HTC's HD2 carrying a secret stash of hidden RAM

Will this phone ever stop surprising us? Rumblings that all HD2 devices have 576MB of RAM inside them started developing in China a little while before T-Mobile unveiled its upgraded US-bound handset with, funnily enough, the same amount of memory. Now, those trusty souls over at XDA-developers have concocted custom ROMs for everyone else to free up the extra 128MB of operational headroom, and user feedback appears to corroborate the theory. We can hardly begin to fathom the reasons for HTC disabling part of its available hardware, other than to guess that a WinMo 7 upgrade was in the company's plans for this phone all along and it just wanted to keep its ability to handle the new OS under wraps. Video and pictorial evidence of cracking past the 448MB barrier after the break.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

[yyandrew Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:00AM]

4.3 inches of amazing

[lv2bll54 Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:10AM]

@yyandrew

i hope your talking about the phone
it might shoot extra RAM at you!!!

[bowdown Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:11AM]

@yyandrew 4.3 inches of a crap OS.

[lv2bll54 Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:13AM]

@bowdown

this phone will make your old nokia os amazing

[tpbftw Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:18AM]

@yyandrew Thats what she said

[Koofteh Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:18AM]

@bowdown How original. You, sir, are a comic genius.

[Barguast Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:36AM]

@bowdown
You forgot to add a reference to 'Micro$oft'. All the cool kids are doing it!

WM on this phone is fine - a bit clunky on other phones perhaps, but with the fast processor it is quite zippy and with the 4.3" inch, it is as finger friendly as any other touch screen phone.

[hq Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:46AM]

@yyandrew Is that what she said???

[unwynd Posted Jan 29th 2010 6:08AM]

and htc shares zoomed higher on the stock indexes!

[Frankenstein Black Posted Jan 29th 2010 10:06AM]

@unwynd - MEH! No HSPA/WCDMA: 850/1900 Mhz.
Talk about turning away 15 million+ potential customers ;^(...

[George101 Posted Jan 29th 2010 11:16AM]

@Frankenstein Black The Australian release on Telstra has UMTS/HSPA 850/2100.

[dansus Posted Jan 29th 2010 6:03PM]

@yyandrew Im tempted, but think i will still hold out for the HTC Trophy in May.

Best of both worlds :)

[Koofteh Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:03AM]

Damn, I just finished flashing 1.66 the other day.

Oh well, I guess it's worth it for the extra memory. Gotta love XDA.

[Hosain Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:11AM]

Nice, can't wait for WM7. I've had this device for two weeks now, replacing my iPhone 3G, and can't be happier.

[oakie Posted Jan 29th 2010 6:29AM]

@Hosain agreed.

i had the chance to fingerfuck one with an early build of WM7 and came away quite impressed with the hardware. the software aint so bad at this point, either, and that's all i'll say since i prefer to keep my job at this point.

as a current, longtime t-mobile usa customer, i was very excited to hear they're getting the jump on this device since it will use tmo's oddball 3G. definitely will be getting this on the first day. never had much luck with WM6 devices in my past, but this is one where the hardware totally overcomes WM6's many issues. to know that the tmo version has just as much RAM and 1GB of ROM is just icing on the cake, cementing the ability to upgrade to WM7 when it's released.

[Plexus Posted Jan 30th 2010 9:29PM]

@Hosain

I have had the HD2 since last november replacing an iPhone 3GS and it can't even be compared to Apple's money machine.
But I also have a little HTC Hero and I must admit that I like Android even more mostly because of the great free apps on the Marketplace.
The sheer superiority of the hardware and the unexcusably lack of voice dialing on the Hero though make me prefer the HD2 as my primary device.
Maybe a Nexus one (when it will be available in scandinavia too) will make me drop also my beloved HD2 but at the moment it seems unlikely

[formetopoopon Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:14AM]

Nooo Noooo don't look! too sexy! Too sexy!

[dattebayo Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:18AM]

One word: Amazing phone

[dattebayo Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:20AM]

@dattebayo
I mean Two Words

[jasonfreeman27 Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:27AM]

this phone is great im going sort my hd2 later for extra ram

[MobileGeek Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:33AM]

how sneaky, now I wonder how they will go about upgrading the ROM to 1GB like the T-mo phones. Someone dig around in your HD2 and see if its hiding in there somewhere.

[IT expert Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:38AM]

Trouble with this phone is...

It's sitting on top of Windows Mobile 6.5, which is basically a doomed operating system. Everyone knows that Microsoft is about to replace it with a totally new mobile platform.

So as it is, Windows Mobile 6.5, underpinning this phone, will have a very short life span before it is discontinued.

That brings us to the question, will this phone be upgradeable to Microsoft's new platform? There are rumors going both ways. Some say yes, some say no. HTC won't officially give that guarantee.

So with the HD2 you're kind of need to pin your hopes on getting an upgrade that we really don't know will happen.

[Tes Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:59AM]

@IT expert

Dude...really, your comment history is pathetic.

[s1xtyn1n3 Posted Jan 29th 2010 5:09AM]

@IT expert
I thought HTC had been confirmed that WinMo 7 was coming to the HD2.... Either way, if HTC decide to upgrade the phone or not, WinMo 7 will come to this phone. XDA will hook us up if need be :)

[jakem Posted Jan 29th 2010 5:13AM]

@IT expert So you're basically saying that the HD2 will stop working the day that WM7 is released if it doesn't get an upgrade? Remind me why that would be the case.

