Wow, I think I've died and gone to heaven....

When I first pulled this phone out of the box and turned it on. I was amazed... From that very first moment I knew I had made the right purchase.
I've had many various phones (I tend to get a new one every year) from phones such as the iPhone, the Fuze, the 9300, the 8525, etc... But the Aria is my first Android phone and let me tell you, I'm hooked.
The things I look for in a good phone are speed, capability, and fun.
First off, the Aria runs flawlessly smooth and fast, opening apps takes no time and there is no bottle-necking like I've found in some windows phones. The screen on the Aria is brilliant, at 3.2 Inches... I don't quite know why HTC is marketing it as a small phone, because other than the HTC EVO or the Droid X this phone is a pretty good size, not to small to use the screen well, and not too big to make you look ridiculous... It's the perfect size.
In terms of capability the Aria is great, there are tons of apps on the market that will do most anything I want, and yes they all run perfectly. My windows phones had more capability in the sense of a business world, they have better word processing, powerpoint, excel (the aria doesn't have powerpoint or excel) so that is a downfall of the phone, but if you don't need those on a daily basis then the Aria more than makes up for its short-comings with speed and shiny-ness. The best way for me to phrase the Aria is a mix of an iPhone and a Windows 6.5 phone, it has the best of both worlds, so you get the fun and games of the iPhone with some of the functionality of a true smartphone.
Don't let Sprint fool you with their 4G talk. Yes Sprint is the first company to use WiMax on a network, they will probably be the only one too since its expensive to install and may be FCC regulated in the coming future. However, AT&T has had 4G speed capability for 2 or 3 years now, it's called HSPDA which allows the transfer speeds of up to 16mbps, which is a lot. I bet 90% of America doesn't even have those speeds at their homes, and certainly you need nothing faster. Basically what this means is Sprint or AT&T you can't go wrong, however... Verizon... definitely the slow 3G bound network, and if they get the iPhone I see many network failures for Verizon.
Of course, using all this data does take a toll on the phone battery, I have my stocks set to update every 20 minutes, my email every 10 minutes, but I do leave WiFi off. I never give my phone a chance to truly run out of battery but on about 14 hours of use and standby my phone drops to around 50% battery (of course on heavy days of use its much less).
All in all, I would greatly unquestionably recommend the HTC Aria for anyone looking for an alternative to the iPhone or someone looking for a well constructed, open-ended device. Aside from the Captivate the Aria is the only viable Android phone on AT&Ts network (since the Aria, the Captivate, and the iPhone are the only capacitive touch screen phones AT&T sells). I read a review saying that this phone was on par with the iPhone 3gs(because AT&T won't let anything rival their iPhone), that review was dead wrong. This Aria rivals the iPhone in every way, when you throw build quality into the mix, and the ability to change your own battery... The Aria excels to record lengths vs. the iPhone.

Great Phone!

i bought this phone unlocked and it works great with my T-mobile network. it has 7 home screens, all easily accessible, and the 3.2-inch touch screen is great for navigation. this phone runs on android, has an internal memory of 160mb with an expandable microSD memory up to 32G. it is small and compact, and it also shares the same charger as my other nokia phone :)

Features that i liked:
1. 3.5mm headset jack
2. customizable ringtones per contact
3. seven home screens with customizable scenes
4. screen automatically rotates depending on phone position
5. automatic sign on to gchat and gmail
6. camera resolution = 5 megapixels
7. touch screen qwerty keyboard

Areas for improvement:
1. customizable notification tones (unable to customize text msg or IM tones)
2. multiple gchat accounts (it allows you to add multiple gmail, but not gchat)
3. many of the apps that i do not use cannot be uninstalled :( this takes up quite a lot of memory space
4. this phone does not come with skype installed, however, skype app is available in "market"... but the app takes up a huge amount of internal memory. it would be awesome if the app can be fixed to take up less space

If you are looking for something that can help you organize things into a small and compact space, i would highly recommend HTC Aria. The customizable screens and features make this phone very personal and user-friendly.

