Ok, so you’re all gonna say, “should have got an iPhone“. Maybe so, but I couldn’t be arsed changing provider and, for the most part, my HTC Touch HD is a very capable phone.

It does everything I need. I’m used to Windows Mobile so the messaging, emailing is good, web browsing is really nice and the camera is great. OK, so I can’t download a spirit level app, but hey, you can’t have everything.

I have one fairly major gripe about it though. It relates to the way the TouchFLOTM 3D has been integrated with Windows Mobile.

My desk at work suffers from some pretty poor signal. It’s not a huge issue but it drops out on occasion. The HTC Touch HD TouchFLO interface has a rather nice SMS overlay over the standard Windows Mobile messaging. You can flick through the messages on the touch screen with a pleasing animation.

So, a message arrives and appears in the TouchFLO interface. You click reply, compose send. You return to the TouchFLO interface. Job done. Nay not so. The problem is, if your signal has dropped out and the message doesn’t get sent you are in trouble.

Why? Well, Windows Mobile knows it hasn’t sent the message. It even pops up a very informative “Text message cannot be sent” modal dialogue. Unfortunately, this is under the TouchFLO interface so you don’t see it. It gets worse. Because the error is a modal dialogue, it is waiting for you to click OK and therefore you don’t get notified of the arrival of any more messages until you click through the TouchFLO interface and clear the dialogue.

This is some pretty dumbass design.

So, I’ve had a few instances of “did you get my text?“. “No, oh hang on…

I’m aware of it now so it doesn’t catch me out as often but in the heat of battle I still click send and forget to check.

If you have an HTC Touch HD, beware…