And I’m with you on waiting for an official release rather than trying to get an unofficial ROM onto the device.

Anyway, first half day with the HD7S down. So far so good. Definitely a shock moving from the iPhone!

I’m excited to see what Mango will bring to the table. Now that we have a release window it’s easier to sit back and say I can live with this for a bit while I wait for the push to happen instead of risking a bricked phone doing a custom ROM.

I’ll post some thoughts on this in a couple days when I’ve really had a chance to use the device. I don’t have a SIM for my iPhone anymore so there’s no going back now!

@Keith – yeah, I knocked the brightness down to medium after one day with it and battery life feels a fair bit better (though still far from great) since then.

It has been released in Taiwan for HTC phones, but I believe by HTC for unlocked phones.

My concern is that Mango is going to be such a huge change and is so close to release that your objective effort would be out of date so soon.

Rodney’s advice is good … Microsoft has been providing free Mango’d phones to reviewers, perhaps you could snag one.

I was referring to this discussion, but thanks, and yall are definitely cool with me.

Did you know that MS is willing to donate money to your favorite charity by reviewing WP7.5 Mango? I’m telling you, get with Brandon Watson over at MS and he will hook you up.

MS should have been advertising weeks ago, and ramped it up when the others started to let their new products out. They have been really letting us down when it comes to marketing WP7x. Your boys at Apple do a great job of promoting products. Wish MS would take some notes.

Also, are you guys used to having this many WP7x fans in here? It’s amazing how civil this room is and is a real pleasure to promote both platforms and just work together. Amazingly I feel really comfortable here and feel that yall are actually helping to promote WP7 instead of knock it down. There should be a site dedicated to the platforms who focus on quality not sheer numbers.

@Stef – on the VPN question, I’m not sure. I don’t see anything in Settings to indicate that capability, but it may be somewhere I’m not looking.

@Rodney E. Jones – Open minded is always good. Also, I was a big-time Windows Mobile user and fan way back in the day. I am seeing the battery life is very, very poor so far. That may be a cause for returning this if it does not improve.

@Brandon – oh, I hope that’s not their thinking. I reckon that would be a bad approach as well.

Also you should be testing with a WP7.5 device and not a WP7.0 device. There are some major upgrades in terms of functionality baked into the Mango update, which put the platform into the same league as Android an Apple.

Contact BRANDON WATSON at Microsoft and he will see that you receive a beta WP7.5 Mango device. But make sure it’s a Samsung Focus!

In terms of screen and performance, the Samsung Focus is a nicer device. But in terms of additional OEM features and audio, the HTC is better.

The official Mango update should be out within the next few days anyway, so it may be worth using the current WP7 phone and then comparing it to the Mango update. Although the two versions look the same at first glance, they are miles apart in terms of features and functionality.

Officially, Mango is Windows Phone 7.5 and internally it was known as 7.1 but the build number will tell you exactly which version you are running.

I have the HTC HD7 and it’s pretty decent. I like it slightly better than the iPhone 3GS, and a lot better than the LG Optimus I had. To each their own.

Anyway, I’m still waiting for my HD7S to come in the mail which should be later this week. Much like you this idea isn’t that I don’t want any iPhone anymore, I’m just looking forward to trying out something new. I definitely wouldn’t be doing this if we were talking about trying a WinMo 6.5+ device, but WP7 looks slick and Android and I just don’t seem to be a good fit from my use with Honeycomb.

@PietSt – yeah, I know.

@WP7 – under Settings > About it just lists it as Windows Phone 7, assume that’s not Mango. I’ll look for XDA / unofficial builds soon. I have a Windows Live account I’ve had for years and never did much with – will look into what it gives me on Windows Phone.

Thanks guys.

To make the most of WP7, you should setup a Windows Live account because that gives you “cloud” access which enables seamless syncing of all your data / contacts. It also gives you a lot of other features, but you’ll figure those out for yourself. 🙂