Windows Phone Thoughts: Leader of The Empire: The HTC TyTN II Reviewed

Benchmarks & Stability
In a rare move for me, I actually ran the benchmarks on the device within 24 hours of receiving it. I did this partly because I knew I'd procrastinate, and partly because I was really eager to see how this thing would stack up. For the comparison, I chose the Cingular 8125 & 8525 (the first two generations of this type of device, known by their code-names as the Wizard and the Hermes, respectively; AT&T's model number for the TyTN II will be the 8925), the PPC 6700 from Sprint (wwas also a slider style, known as the HTC Apache) and the i-Mate JasJAR (to get a comparison of a first-generation WM 5 device and a first-generation WM 6 device). Let's start with the CPU index.


Figure 6: The CPU Index.

As you can see, the JasJAR still beats the sliders in the CPU raw-power category. This is probably to be expected as its processor is more optimized for speed than other concerns (battery life). What many slider-style users will find interesting here is that the faster processor in the TyTN II far out performs first-generation sliders (e.g. the Wizard) and does fairly well against the second-generation (8525). I would have liked to see it pull away more so from the 8525, however an improvement is still an improvement.


Figure 7: The Filesystem Index.

Well, all that processing power is nice, but if you can't pull the files off the ROM fast enough, you're still getting pokey device performance. The file system index shows that the TyTN II out performs the older competition nicely, with nearly 30 point gains over the nearest competitors. The Wizard, not suprisingly, is far behind. As I know many Wizard owners elected to skip the Hermes series (8525) and wait for the third-generatio. I can assure them that they will not be unhappy with the changes HTC has made.


Figure 8: The Graphics Index.

Graphics can really make or break a user experience. When I reviewed the iPAQ 6915 last year, the graphics index alone (6457.6) made the device seem to fly past performance of my other units (in actuality, it was an illusion, the device, under complex calculations, was still quite slow). The TyTN II may not match the iPAQ, but it does trump the competition here. It's interesting to note that the Wizard had slightly faster graphics than the Hermes, with the Kaiser now jumping back up in graphics performance.


Figure 9: The Benchmark index.

Finally, in what really isn't a surprise given the graphs above, Spb Benchmark gives the TyTN II the victory. As far as performance goes, you can't argue that HTC has really decided to beef up the TyTN II!

But good performance doesn't do much if the device is unstable. This was the plight of many a previous device - my iPAQ 6315 was so flakey, I had to schedule a soft-reset each morning to keep it operational - granted that device had a whole list of problems beyond the scope of this review. To this day, CSRs at T-Mobile choke when they see that I had my 6315 exchanged 6 times in 10 months.... I've read early reviews of the TyTN II that seem to indicate that the individuals reviewing the unit have suffered no stability issues, which is something I wish I could say. Now to be fair, the 2 - 3 times that the TyTN has locked up on me in the past 24 hours have probably been during operations that I wouldn't expect it to remain peppy through. In one circumstance, I was taking a photo while on a telephone call using a Bluetooth headset. The device was fine through that - it was when I hung up the phone call and wanted to send the photo that the device hung. The device also required a jab to the reset hole (which is probably the worst reset hole I've ever seen on a device - it offers no tactile feedback when you press the reset button - I felt like I was just jamming my stylus into a tight opening and not hitting anything every time I've reset it) when I had Pharos Ostia running in the background using the integrated GPS, had the camera application running in the background, and tried to rapidly open and close several applets at once. Probably, again, not usual use! Overall, when I'm not trying to do 5,000 things simultaneously with this thing, it's been responsive and peppy. A few times I've hit the "start" key and have not had the menu open, however tapping on the start button seems to do the trick. I've since seen others report this occurring after the device has made a phone call AND has a password enabled. I figure this is probably a bug that will be corrected in the first ROM revision, otherwise it may become quite annoying.

My final verdict, benchmark & stability-wise? Well, it's certainly faster than any of my other devices, and its stability is on par with the Treo 750v & T-Mobile Dash I've used for the past few months, if not more stable. I don't see any deal breakers with stability, and I see a for-sure deal maker with the benchmark performance!