Ive come to the Tattoo from a HTC Touch Dual and WinMo(of course). Phone size and aesthetics have always been important as I have always preferred smaller size phones. My greatest concern was whether text input would be ok, as I do alot of SMSing. WinMo had me quite used to stylus input and I wasnt sure if I could make the transition to fingers! Needless to say, android is designed with fingers in mind, whereas WinMo is not.

For the Tattoo, I've found this is best achieved by flipping the phone into landscape mode. You can do it in portrait if you use keypad style entry format, but landscape wins for me. Android's inbuilt dictionary is also pretty good at cleaning up any misfires you make as you speedily type along, and learns new words of course.

HTC's sense UI is what sold android to me. To get a phone that sports this at a sub $450 price tag was great. As noted by mobicity, the asian version we get does NOT support market - which is a super PITA, as market is definitely one of the pluses of the android experience. You can get access to apps online via barcode scanning from places like androlib and many more.

There is an upgraded 'clean' UK english 1.67.405.6 ROM floating about which you can deploy on your phone with the goldcard method which I and others have written tutorials for around the interwebs (search for my nickname). It's definitely worth it IMO. If you find the above ROM that is an official upgrade package, the risks to your phone are nil as the HTC sync app will simply refuse to update if you haven't done things right.

Also, I found that touch input sometimes crashed when I still had the default asian rom whenever writing input was (accidentally) selected.

Games from market etc are pretty cool, though some are not playable as the small screen of the tattoo obscures some games that have not been optimised for its smaller display. Jewelust is my personal favourite :)

As much as I would love a Hero, or Nexus one, I cant justify the cost for the relatively basic things I use my phone for. That being said, I do use GPS and the terrific (and free) My Tracks app to record all my hiking tracks and stats, and its worked great thus far. I'd like to see other entry level phones do that!

Good Luck!
Astro (Posted on 15/01/10)

Great phone within the Android family. It has a nice feel to it and is lightweight. Battery life is acceptable considering the apps you can download on the phone. Most people find the screen to be too small considering phones like the iPhone and Magic, but I found it to be just right. However, the keyboard felt a little cramped in portrait mode.

Nice, entry level Android phone. (Posted on 19/11/09)