few months after this another new ROM image was released containing a some bug fixes from Microsoft and an update by HTC to a later Sense UI featuring closer integration to FaceBook and a built in Twitter client, so I duly updated to this - and that's when my troubles started.

I suspected the new Sense UI was ported from the version written for the HD2 or similar recent Windows phone, as the whole responsiveness has became considerably slower than the original WinMo 6.5 Sense UI. I can't help thinking it was therefore aimed at the newer, faster devices, and just slung onto older models with few, if any, modifications.

The first thing I noticed was updating contacts linked to FaceBook. At first I though this just crashed, in actual fact it's taking several hours (even over a Wi-Fi connection) to update the few contacts (sub 20) I have linked to their FaceBook profiles. That's not really acceptable

The bigger problem I've encountered is a couple of times when making a call. What happens is I'll select my contact from the list, and the phone will report it's calling them... until a different contact from my list answers. When you hang up the phone history list correctly states you called the wrong number.

This is simply not acceptable.

Along with this, the phone has become very unstable, locking for minutes at a time or crashing altogether on a frequent basis, I've even missed a couple of calls due to this (and been unable to terminate calls on several occasions ). I can also forget about using the speaker-phone (although that may be yet another hardware fault).

As mentioned I suspected this wasn't so much down to the underlying OS as much as Sense itself. To prove this I turned the Sense UI off and for the first time tried to use the new Windows Mobile 6.5 UI instead. It's not as good, but I figured that if it works it will be bearable until they hopefully release another ROM update.

I'm now a few days in and whilst there's several things about Sense I am missing, the actual 6.5 UI isn't too terrible. Interestingly, I'm not yet sure if things have been made any better on the reliability front. The phone does now boot several seconds faster (as it no longer needs to load Sense), but I have had at least a couple of occasions where it has frozen for several seconds, so if it is better now, it's not by much at the moment (Apple fans please don't tell me this wouldn't happen on an iPhone, I know several iPhone users who regularly curse the reliability of the device, one even has to reboot his phone every time he travels from London City to Docklands for some bizarre reason. This isn't just an issue with Windows Mobile).

I'll probably try a hard reset at some point but since these problems started soon after a bare update, I'm not hopeful. I'll be sure to let you know how I get on.

Of course, the downside of all of this is that I'm now a little wary of getting another HTC phone. I was thinking of a Nexus 2 if that's out by the time my contract comes up for renewal in December. We'll have to see now, mind you if it is down to the underlying OS, I'm unfairly giving HTC the blame. Mind you, I don't suppose Android is flawless...