Uh, oh. We’d expect this from Dell, but HTC? Never. It seems that the Taiwanese handset manufacturer has been shipping pre-production Advantage units to CompUSA, Amazon.com, and elsewhere. Customers are reporting that their Advantages are showing a “Test Only, Not For Sale” warning immediately after booting up, which is a telltale sign of pre-production software/hardware. A quick software update seems to fix the software issue, but we wouldn’t be too happy if we had just dropped $849-$899 on a pre-release unit. CompUSA is now showing that the Advantage is “Sold Out” of their online store…taking some time to regroup, perhaps? Has anyone out there had any similar issues?
UPDATE: HTC contacted us directly to inform us that while this is known issue, it only plagued a very small amount of users and HTC has been doing everything they can to correct the problem. Long story short, if you find yourself an unlucky buyer with a “Test Only. Not for sale” unit, there is no doubt in our mind that HTC will honor any warranty or other issues regularly taken of with production devices. Good move, HTC. Now if only we had another Kaiser we could start some turf wars…
UPDATE 2: Here’s the ROM update on the HTC website for customers to update. The devices that have shipped now all have final production versions, but if anyone has any questions they can call the Advantage Technical Support hotline at 1-877-878-7922, or go here for other Advantage support needs.
