WTF? "Where's the flash"? April 1, 2011

Reviewer:  jeff neves 

I have had my phone now since the 20th of March and I must say it has been worth the wait! My Mogul broke last year and there was only the Pro 2 to replace it, but with only one year to go I decided to wait for the Arrive to arrive. My only concern at this point is that there is no compatible Adobe Flash software for the browser. Which kind of forced me into a Zune subscription to enjoy music on my phone. I wished to be able to use my GrooveShark subscription online with this phone, but without flash; it'sa not happening! Flash support is supposed to be here in July so I am keeping my finger crossed for that. Other than that I simply love my new phone.....

I recommend this phone. March 26, 2011

Reviewer:  V "cloroxbb"  (Michigan) -

So, I actually bought this phone thru Target Mobile because I didnt think to check if Amazon had it. For some odd reason the phone released on the 20th but online only.

I really like this phone: Positives

Its fast, I havent really noticed any lag whatsoever yet

The touchscreen is very responsive. If you decide to forego using the slide out keypad sometimes, the on screen keyboard may be small, but it barely ever hits the wrong letter when you use the touchscreen.

The resolution is good. A "retina" display this is not, but looks good anyway.

The battery life is awesome. The battery on this bad boy seems to last a long time! Much longer than the Evo, and especially longer than the Blackberry Style, and the a little longer than the Hero. The Evo seems to last under a day, even if you barely use it. The Blackberry style dies quick no matter what, and the Hero lasts about a day as well. The Arrive's battery has lasted me over 2 days with medium use. But of course batteries do degrade.

Negatives:

Cant use MP3s as ringtones (at least I havent found out how, if you can)

Doesnt have a ton of games yet, if thats what you are into. But the games they do have are decent. I have only bought Full House Poker so far (but pisses me off that its single player only, and that I had to buy it even tho I already own the XBLA version on 360). I have downloaded a bunch of free games tho.

Solid Device, OS, and Experience. June 9, 2011

Reviewer:  William L 

This device is absolutely top notch. I was a palm pre owner for about 2 years and didn't want to switch to at&t to get the veer and there's no telling when the Pre 3 comes out. While I do miss the WebOS, Windows Phone 7 is truly amazing and the deep integration of apps is brilliant. There are soo many features on this phone that truly make it easy to get in and out like they advertise, and the new Mango update is going to be spectacular in the fall. I highly recommend this phone, and the keyboard is great, this whole review was done in about 2 minutes on the slide out keyboard :D.

