The Easecase is sold on eBay and is made to order. You can choose the design, leather, inner lining, strap, and personalized it with your own initials. Here’s some picture to show you the pouch I have now.

Easecase Pouch

I chose to have a hole in the middle of the pouch so that I can easily push my Blackstone out of the pouch, and my initial on it .

Blackstone Fits nicely in the case

The Blackstone fits perfectly in the case and it holds the Blackstone in place so it will not slide out even with gravity pulling it downwards. The workmanship is very good.

Red inner lining

I chose red to give it a posh look. Although I’m very happy with the pouch, I still think the price is a bit steep. Maybe $10-$20 cheaper will make it a very good buy.

HTC Touch HD aka Blackstone

It has been almost a month now since I first own this phone. I promised another review and here it is.

So far I had flashed 4 different ROMs from different developers. They’re all competitively good but I decided to stick with Dutty’s Xtreme ROM. There is great potential in the phone, but sadly there’re limited support to it, therefore community developers are really appreciated on the xda-developers.com.

Battery Life
The phone now drains significantly more battery than its stock rom. It’s not a good thing, but it’s nobody to blame, but the phone. I don’t blame the phone though, I blame technology. Well you got to work out the math to understand why,
Stock ROM = Stock performance
Cooked ROM = Better performance
Better performance = Greater clock cycles = Greater heat generated = Greater power consumption (BAD)

So to conclude all the mathematical equation to you, faster = bad. Hahaha. Just kidding. What I trying to say, everything comes with a price. With better perfomance on the Blackstone, you need to sacrifice the battery life of you phone.

I’m quite happy with it because it definitely last me for the day with heavy usage. Last me for 2 and half days with adequate usage and could last longer if I disconnect myself from the world, literally.

Call quality
Calls are clear and crispy. I can hear very clearly throughout a phone call and even video call is amazingly clear. For once I was listening to music and speak through my headphones without a mic! See how amazing the phone is. It’s not the wonders of my Sennheiser, it’s just how speakers works, it can be use as microphones too.

Music Player
Music quality is superb! I can’t say more about it. It can be really loud on my Sennheiser and the quality is above what I expected from a mobile phone. It also automatically stop the music when there’s an incoming call.

Sluggishness
I guess this is unavoidable on Ms Windows based system. No matter it’s on a mobile device or a desktop platform, it’s still to blame on the OS architecture.

Finger friendly
Very indeed! You can’t beat the iPhone on this, but it’s nearly there! Job well done for introducing Touchflo3D on the device.

Internet
Wifi, Data connection through HSPDA, 3G are all smooth and responsive. I surf the Internet like I normally do at home without any shortcoming! Actually there’s a tiny little flaw, that the phone doesn’t have a cursor so I can’t browse over Facebook images to see who was tagged. This is actually to blame the website and Opera mobile browser!

SMS & e-Mails
We must admit that we can’t live without SMS and e-Mails nowadays. I can check both type of messages without much effort. With the schedule settings, Blackstone will download my mails using IMAP. I can delete it on my phone and it propagates to the mail servers and vice versa, automatically!

Memory Storage
Too much, don’t know what to do with the free space. Maybe I should put more music in it, but I can’t even finish listening to all of them! Moreover now 32GB SDHC is available in the market, try eat that iPhone!

Touch
As the phone’s name implies, we have to operate this phone using touch 98% all the time! 2% will be clicking the power switch, soft reset button and the volume keys. 98% of the time!! So you better expect the touch responsiveness is good! It does live up to its name fortunately. Still it can’t beat the iPhone in this, but you can do a lot of other things with the Blackstone.

FEDEX Package arrived

It cost me a bomb though, but it’s well worth it. It’s not just any ordinary phone, it’s a smartphone, the iPhone-killer, the Blackstone, whatever you want to name it.

HTC Touch HD Box

HTC Touch HD Unboxing

The package, being shipped from Hong Kong comes with an adapter for the charger. I’m cool with the adapter because it is a lot cheaper compare buying it locally. The box is not much of a eye catcher, but the lid is magnetic. Uncovering it awaits the Blackstone, shimmering.

Accessories

HTC Pouch

The package comes with all the standard accessories, 8GB Micro SD card, extra Stylus, pouch, USB cable, charger, manuals and Cds. The disappointing part of the purchase is the cheap pouch that HTC includes. I pay so much for it and I get a microfiber pouch? Comon, at least do it leather. I got my previous Dopod D810 which comes with a leather pouch. Not very fashion trendy though, but it’s leather.

5mp Auto Focus Camera

The phone is designed to be very sleek and simple. Only 4 touch sensitive buttons on the front, a generous 480 x 800 pixels touch screen, light sensor, ear piece and a front camera for video calls. At the rear there’s a 5mp auto focus camera covered with a brushed aluminium plate. Nice.

The stylus is magnetically sticked to the phone. It’s convenient that you don’t need force to pull or put it back, but it does comes out easily when you try to squeeze the Blackstone out of the pouch. The MicroSD slot is located inside the back cover, which is not very convenient but not a big fuzz to me.

HTC Touch HD

The Blackstone comes with the new improved Manila 3D. I’m so impressed of HTC trying to make Windows Mobile to be finger friendly. The touch screen is remarkable, although not a multi-touch screen like the iPhone, but it’s good enough for its job, even better after a little tweak. The camera is only acceptable but I am not bothered much, I never expect much from a phone’s camera.

I flashed the Blackstone with the newest radio version 1.12.25.16 and it is just excellent! Calls are crystal clear and the best is the GPS receiver! I can easily get full coverage on a fine day in less than a minute time! The battery usage is minimal too, thanks to the better 65nm CPU. Compared to the older models which is 90nm processors, it draws minimal power consumption which gives the Blackstone up to 6 days of standby.

I also flashed with a couple of ROMs and I decided to stick with the best – L26’s ROM. Version 9 of the ROM is coming out later today, I might write another review on it and about all the software in it.