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Misunderstandings

It has come to our attention that pretty much everybody reading or writing about this, and HTC themselves as well apparently, are misunderstanding at least part of the issues, causing them to state things that are simply not correct or not very relevant. To clarify some of these things, we have set up this page. We have listed the most common misconceptions and some additional information here.

This is not just about video playback!

While this is certainly a part of the complaint, it is by far not the most important part. You need to realise that in the world of technology, everything you see on your display is commonly referred to as video and governed by video drivers. That in itself has absolutely nothing to do with video as in films. The point is, everything that ends up on your screen is affected. Unless something literally says "video playback" (especially note the playback part), what is meant is most likely just displaying something (anything) on-screen.

The problem is the complete device is very sluggish, even compared to much older devices. This includes the drawing of normal applications, like the Today screen and TomTom, taking pictures (almost undoable), responding to user input, answering a call, opening the start menu, as well as playing games and video playback. This is certainly not up to par with the device's specifications.

You could compare the display performance to running your Windows computer in "safe mode" with the default "VGA driver".

We feel that many of these issues could be solved by using the correct video (multiple for various video aspects), touchscreen and camera drivers - and those are what we want.

Right now, most articles published about this have seriously upplayed the video playback problems, while downplaying or completely ignoring the other display, camera and touchscreen issues, while the latter are far more important for normal device use than the former.

HTC never promised X or Y, these are not multimedia devices, etc

The devices' specifications state that they use the MSM7200 and MSM7500 chipsets. The MSM7200 and MSM7500's specifications state they have (impressive) hardware accelerated video capabilities on-board. As HTC has never stated these hardware accelerated video capabilities would not be available, people (correctly) assume they should be. And indeed, we have received many reports from people who have bought these devices because of these much hyped chipsets. Even HTC's own press releases (see the Misadvertising page) try to impress by stating these capabilities.

Some may look at this and say that it states it supports an 8 MP camera as well, and this isn't included either. The difference here is that an 8 MP camera is not an integral part of the chipset, while the video hardware most definitely is. Furthermore, the devices' specifications say they come with an X MP camera (so obviously not with an 8 MP camera), but they don't say the devices come without these video capabilities.

Furthermore, these devices are advertised as providing a "rich multimedia experience" as well as being "more powerful than anything you've seen before", and they cost up to $1000 US. We feel that if a device is advertised in such a way and is sold for such a price, the very least that may be expected is that it performs as well as the previous generations of devices, which they do not in various areas.

These devices do not have the ATI Imageon hardware on-board

First, this is not exactly what HTC stated. They stated that these devices do not use the ATI Imageon hardware (surprise). If the chip is in there or not cannot be confirmed or denied at this time (Qualcomm has not given an official answer to this question, and no, we're obviously not going to trust HTC's word on this), but we have a lot of reason to believe it is there.

Furthermore, if they are using a version of these chipsets that do not have this hardware, why isn't this stated anywhere in the specifications, and why do they try to make people believe this hardware is there in their press releases? That would be deceiving, after all.

Last but not least, even if the video playback and 3D acceleration parts of the chipset are somehow missing, even the most modest of video chips provide some acceleration for normal drawing operations, like displaying normal programs on-screen. But not even that seems to be used by these devices.

Update January 24, 2008: They do not mention if there is any hardware based on the ATI Imageon either, which would ofcourse be the case. No mention is made at all about the QTV (accelerated video playback) or Q3Dimension (3D acceleration) technologies.

Update January 29, 2008: As CoreCodec has now shown (see our home page) there certainly are 'faster than default' ways to put things on screen...

HTCClassAction.org has not filed a lawsuit (yet)

No lawsuit has been filed thusfar, but we do have several people in several countries working on this in some form or other.