Gimmicky and Hyped Up January 5, 2012

Reviewer:  WillP 

I regret puchasing this phone. Even after the Mango update to 7.5, I am still disappointed with my overall experience. The bing turn by turn directions continuously fails on a massive level. It never orients the map correctly, ususally keeping it upside down. With every turn, the map reorients itself so it's still upside down, and sure I could flip the phone over but then the written instructions are upside down. It almost always fails to audibly give you instructions. (When you are at an interection and need to turn the phone remains quiet, not warning you of the turn, even with volume up all the way.) Half the time, the screen lock kicks in during navigation and I have to unlock the phone which is a real pain. Also Bing Maps can't even get the name of the city I live in right. I live in Lakewood which is it's own city. Not part of Denver. It always lists addresses as being in Denver which is wrong and can create confusion of the address exists both in Denver and Lakewood which many do. Google Maps gets it right.
Trying to download anything is a nightmare, whether over Sprints network or a wi-fi, it almost always fails and brings up an error code. I have had to just give up on several games and apps because they refuse to download without an error. All that it ends up accomplishing is draining its battery in its feeble download attempts. I immediately cancelled my Zune membership as well because of DRM nightmare. I don't want to have to call Microsoft every time I want to downlaod a song to my phone or PC!
Aside from arriving a few days late, it took another week to get the thing activated. Sprint didn't know what they were doing and just kept passing me around from one tech support person to another. Also on a sidenote I am disappointed that there isn't any integrated visual voicemail.
It is supposed to be equipped with Internet Explorer 9 which so far has turned out to be painfully slow. Again the lock screen often comes on before the webpage even starts to change from a white background. The phone needs a better way of keeping track of call history. My Samsung Instinct from years ago was much better at this than the windows phone. Why they can't thread the calls like they do with text messages, I don't know. It's pretty easy and simple and I've seen it on many phones.
The supposed high res camera is okay if you are taking slow motion film but if you are trying to record something happening with any movement, forget about it. It comes out pixelated and choppy and reminds me of old cell cameras from a couple years ago.
I am exceedingly disappointed with the Microsoft Office App that comes with it. I find it to be very unproductive and frustrating. It wouldn't open most of the documents I was trying to open, whether from attachments or skydrive. And skydrive integration is nice but it still needs LOTS of improvement.
Also, until Sprints network improves, this phone will be very annoyong. When trying to stream music over Zune, it kept pausing after every 10 seconds to buffer which took 20 seconds. There was more silence than music and it is really annoying to hear the music start and stop. Plus there is no memory card slot to help solve this problem. And sure the phone has 16GB of memory but let's get real. In this day and age that is pretty small. It doesn't amount to much at all when you look at the built-in memory of say Apple's products which is considerably more(and I don't even like apple). Last.fm just wouldn't work unless I had a wi-fi connection available. And also many podcasts wouldn't download also over a cellular network saying there was too much data. Why am I paying an additional $10 a month for supposed unlimited data when they just turn around and tell you to use wi-fi to complete your downloads, which obviously is a separate cost. Netflix operated very similarly to Zune. Over wi-fi, great. But if I leave my house, not so great. Again, constant buffering. Very annoying.
The battery isn't great at all and drains very quickly. I can never leave the phone off the charger for more than 6-8 hours otherwise it powers itself off. It always gets very hot when using apps on the go or charging it. The screen quality is decent but it is a little small. The audio quality on the phone is a little sub-par but better than average. The physical build of the phone is descent. I have dropped the phone a coupld times now on the cement and ground and still no scratches at all or breakage of any kind. That's pretty good. The metallic battery cover pops off making a scary sound but the phone itself has survived unharmed. Maybe there is potential for this phone and for some people it may be just what they need. For me, if I had to do it all over again, I would not buy this phone. I would have kept my $15/month Consumer Cellular plan and just bought a laptop instead. This phone seems more for entertainment than it does for serious work. I could go on with other things I don't like but I do not feel like nitpicking any more than I have.

Help May 10, 2011

Reviewer:  onekaidog 

I have had my arrive for 2 days and cant figure out why its not sending my pictures to my husbands evo.He can send them to me but I cant send pictures to any of my family members phones. Any suggestions?

