I'd love to organise it properly too, but right now my memory card is a mess. I think the people behind TomTom assumed they "own" the memory card, if you see what I mean. Still and in all it's a price worth paying for how much help tomtom is at times!

There does seem to be something odd going on. I <3 my one. It's an HTC branded phone with no network rubbish on. It's fast, it's reliable, it doesn't hang all the time (or even at all, to be honest). It's a great improvement over the T-Mob branded (but flashed with a XDA-developers ROM) TyTN I had previously. I can't comment on the video thing. It's clear that the phone isn't being all it can be while that remains unfixed but I didn't buy it for that myself and haven't really messed with it, the one video I have on my memory card seems to run ok, TomTom maps seem fine to me, etc... *shrug*

But all the posts here from people with Orange and T-Mobile builds can't be ignored. My chiropractor also has a TyTN II but from Orange, and comparing his phone to mine it does seem to behave rather differently.

Software on my phone:
3gVision i-nigma
Aspecto WiFiFoFum
Cambridge vxUtil
T-Mobile customisation (an XDA-Developers cab that loads t-mobile phone/MMS/Data settings)
HTC Home Customizer (not that I use it)
Google Maps
HTC Camera Patch
Microsoft .Net 3.5 Compact
MS Live Search
MS Live services (Mail, Messenger, etc)
MMetrics Meter
MoDaCo NoData
My Mobiler
Nadavi HTC GPS Tool
Newsgator Go
Opera
RARLABS Pocket RAR
Salling Clicker
SPB Backup
SPB Mobile Shell v.2.0
SPB Space Calculator Skin
Thunder WM5torage
TLR Large Start Menu
TLR Large Title Bar
TomTom Navigator v6
Yahoo! Go 2.0

I've got quite a large mixture there, lots of different things, lots of different versions of software, I've got 89.18Mb of Storage space and 58.62Mb of Program space free and my phone runs really very well indeed. I've also ran S2U2 on here in the past and it did slow things down a little bit and needed a few resets while setting it up and "playing" with the settings but the slight slowdown aside was OK for day to day use too. As I use SPB Mobile Shell, I've removed the HTC Home plugin from the Today screen.

As I said to Bainsyboy, I don't doubt people are having a bad experience at all, but I can't reconcile those experiences with the one I'm having.
So there's something odd going on. Are HTC using a different "build" of WM6 for OEM devices vs. the ones they sell themselves? Is there some common item being loaded by all OEMs that isn't on my list above?

Am I just lucky? Am I one click on the wrong program away from starting to have problems myself? Are you guys one button click, one startup menu item deletion or registry hack away from a device that runs as well as mine? Or what?

Maybe if we can answer those questions, if someone else running a HTC-branded phone rather than an operator one can chip in to say how their phone runs, we might start to figure out what is going on and maybe you guys can get a phone that behaves how it should do considering the price of these things

Flashing might help but if you're unsure about the process behind that then I'm reluctant to advise it myself.
Not that it's likely to fail: It isn't likely at all. I've flashed dozens of phones and the only problem I've had was with upgrading a T-Mobile TyTN at work from the T-Mobile install of Windows Mobile v5 to WM v6 and that was traced by T-Mob to a h/w issue with the phone itself, not the rom or the process I used.
However it's a big change to your phone and there is a small risk and you need to make the decision with that risk in mind.

I don't want to sound like I doubt you and your experiences but they sound completely different to my TyTN II experiences. Mine (HTC brand, not an operator branded phone) seems very fast and reliable indeed, an improvement over the TyTN I upgraded from in every way - and that was quite a fully featured phone to begin with. I wonder if something Orange load onto it is causing you problems or if you might have installed an App designed for an older version of Windows Mobile that might be doing something subtle to your phone.

Just got me one from an Amazon store for about £32 inc VAT and P&P. Nice properly packaged SANDISK one with a USB adapter, so I'm happy with it.

I can't comment about phones in particular but CEX have always been OK with me. They guarantee purchases for 12 months so they stand by what they sell to some degree at least.

I can't see you getting a phone for that sort of price without going to them or someone like them. At least I sort-of hope not having just recently purchased a TYTN2 for full price myself, not that I'd begrudge you getting a good deal but I'd be annoyed at missing it myself ;-)

You can certainly get calls while running TomTom. As for listening to music, I've never even tried - a large part of the benefits of TomTom (and similar products) are the spoken directions and audio warnings; even if your device has the power to play music and run tomtom side by side without any issues you'll find that each diminishes the enjoyment of the other imho.