Great phone

Ownership: 1-2 months.
The good: Fast for the size! Fits in my poket without a bulk.
The bad: Battery could last a bit longer, minor OS problems, screen too glossy.
Overall: Great alternative to those huge screen phones that won't fit nicely in your pocket without sacrificing the use.

Summary: I previously owned a blackberry 8320 and when I was ready to go to touchscreen phones I knew one thing: I did not want an iPhone (bias here) since I do not like apple and I just wanted something different. So looking for phones I ran into the HTC Aria, since I was already an ATT customer I would not have to change carriers and it would be easy. Once I got the phone activating it was quick and easy. Overall the phone is small, which I like, so I can put it on my front pocket without it being noticeable. The android OS is quick, easy to use, very customizable, and has features that were just recently added to the iOs such as creating folders, which I use to put all my games in one folder. There is thousands of apps to choose from, many great and free apps and games too.

The only issue I have had with the phone is when texting, often I will get an error message about the input software crashing, if I was holding the phone horizontally I have to change it vertically to see what I type until I restart the phone, which is actually fast, so that is why it has not bothered me too much.

Other than that the browsing is fast! WI-FI is a plus! Great phone, I do not regret upgrading with this phone.

The biggest little phone you can buy!

When you're stuck with AT&T and don't buy into Apple's closed philosophy, this is a great choice to go with. I'm coming from an AT&T Tilt 2. This phone is the same form factor as the HTC HD Mini but uses Android 2.1 with HTC Sense instead of WinMo. HTC Sense really makes this phone great and gives it a one up on the Samsung Captivate. Don't hesitate when considering this phone, a few easy to find tweaks (such as Sideloading, Rooting, and custom ROMs) on the internet and you have a phone comparable to the HTC Incredible on Verizon (just smaller). Even though AT&T has locked it down so you can't sideload apps from the phone, there are programs that are 100% legal to let you do so -- find the HVGA version of Swype and any keyboard complaints you have will be gone. If you wanna go a little further, rooting this phone only take a few minutes and thanks to the digital millenium copyright act you can do that worry free too. After this 5-10 minute process you can remove all of AT&T crappy software and the battery life is much better. You can even get a 1500 mAh HTC HD mini battery from an eBay store in London for $15. I love this phone and will be sticking with Android for a long time!

Amazing phone with tons of features

So I read and read about this phone before I finally purchased it and decided, despite the one issue I could find with battery life, everyone seemed to give this phone high marks. They were right. This phone is great. It is fast, well designed, light, and just looks great. I worried that going from the Iphone to an android phone would be hard, but that was not the case. The transition was very easy, and not being tied to ITunes is wonderful.

The one thing bad I can say was the battery. The battery lasted maximum of about 7 hours of standby, which was just unacceptable. I took everyones advice and turned off Widgets, and made sure to routinely kill processes running in the background. None of this worked. After talking to a friend, they mentioned going into the Android Market application and turning Download notifications off. They said they read somewhere that this was a bug in 2.1. I did this and my battery life went from 7 hours to about 12 hours. I was amazed that this issue would cause that much unneeded battery consumption. After doing a little more research, I read that people who moved their phone to Android 2.2 were getting amazing speed and battery life out of our Aria. The one problem is the Android 2.2 install is not official. I am holding off on 2.2 in hopes that AT&T and HTC see that 2.1 is a big issue for this phone and really push for 2.2 soon.

I find it funny that after all the battery bashing that's going on about this phone on the internet, it turns out not to be the battery, but the Android 2.1 OS and HTC Sense. I think HTC should step up to the plate and deliver 2.2 ASAP for this phone or offer a solution to the battery issue (besides the whole full discharge thing which doesn't work).

I give the phone an Excellent rating because I know it has huge potential. I give HTC a Below average rating because they failed to test this phone and advertise longer battery life than it actually delivers with their base install.