Dissapointment November 6, 2011

Reviewer:  Alexander  (Carlsbad Ca) -

Horrible Phone! I AM RETURNING it. I "love" Microsoft, because only love would explain me comming back for more. I am VB hobby programmer (not tech skilled) I love Silverlight. I was very excited about the new windows phone. When my old phone died I got this phone instead of a newer phone on the market because it was a windows phone. Within the first hour, I tried to set up my Pandora account and this particular model is not compatible. guess what, IT WILL NEVER WORK WITH PANDORA. I researched this phone on Bing(I wonder) but since I did not type in "HTC ARRIVE PANDORA", Microsoft in what I can only assume is "privacy\security concerns"(but is actually attempt to make it's applications popular) Microsoft denies multitasking to 3rd party programs (evidently it's only ok for Microsoft to spy on you). They offer a crappy sprint radio "clone" that does not have the selection/capabilities/capacity/abilities and is just generally not as good as Pandora. This is not the only issue. I got home plugged it in to see if I could find a solution and Zune loads up. I clicked through it and went to my computer to see what was on the phone. No E: appears IT DOSE NOT HAVE PLUG AND PLAY FLASH DRIVE. You can transfer pictures, videos, and music to it from Zune after the 100mb installation. If you go to a computer where you don't have admin rights to install it such as any school, office, Kinko's, have fun with your documents stuck on your this worthless phone. I have read the manual and I have not figured out how out to remove apps or manage the apps. Upgrading the phone is really time consuming and can only be done through Zune on your computer. For those of you that don't have a computer, or an older computer,(which is not me defiantly not my 2 year old computer with 4 possessors). The WIFI hook up is only compatible with WEP encryption, which is opened or shared network. Depending on your company's/home security, have fun not using that. The worse design feature is when the phone goes dark key guard mode. You press the top button and the front picture comes up, you slide this picture up, to get at the thing you were just working on. This is not bad in it's self, but if you hold the top button, the same front picture comes up and if you slide it up the phone turns off. The off button is the same as the exit out of the screen saver. The office one note, which is a great program on the computer and I recommend every one check it out, is horrible on the phone. All the office documents use skydive cloud syncing through your live id and you must make your one notes the share type, not the flash drive moveable ones. It seems impossible to close any running application or see what is running on the phone. Most people will not have a problem with this phone until some time later when they need to use one of these features. Video is sucky too. Not that anyone ever uses the video. Apps upon pressing the back button enter a suspended state if enough apps are opened the old apps are killed without warning not saving any of the information. Ah, there is a article on turning the phone in to a flash drive for Your pc only. It involves editing the registry and will not work on other pc's that you haven't done this with(not for novice users). Oh yeah, no Flash. The whole phone seems like they ran a survey on what 25 average consumers needed from a phone and removed all but those features. Most people don't know that their car needs a radiator but when it over heats they say "why doesn't it run? I want it to just work. Make it go". I want a Windows Phone I just want a better one. I hope Microsoft reads this I don't know where to post it to them they need more "feedback" then collecting that I listen to Basshunter. The phone list for $500 plus. I got mine for $199 +40tax +39 activation +36 restocking when I return it + 39 activation for the phone I replace it with so yeah $353 plus lot's of wasted time.

WP7 - Buyer Beware! May 16, 2011

Reviewer:  Love the Beach "kaa3655"  (Alpharetta, GA) -

Had high expectations, but what a let down. Waited for Sprint to roll out their WP7 phone so I could get boring but bulletproof sync w/Outlook 2010/OneNote/Business Contact Manager. You know, the "smart" part of smartphone? Should have done more homework because this phone does NONE OF THE ABOVE. You have to jump through hoops to float all your data out to the "cloud" just to get it back in the same room with you and onto the phone. After all that you cannot sync your Outlook Tasks because guess what - tasks weren't included in WP7. Seriously? Maybe if the developers at Microsoft were actually managing their tasks they wouldn't have forgotten that one. The fact that Windows Phone software can't talk directly to Windows PC software (but can get to Facebook) is a total joke. If a simple thing like synching a phone is going to be this difficult, might as well follow the herd and go Android...

Too little, to late... March 18, 2011

Reviewer:  S. Colon "WOLFBANE"  (BROOKLYN, NEW YORK United States) -

I tried this phone, and took it back before the 14 days were up. I'm sorry, but I've been spoiled by Android. What's wrong with it? WinPhone7 is the problem. You cannot multi-task with these phones for starters. There is no file system, thus no file manager! Also, just like it used to be in Windows, you cannot replace any of the applications and set another as default. For example, you cannot use Chrome or Firefox as the default browser. It is also completely closed source, so forget about getting a good majority of applications available on Android because of the heavy restrictions. Customising is non-existent, and will remain that way: 3rd party shells are not allowed.
If you are looking for a business oriented phone, it is very limited in ActiveSync support, and WindowsPhone7 does not support on device encryption. Barely no Exchange support. No Outlook support, yet. Pops open Zune marketplace every time you plug it in, and you can't use it as a drive when connected to a PC. Cannot restrict services based on application, so every service is available or it isn't, wtf! It can only be synced via Zune, so forget WMP or anything else for that matter. There is also no way to find the MAC address, so forget about filtered networks!
Shall I continue? As far as I'm concerned, this is another failure like the Zune, and Vista! Wow.