Back when I had a hermes, I used this bluetooth adapter: http://svp.co.uk/product/sumvision_bluetoo...on_tomtom)_4313

It isn't the cheapest I've seen but it works really well, lasts a long time on a charge, works with every single GPS app I've ever thrown at it and it's a Sirfstar III chipset based device too. As you can see from the pix on that page, it's small enough to chuck into a pocket and forget about if you're going hiking or suchlike.

Money well spent - I've got a Kaiser now with the built in GPS but I'd definitely buy one of these again if I needed to.

Oooh I forgot you could combine them. I tried plus and it never really did it for me. Still SBP got me for mobile shell v1 & v2, backup and weather so they can't complain!

The one you like after trying them both?

I prefer mobile shell, personally, the 2.0 version is very nice indeed. But it's a subjective thing rather than a technical thing. You like whatever you like.

Hope you had fun shopping!

With a cab file, you can usually go into settings on the device and uninstall it from "Remove Programs". Failing that, you can _always_ "format" a machine's memory and config back to factory conditions with a hard reset, but that is an extreme step that you shouldn't be using day to day.

As for backing up, there's lots of alternatives here, I personally use SPB backup both at home and on all the devices I support at work. These pretty much all make it easy to take a backup of the system configuration and put it onto memory card before fiddling with settings in the registry (not the ROM, dumping that is a specialist issue).

Don't own one myself (just upgraded from hermes to kaiser this week!) but I took a long hard look at the touch dual and the touch cruise before making my choice and spent all of last week sitting next to someone on a training course who had a touch dual and had nothing bad to say about it.

One thing I will say about forums is that devices always look bad if you just read these kinds of forums because help with problems is part of the reason people come here, so you might be getting a false picture of the device. It's like if aliens landed in the car park of your hospital, wondered into accident and emergency and thought all humans were injured all of the time based on what they saw in there!

I think it launched about August '06, though I'm not sure it'll be vanishing soon as it's a popular model with WM6 support. But yeah it's a gamble - it might be available for 6 months more but not 12, say.

The touch might be an interesting option (and if you went with this i'd love to hear how your business got on, we're still doing 'trials' with hermes devices). Another option if you can wait might be the HTC Kasier, which is probably best described as a hermes on steroids.

What we'd love is something that supports all the options the hermes offers but in a blackberry type form factor. I can't say I 'get' that blackberry type layout myself but people keep asking for it!

Isn't the Hermes over 6 months old?

I've got one personally and we're also trialling them for our "corporate" roll-out. So far the people on the trial (most junior of which is my line manager, most senior of which is the big boss himself!) seem quite happy, as do our helpdesk so far.

We've gone the whole "Mobile Data" hog, Wireless Exchange Synch, replacing pagers as well as phones, viewing documents on the go, etc.

One thing to think about with PDA functionality - did people not use it because, well, they're just not bothered? Or did they just not use it because they found it clunky on the Mini-S? Personally, I love this form-factor and my next personal phone will probably be the Kaiser, but if you're certain no one will use the PDA functionality then I wouldn't buy new phones in that form factor - why borrow trouble by buying complexity if you know it'll never be used.

I can't believe how messed up their upgrade process is. Oh well.

Hope you like it as much as I do.
the link for brando should be http://shop.brando.com.hk/

fwiw for anyone else reading this thread, I've done a review of the XDA IIi which can be found here: http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/win/XDAIIireview.html

Good choice, from what i've seen in my admittedly short time with a IIi, you won't regret it! Now I _do_ use text a lot, both for SMSing people and for general note taking, but to be honest, I find input with the stylus or the "phone pad" keyboard to be more than good enough for me.

I also got a delivery of bits and pieces from Brando today, got a spare battery, "worldwide" travel charger and a screen protector for less, including delivery, than most uk places are selling a second battery for!

Thats what I paid. Maybe I could have got it for less but haggling was never my strong point and it was £70 less than orange wanted so i was already happy...

I had the exact same experience. I was also told that their rules for how they manage retention had changed, this may be why. Its their loss... I wasn't expecting the M2000 for free, but to charge me so much more for an upgrade over the price that O2 are offering for a new contract is just plain insane.

Well now i'm the proud owner of a XDA IIi. I looked at the IIs (because I was trying to upgrade to a M2000 with Orange after all) but after holding both in my hand I decided that the IIi was more comfortable (it _is_ marginally smaller and lighter) and it has a lot of minor improvements... and I wasn't all _that_ taken with the IIs keyboard after playing with it for a while... I felt it was "ok... but... meh!"

I had this problem and Orange Retentions wouldn't budge. £250 was their best offer on an upgrade. Laughable. I wouldn't expect a device like this for free but c'mon!

So I now own a O2 XDA 2i, and once the phone number is transferred my niece will get a SPV E200 as a nice little present!