I am about to begin work on the Hermes review a couple days ahead of schedule. In the meantime, I wanted to bring you an interesting article from Larry at Palm Is Life.

It would seem that some of the HTC Hermes family of PDAs have erratic touchscreens, displaying imprecise digitizer behavior. Larry received one such device at Mobius…

He says, “The first custom-made 3G Smartphone made by HTC was launched by Chung-Hwa Telecom Taiwan, is the best-seller model which more than 10,000 units were shipped within 2 months as it launched. The other family members are all in the same hardware specification as CHT9000, they are HTC TyTN, HTC Hermes & Dopod 838 Pro. Unfortunately, it (CHT9000) comes up a severe issue on its touch screen with a high failure rate. My Dopod 838 Pro got same problem as well right after 72 hours running.”

Needless to say, when Larry first mentioned the problem to me in an IM, I immediately checked mine and was relieved to find that I didn’t have it to such a degree. I have noticed that there are times when I don’t feel like the stylus is exactly on top of the line drawn on my screen, but never anything to this degree. I asked Jenneth and Joel to check their Hermes, and neither had issues as severe as Larry’s.

Update: G-A of Akihabara News has also got the digitizer problem, and it is just as severe as Larry’s was.

Never one to just “send it in for warranty work”, Larry took it upon himself to take the Hermes apart and figure out exactly what was causing the problem.

While I would be a bit chicken to do the same, I have to say that his pictures are very impressive!

Larry’s article with lots more pictures and comments - in both Chinese and English, may be found here.