I have agonized over this for a while, particularly after being on call and dropping 3 consecutive calls that left me awake and irritated. Luckily, they weren’t critical, but the iPhone, which I love, works very poorly in my house with AT&T. There is a nearby cell tower, and I should get 5 bars of coverage but we are behind a hill and as you enter its shadow, the bars go to zero, and in my house, 2-3 bars is a good day. I know never to take calls from the kitchen but rather run outdoors if the call is critical.
Therefore, I am quitting AT&T and moving to Verizon. I used to be a 10 year Sprint veteran, but their coverage is equally poor. AT&T in its greed sets their phones for almost no roaming and so won’t switch towers even though there are GSM towers within site (T-mobile I guess). So to Verizon I go with their miserable top down approach to smart phones.
They apparently were offered the iPhone but did not want to relinquish controll over the apps.
I know I had sworn off WinMo, but fact is that HTC has hacked up WinMo 6.1 to work almost like the iPhone with its “flo”-ing user interface. What I like is the fact that you can tether the phone or even better, download a software that will let you make the phone a WiFi hotspot which is nice for my laptop. The irony will be that my iPhone will still be in my pocket for use to call out via Skype over Wifi -this works very well.
I’ll review the HTC Touch Pro2 as soon as I get my hands on it. It’s screen is larger and has higher pixel density than iPhone and it has a real keyboard. It has Bluetooth 2.1 which should let me pair all kinds of gadgets to it including a stereo headset and my earpieces (Plantronic Pro 950 which I consider incredible for cancelling outside wind noise).
Verizon will have to change a lot of things to get iPhone and may not have it in its DNA to undergo this change. AT&T deserves a bag of poop delivered on its doorstep on fire for its negligence of establishing bulletproof coverage. These phones are mission critical and need to be on and reliable.
AT&T had its chance -I asked the customer service rep for microcell -to set up a local in-house micro cell tower. But this would only be an admission of defeat for AT&T and it has not release what would be an enabling technology.
So I ring AT&T’s doorbell, light that paper bag full of steaming poo, and run down the street!
Golfism -life is a metaphor for golf 
The new touchpro is a cool phone…but as a former WinMo and HTC user I can honestly say, it’s not that comparable to the iPhone. Still…it’s a great phone. But I predict when Apple finally breaks free of the AT&T only option Verizon will be the first to get the iPhone so you can switch back.
Agree. With five days of use, I can say that Verizon’s HTC app store is a joke -takes too many steps to get to poorly presented and too few apps. The WinMo’s charm showed through in the form of two soft resets to cure freeze ups. The HTC touch-flo interface mostly works but is clearly no where near the coherence of iPhone’s interface. The screen is gorgeous on the TouchPro2. The ability to shoot video is great but video won’t go through MMS. With the lockdown on the apps and high data needs -Verizon is protecting itself from AT&T biggest problem -the data rushes created by iPhone. Keyboard is nice, but I like portrait keyboards better -less thumb travel. I found the keyboard very difficult to hold and type on the Droid -they recreate the problem that Nokia has on its N810 and N900 series devices with narrow space between display and top row of keys. Why didn’t I go Droid -it’s half baked and Verizon basically crippled it like they will try to with iPhone.
Oh Well. I do have to say that I haven’t dropped a call yet from every nook and cranny of my house. I haven’t dropped a call period in the five days which would have been a rarity on AT&T.
Neat thing I found -WalkingHotSpot which turns the WinMo phone into a mobile Wifi device!
Typical of Windows Mobile -it was difficult to get the program onto the phone, but once on it, it works as advertized. It drains the battery quickly, but with a car adaptor, Wifi everywhere!