Hello all, I just thought I would drop by and share some words with you about HTC’s Freestyle. For those of you who do not know, the Freestyle is being hailed as the closest a feature phone can get to being a smart phone - without being a smart phone. It runs on the Brew MP OS and uses the HTC Sense UI, which is very easy on the eyes and smooth to play around with.
The device comes packed with eye-catching features that make this phone look amazing on paper - especially to those who want a lot of the bells and whistles of a smart phone without a forced (and not unlimited) data plan. Some of these features include a 3.2MP camera, Friend Stream (a social update aggregator including Twitter and Facebook), many different widgets to stick to your home screens, and a surprisingly competent web browser.
But the fun stops there. This phone is so ridden with bugs and sketchy behavior that I shelfed it for a Samsung Eternity II after two weeks of use. You may have seen the mostly positive video reviews of this phone, but I assure you that had these reviewers used the phone for a longer amount of time, they would have not given it such praise. So, without further delay, here is a list of the problems I have discovered.
1. Don’t have mobile email ($5/mo)? Well, say goodbye to social sharing services like Twitpic or Tumblr that require you to SMS an email address. Not only does this phone prevent you from SEEING any email contact in your address book when sending an SMS, but it rubs salt in the wounds by suddenly matching the name of the contact when you manually enter the email address. In a nutshell, it will let you send SMS messages to email addresses, but it will hide any email contacts from you until you enter the whole address manually. This limitation literally serves no purpose but to convince people to pay an extra $5.00 a month to use all of their phone’s BASIC features - Features that are fully available on every other AT&T phone I have used.
2. There is no subject line available in SMS messages at all. This once again is probably tied to mobile email to prevent people from finding an alternative. The problem is, once again, I have never seen this on a phone in my life until now. This also prevents you from sharing comments with your photos on sites such as Tumblr and Twitpic, as they rely on the subject line for this input and typing your comments in the body yields no results.
3. Friend Stream is broken. Facebook works, intermittently, but last week it didn’t update for four days. Twitter does not work at all. Anyone who has tried to log in through my phone has received an “Invalid username/password” error and it has never worked.
4. Texts often arrive 3-5 hours late, and with as many as six duplicate messages. I checked the bill online and each duplicate text appears to have been counted but I could be wrong. This means that you will be financially destroyed if you do not have unlimited texting, and you will hate everything about your phone.
5. Text message and voice mail indicators do not properly refresh and will often tell you that you have a new notification that you have checked half a dozen times.
6. The phone frequently crashes fully when performing simple tasks such as browsing Twitter’s mobile site.
7. The web browser will give you a 404 error approximately 1 out of every 8 times you click on a link, especially if you are moving from a mobile site to a full site. So get used to constantly having to refresh pages to get them to load properly.
8. The weather will only update manually and has no option to put it on a schedule.
9. Text messages will come through with no indication whatsoever - or new message notification. They appear in your inbox as if you read them already. I have missed many messages because of this.
10. The HTC Browser seems to be incapable of keeping you logged in to any website. This means you have to do a lot of extra logging in every time you want to check everything online.
These are just the problems I discovered in the first two weeks of use, and I completely gave up on it. I see that other people out there are having problems with this cell phone, but if we want it fixed we have to speak up! It’s a very expensive device for what it actually is, and I think we deserve to have a phone that actually does what it advertises itself as able to do - or at the very LEAST, make it work properly as a texting phone.
If you have this phone and are just as disappointed by its gaping flaws as I am, please chime in and let everyone know what your problems are. HTC needs to know that we want an update and we want one soon. The device itself is very sleek and well-built, and I loved it until I realized how crippled it was. Pound-for-pound, it’s the worst phone I’ve had in its current state and needs a firmware update immediately.
