Metropol

No.

Really can't think of anything to add here so I've intentionally left this space blank.

I hope its not some insidious trojan at work.

My phone is making me cross these days. Wifi drops in and out. Spotify premium takes an hour to load up. Its telling me memory is low again, and the battery life is poor.

Aside from that I still love it.

Oh the battery *is* poor isn't it. The amount of heat generated by the 3G modem is also rather unnerving the first few times it occurs.

One thing that is rather annoying me of late however is the orange firmware and its refusal to let me uninstall shite. If there wasn't such limited space on the internal memory this would not be an issue but the refusal of the big apps such as google maps and flash to move onto the SD card really does limit things.

Still adore the thing however. Installed the gingerbread keyboard recently via a hack and have been finding it much nicer to type on although it does lack some of the nicer features such as the .com button in the browser. Wonder if they're HTC added or dependent on the rest of the OS being present.

On the subject of WinPho btw, has that copy and paste update been spat out by the UK carriers yet?

Got a Desire S delivered today and am very impressed so far. Got it for a steal from o2 (£150-ish once my cashback comes) and it's the sim-free version so no o2 branding and I can use my Vodafone sim instead.

One thing I'm not sure about though, I seem to be syncing with both Facebook and Facebook for HTC Sense (and twitter) can I get rid of one of these, and which is the best to get rid of?

Pete wrote:On the subject of WinPho btw, has that copy and paste update been spat out by the UK carriers yet?

O2 has it, and I think Orange have started...
It's amazing. I copied and pasted for whole minutes.

lukey wrote:

Pete wrote:On the subject of WinPho btw, has that copy and paste update been spat out by the UK carriers yet?

O2 has it, and I think Orange have started...
It's amazing. I copied and pasted for whole minutes.

In the UK only T-Mobile doesn't yet have it. *shakes fist angrily*

Deutsche Telekom Europe is now one of only two carrier groups (the other being Telefonica Spain, though not Telefonica O2 in other markets) in the world that is still 'testing' the February "pre-update" update, as well as the March "NoDo"/copy+paste update. That the testing phase is still ongoing means that each of these updates is still, at best, two weeks away from being delivered to handsets, although the update schedule hasn't itself been updated for three weeks, so it may well be available sooner.

Still, grrr.

So what's the deal with dedranding then? Anyone tried it? I am becomming increasingly narked with the annoying Orange "improvements" to my phone and the manner in which it infects so many apps with attempts to make me buy things / use their own dodgy app store.

Obv it'll cause Orange to stop supporting me if it goes wrong but according to the wisdom of the internets, so long as I stick to official HTC firmware I can shout at HTC to get it fixed.

So, yay, nay?

I don't have any of this carrier applied nonsense - I think that's because I got mine during the ash cloud problems last year, and the handsets were so delayed from the point of me ordering, Vodafone didn't waste any time applying their own firmware version.

Am I *missing* anything, or, (by the sounds of it), am I benefiting from not having these little extras?

You're missing nothing. The carriers tend to add nothing of any consequence except for their own delightful customisations like T-Mobile making everything pink or Vodafone adding its 360 apps which no-one uses.

On my T-Mobile Samsung Omnia 7 (Windows Phone), T-Mo were remarkably reserved in applying customisations, limiting them only to adding a logo splash screen on boot-up, chucking a few network settings on there (like voicemail access, MMS settings etc), and for no good reason, changing the search provider within Internet Explorer to Google. Weirdly, this last change only works if you already have Internet Explorer open, and then hit the search button; every other search is powered by Bing, including those that take you to Internet Explorer, and if you want to amend the search that you started with Bing while browsing, well, you can't.

Thanks, T-Mobile. Really helpful.

Far less intrusive than most carrier customisations though; usually, the carriers can't help themselves and sprinkle their shitty confetti over the ROM with such enthusiasm that it often causes performance hits compared with stock manufacturer ROMs, despite all the 'testing' that carriers claim to do.

Shops like the Carphone Wharehouse and Phones4u come in useful here, as whenever I've bought a phone off them, they've always given me a generic device, not branded to any carrier. My BlackBerry, for example, doesn't have the O2 logo on it like it would do if I'd got it from an O2 store, and it has next to no O2 bloatware on it

My Orange desire is not only crammed with useless tripe like trial versions of monopoly but also has things such as google talk hidden and replaced with Orange's bizarre version of MSN that doesn't work. Also there is a secondary app store that never works, loads of other apps that refuse to work over wifi (Orange maps for example, usefully called "Maps" and sat next to the far superior Google Maps, or "Maps" as it is called).

The music player tries to make me buy more music too and there are a whole host of other little oddities with strange icons that serve no purpose.

Very irritating.