gdgt

The device feels very solid and well built. Very thin, not too big, and not to heavy. I think it would look better without the two-tone color scheme, but it still looks nice. The screen is very bright and colorful. It makes my other portable devices look washed out by comparison. The camera is decent, with a nice led flash. HTC phones rarely have great cameras, but at least this one is good enough for basic pictures. Just don't expect anything amazing. It also records non HD video. The trackball lights up for notifications, but otherwise it's mostly useless.

The best part about this phone is that it is just super fast. Apps open instantly, web pages load very quickly. In fact, it loads pages faster on at&t's edge network than my sluggish Windows Mobile phone does on 3G, probably due to the snapdragon processor. The phone is pretty good at managing running tasks. I downloaded the Advanced Task Killer app, but I haven't really experienced any reason to use it yet.

The Android 2.1 software has some awesome new features. I love the speech-to-text, which is enabled anywhere you need to enter text. I though it was going to be a useless feature, but it's surprisingly accurate, even though I'm not the best speaker in the world. The whole phone is very well integrated with google services, so if you're a big google user you'll love this phone.

Android still has some flaws though. For example Android still doesn't have a good video player built in. You can watch videos in the photo gallery but it doesn't work very well. Overall its a mediocre media player out of the box. I haven't tried any of the media players in the market yet, so there may be some better options out there. I don't use my phone as a primary mp3 player so it's good enough for me.

One big omission from the Android OS (due to software patents or other unknown, mysterious reasons) is lack of multitouch. Keep in mind the hardware does support it, but the built in apps do not. For example, if you want to use pinch-to-zoom on the browser, you can download the third party dolphin browser which has it built in. The only part where I really miss multitouch is in the virtual keyboard, since it helps reduce typos from pressing multiple keys at the same time. It's not really a big deal for me, but hopefully multitouch will be added in the future.

This phone is not the revolutionary earth shattering "superphone" device that the entire tech community had been hyping up for weeks. However it is a very solid phone with great hardware and a good OS which just keep getting better over time. If you want an Android phone I would definitely recommend it.