I have spent the last twelve months using one as my primary means of communication and MP3 player and I'm not going to sugar coat my opinion in the early going; there have been days I've yearned for an old, lowly, woefully equipped Nokia 3210 to replace it.
This, is what the phone looks like now after twelve months wear and tear -
The cracks are the result of a nasty Jagermeister related halloween drinking accident although (and this is one of three small victories I will lay at HTC's feet) the screen does still work remarkably well, it's just a shame about the rest of the phone... This accidental damage, or more precisely HTC's policy on repairs was also my first major issue.
In order to tell me how much a replacement screen would cost they insisted I would have to return the phone to them at a (non-refundable) cost of twenty quid.
No dice said I, this is ridiculous. "It's policy sir" - "Do you fit the screens to your phones" - "Yes" - "So you must have an idea of what the part costs" - "No sir" - "So you fit a touchscreen to this phone and you have no idea how much it costs? How do you know you're not losing money on every one you sell?" - "That's not what I meant" - "No, you meant that you personally don't know and I understand that but you must be able to find out, I don't want to spend my own cash sending the phone to you to find out a repair is un-economical compared to the cost of a new or different handset. Plus, what am I supposed to do in the meantime, pay for a months worth of calls, texts and data I can't use because you have the phone?" - "I'm afraid I don't know. Did you take out insurance?" - "No" - "Well there's nothing more I can do".
Yes, I know, I'm a blue ribbon idiot and have had insurance on every phone I've had previous to this one, I took the chance and I'm aware the moral of the story here is to always tick the box for insurance on a contract phone. Lesson learned, but to my mind that is also extremely poor customer service on their part .
Speaking of extremely poor, let's tackle the operating system.. Now unlike the higher end HTC's this phone uses a Windows Mobile OS. Reviewers and HTC's own blurb claimed it was a pleasure to use as it used HTC sense as a front end to smooth out all the rough edges. What it really does is make the phone painfully slow to start up, prone to freezing at the drop of a hat and nine times out of ten when I take it out of my pocket it flat out refuses to come out of stand-by mode. It sometimes disconnects its own data connection for no reason in areas of full signal strength. It forgets I've got any music on the MicroSD card as often as I remember my headphones and if you've got a few apps on there it just gets slower and slower and slower to respond to any input. It will notify me I have a text message, but then not let me into my inbox without freezing for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, among countless other tricks and quirks. Oh and when you treat it nicely, I mean really nicely it will go as far as to invert every colour on the screen or justify the entire screen five millimetres to the right so that it wraps around on itself and makes any keypad inputs nigh on impossible until you revert it to stand-by mode and then of course it won't come back on until you've cajoled it into doing so. Top notch stuff. Oh, and that thing with the screen, that was happening BEFORE I dropped it and occurs just as frequently since
So, what are those other two small victories I spoke of in the beginning? It's got a vibrate function akin to that of a hammer drill at full chat, if you're into that sort of thingSilent mode or not I have never failed to notice the thing go off; unless of course it's playing possum in stand-by mode, in which case it fills it's gerbil-esque cheeks with whatever notifications I recieve until it deigns me with its presence again. I've had the phone next to me for hours on end and heard nothing until it rings and the decidedly irritated voice on the other end accuses me of having it turned off. At which point I recieve the half dozen text messages and voicemails it has secreted away somewhere, I think it re-directs them to Narnia while you're not looking personally..
The third and final victory is it's rubberised back, which is one of the few decent design features (note to HTC - yellow plastic on the inside of the case is not a design feature worthy of note and never will it be) and in fairness it needs it, because if it was smooth the strength of the vibration it's capable of emitting would help it find its way to the floor no matter what surface you thought you'd left it on...
I have owned countless handsets from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and every other brand you can think to name except Apple and I've spent a great deal of time messing about with other peoples iPhones and never once have I had half this much trouble trying to get a phone to just be a phone for more than five mintues at a time.
I've been saving my thoughts on the HD Mini until I'd owned it long enough to feel I've experienced every positive and negative about it, given it the benefit of the doubt if you will. But never have I encountered a phone quite so useless in all my given days. Buying an iPhone might make you a bit of a sheep and in this mans opinion one day they will become self aware, form Skynet and bring about the end of days, Jobs style. But at least they work!
Rant over. I can breathe again now!


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Silent mode or not I have never failed to notice the thing go off; unless of course it's playing possum in stand-by mode, in which case it fills it's gerbil-esque cheeks with whatever notifications I recieve until it deigns me with its presence again. I've had the phone next to me for hours on end and heard nothing until it rings and the decidedly irritated voice on the other end accuses me of having it turned off. At which point I recieve the half dozen text messages and voicemails it has secreted away somewhere, I think it re-directs them to Narnia while you're not looking personally.. 
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