Thursday, March 10, 2011

HTC Thunderbolt Hype: Keeping My Desire HD

With all this delay to the release of the HTC Thunderbolt one wouldn’t be surprised if some potential customers changed their mind about waiting for the Android 2.2 Froyo smartphone, and yes, some people have simply had enough of the run around and moved onto another device.

Mostly I have found by looking at the various comments on our HTC Thunderbolt posts that people are opting to pick up the Motorola Droid Bionic, and to be honest with all the beating about the bush Verizon has done with the HTC Thunderbolt one can’t blame customers for looking at other devices.

The thing is, the HTC Thunderbolt isn’t an all dancing, all singing smartphone that’s better than any other out there, yes it will be able to run on a 4G network but then so can others, so lets compare a few specs between the Thunderbolt and say another HTC handset, the HTC Desire HD.

Thunderbolt specs put forward according to Phone Arena, a 4.3-inch capacitive touch screen, 8 megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash and 720p video, front facing 1.3 megapixel camera, Android 2.2 Froyo OS, built-in Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, GPS, a-GPS, Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR, WiFi 802.11b/g/n, 8192MB memory, 32GB microSD expansion, DLNA, and 3.5mm jack.

The HTC Desire HD specs according to GSMarena are, 4.3-inch capacitive touch screen, 8 megapixel auto-focus camera with dual LED flash and 720p video, Android 2.2 Froyo OS, 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, Facebook and Twitter apps, GPS, a-GPS, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, WiFi 802.11b/g/n, 1.5GB memory, 32GB microSD expansion, DNLA, and a 3.5mm jack.

So not a great deal of difference between the two, of course the Thunderbolt will be able to play nice on Verizon’s 4G LTE network but as that’s not available yet, it shouldn’t really count like for like, besides by the time the Big Red does have 4G LTE fully rolled out newer smartphones will be available.

So the thing is this, if you own an HTC Desire HD will you bother exchanging for the HTC Thunderbolt once it finally arrives, or will you simply keep hold of you HTC Desire HD?

Now as for that HTC Thunderbolt and its never-ending release delay, one of our readers called NoMoreThunderBolt pointed out in a comment on one of our Thunderbolt articles that Best Buy has the date for pricing for the HTC Thunderbolt set to become affective between 02/20/2011 and 03/26/2011.

Here’s how you can verify that info, hit the Best Buy site, then enter the location 75070, click on weekly ad at the top, click on the Buyer’s Guide, once done you click on any image of the Thunderbolt and you be presented with a pop-up showing the price and at the top it states “Prices effective Sunday, Feb. 20 – Saturday, Mar. 26 (Except as noted),” try it, it works.

So could this then mean that the release of the HTC Thunderbolt could be as late as the 26th of March? Your guess is as good as mine.