[IT expert Posted Jan 29th 2010 6:11AM]

@jakem. No, I didn't say it'll stop working when Microsoft's new mobile platform is released. I just think it's probably better to hold off on buying a Windows Mobile phone at the moment, until you can find out more about the transition plans. The Microsoft presentation is on 15 Feb 2010 at MWC, so that's not long to wait.

[Slim Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:46AM]

Responsive/responsiveness are totally not in this phone's vocabulary, although it's got this 1GHz "monster" in it... I know, I know, it's the screen, not the CPU :o)

[Herr Synnberg Posted Jan 29th 2010 5:08AM]

@Slim It's got a capacitive screen.
Try again.

[loocas Posted Jan 29th 2010 5:43AM]

But, he's got a point. I've had this phone for about a month now and while I'm loving it and consider it being the best phone I've ever had, the responsiveness sometimes isn't the greatest. It can get pretty slow, occassionally, rarely, not always of course.

But the thing I hate most would actually be the capacitive screen. It's terrible for typing even short SMS messages! The keyboard/screen sometimes gets confused and while I'm clearly tapping a letter "W" for example, the keyboard suddenly starts to pop up all the letters all around the keyboard as if it didn't know which one I'm holding my finger on! This is annoying as hell. Again, it doesn't happen all the times, but when it does, I want to punch someone!

Also, the SMS being stuck in the outbox folder is another story. After all the patches and what not, from time to time (absolutely random) the SMS just won't be delivered. I won't notice and certainly the recipient won't too. This is another huge issue.

But, as I've said, once they iron out these kinks, this will still be one of the best phones out there!

[interested Posted Jan 29th 2010 9:22AM]

@Slim
A little bit of fishing around and you can find some unofficial driver updates that increase the responsiveness of the screen. Try the XDA website. (Google it)

[BigJayDogg3 Posted Jan 29th 2010 10:23AM]

@loocas

Try killing tasks. People have a tendency to have a metric ton of applications running in the background without their knowing it.

[Slim Posted Jan 29th 2010 10:53AM]

@interested I'm not a newbie and nope, I'm not saying the iPhone is better... But it is in terms of touch/system response. The HD2 has still a few miles to go and catch up on the user response part compared to the iPhone. Not a fanboy, but had to return to it after being quite upset about the HD2. Did tweak and modit, nothing worked that much so that I'd keep it ;o) oh yeah and I guess I'm the only one who also thinks that whatever hardware you drop in front of M$ and their Winmo, they will show you that all your resources (CPU, RAM) are belong to us... (read: to M$) :oP

[Tes Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:56AM]

Wait? They put hardware in a device...didn't tell anyone about it in some scheme to enable it later on in a software update?!

MADNESS!!! Only a MAD company with no sense would do that...right Engadget?

[Rem DX Posted Jan 29th 2010 7:51AM]

@Tes
This was pretty funny.
HTC is amateurish about it though, they forgot to charge $ for this privilege.

[TruUnknowN Posted Jan 29th 2010 4:57AM]

This should be breaking!

[Herr Synnberg Posted Jan 29th 2010 5:10AM]

Now THIS is a MAGICAL product. One that actually has the entire internet "In the palm of your hand".

Someone forward this to turtleneck, pls.

[Teslanaut Posted Jan 29th 2010 5:26AM]

@Herr Synnberg Who wants the Internet in the palm of their hands? Do they not know how dirty the internet is?

[Ruben Posted Jan 29th 2010 7:28AM]

@Teslanaut : at least this device can handle flash, helping you get something else on to the palm of your hand.

[jasonfreeman27 Posted Jan 29th 2010 5:52AM]

i use bsb tweaks 1.4 on my hd2 and it fixes quite a few things also allows few extra stuff

[Koofteh Posted Jan 29th 2010 7:55AM]

@jasonfreeman27 Hmm, might want to upgrade to the latest version, it's up to 1.6 already.

[CJ100570 Posted Jan 29th 2010 6:30AM]

Much like the 3rd nut my dog has, who cares?!

[Rem DX Posted Jan 29th 2010 7:52AM]

@CJ100570
Trolling troll is trolling...

[oakie Posted Jan 29th 2010 6:41AM]

why the sideways camera in the second vid?

i have slanted eyes too, but it's still sideways to me.

[MarkA Posted Jan 29th 2010 7:29AM]

It's still Windows CE 5 though, so still max 32mb per process and 32 processes.

[shpatar Posted Jan 29th 2010 7:53AM]

Can someone provide a link to the XDA thread with this? I can't seem to find it

[shpatar Posted Jan 29th 2010 7:56AM]

@shpatar http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=622964

[JudgeDredd Posted Jan 29th 2010 7:55AM]

Humm this was reported a couple of days ago (the actual source of Pocketnow's story): http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2010/01/25/do-all-htc-hd2s-have-576mb-of-ram/

[XDAfan Posted Jan 29th 2010 10:52AM]

@JudgeDredd yea too bad they didn't find the cool video! i would know, i follow both mtechworld and pocketnow. their post now magically has the video after it was found by another site ha! quick search on youtube proves it. props to PNOW for researching thoroughly.

[XDAfan Posted Jan 29th 2010 10:56AM]

@XDAfan 'they' and 'their' meaning mtechwrld

[JudgeDredd Posted Jan 29th 2010 10:59AM]

@JudgeDredd Too bad you got it wrong mate. If you click on the 4 days old link I posted you'll see that the video is linked in the story as a .mp4 (that's the file Pocketnow uploaded to Youtube). I guess that mobiletechworld decidede to put it up on youtube later seeing as Pcketnow did it.