If you put your money where your mouth is, then can you afford to be apathetic?

I don’t necessarily want to get political yet, because then the legions of the Dempublicentarian Party will come and cast spells at me with their best wizards and witches (I’m not saying anything bad about any candidates, but doesn’t Hillary’s famous cackle sound something like The Wicked Witch a la The Wizard of Oz? Maybe it’s just coincidence…At least, it seems that in the polls, she’s flying high, defying gravity)

But what I did want to talk about was another thing…buyer’s remorse. I guess in some ways, it’s a good thing to feel bad if we have made a poor purchase. However, in other ways, it’s probably a good thing to try to defend our purchases no matter what. So many people do it every day with the PS3 (and my Xbox360 fan friends say that owners of the Wii also do this in a sacred shrine, but who’s video taping that?) However, petty video game squabbles…they are petty.

What happens, though, when you buy something with prior conducted research, a clear plan and strategy, and all of those other good things? If you find fault with the product, should you speak out against it or the manufacturer or should you stay silent?

Enter numerous disgruntled HTC product owners who think that they have a right to create a big stink about the fact that HTC has “forgotten” to include the drivers for video card graphical acceleration in a number of their phones. The major issue is this: if you spend upwards of $700 to buy a phone unlocked (thankfully, our American cell phone providers, which in every other way are screwing us over [or perhaps you want to read this long one that goes into a lot more detail?] DO subsidize the costs of phones) and it is advertised as one of the most cutting-edge, capable phones around, then you should expect certain capabilities of it.

For example, if you have a camera with the phone, shouldn’t it be able to take pictures without having to wait 7 or 8 seconds to process? I dunno about you, but Kodak moments usually don’t pose and hold for hours and hours like they used to. Or, if you wanted to play some videos on youtube, like that slick iPhone dealie that Apple’s got (and which you might say influenced and pressured your decision to buy a device like the HTC Touch or HTC Kaiser–to compete with the iPhone), would you stand for unnecessarily slow performance if you didn’t tweak the videos heavily?

According to HTC, you shouldn’t care about pictures, and you should be able to take slowdowns. After all, in their words, not mine (with emphasis added):

HTC is committed to delivering a portfolio of devices that offer a wide variety of communication, connectivity and entertainment functionality. HTC does not offer dedicated or optimized multimedia devices and can confirm that its Qualcomm MSM7xxx-based devices do not use ATI’s Imageon video acceleration hardware.

HTC believes the overall value of its devices based on their combination of functionality and connectivity exceeds their ability to play or render high-resolution video. These devices do still provide a rich multimedia experience comparable to that of most smart phones and enable a variety of audio and video file formats.

HTC values its customers and the overall online community of mobile device enthusiasts and fans. HTC plans to include video acceleration hardware in future video-centric devices that will enable high-resolution video support.

So, essentially, according to this, it’s acceptable that these devices have limitations, because these aren’t “video-centric” devices. They are for business users, right?

Well..then…what might a business user want to do? Maybe he’d want to do GPS? Nope, graphical acceleration gets in the way there, so you can see that the updated model lags to a much older device. Or, what about when the device lags in doing the most basic tasks, like moving from portrait to landscape mode and back? I don’t know about you, but iPhones can do that quite well…

As HTCClassaction.org and other HTC devices users at xda-developers.org or elsewhere have noted, the problem is that the lack of these drivers affects the performance fundamentally. So, to me, I don’t know what to think when I read something like this in the AT&T forums for HTC-based devices:

I understand that everyone wants good drivers, and I am right there with them, but to completly knock the device because of it just boggles my mind. So what that a feature is not up to par with the rest of the phone? Because of one feature that is inferior to the others makes it a bad phone? The way I see it, is if you need to watch videos, go watch them on a HDTV… and if you are on the move, take a laptop or PSP. If all you bought the phone for was for just for watching videos or taking pictures, then you need to stick with a laptop or an actual digital camera. We need to remember that this is a phone with added features… not a video player or camera with an added feature of a phone.

The fact that this phone does wi-fi, internet, e-mail and several others makes it completly [sic] awesome but it seems to me that the attitude is ‘I have to have it ALL or would rather have nothing’.

The thing is that these problems are all encompassing, first of all. They extend into core functionalities of the product. If, by some chance, a user of an AT&T Tilt or MDA Vario III or Sprint Touch or ANY HTC device affected NEVER notices a decrease in functionality from using their device (because they are “only” using the device for text messaging and perhaps calling), I’d suggest a few things.

1) They are in a smaller minority than women in MIT Engineering classes (just kidding, I believe in the ability for people to defy gravity.)

2) They are being apathetic in an issue they should not be apathetic in.

This is the point, people. These guys put their money where their mouths were and bought this product…it doesn’t make sense to give up and lie like dogs!

OK, OK, so in a past life, I often ripped on a few iPhone owners at the lacks in their seeming OMG WTF BBQ awesome 1337 phone, but this is the thing: now it’s happening all over again with HTC devices. When I would say, “Ha ha, your phone doesn’t have MMS,” others would say, “Well…I don’t use it and don’t need it. Or, when I would say, “Ha ha, your phone lacks 3g and custom apps,” they would say, I don’t need those.

Apple got on the ball. They will come out soon with a 3g-enabled iPhone (they probably should have done 3g with the first one, BUT I’ll give them that)…and the SDK kit for 3rd party apps comes out very soon.

What about HTC? If they won’t act on their own, maybe we do need some publicity to push them in the right direction…that’s putting your money where your mouth is.