i bought an esteem shortly after it came out, it was $320 i believe. it was ok for the first 2-3 weeks before it started messing up. the metro store told me it was the sd card causing the problems. -.- then i found out about the ZVD update here. told the same store about the update and got a really surprised look from them. so they printed out the instructions and told me to do it at home because they didnt want to be bothered with it. got home, followed the instructions to a "tee" and ended up hard bricking the phone, wouldnt turn on at all. so i had to drive about an hour away to a corporate store and told them the situation, they replaced it for free, and installed the ZVD update. same problems came around after 4 days, so i then rooted, installed the plague kernal, oc'd to 1.8ghz, and had no problems for the following 3 or so months i had it. then i went into rom toolbox pro and set a custom boot screen, to have it soft bricked. couldnt restore to factory defaults so i went out and got a connect. 2 days after the purchase, i open up CWM recovery on the esteem and restore to a previous working rom. im still using the connect. my point? even with the esteem rooted, and overclocked, the connect is far better IMHO. i did a quadrant benchmark test on both phones. rooted oc'd to (turned up for the test) 2ghz esteem, and a stock connect. somehow the connect still got a better score than the esteem. now i lie in wait, for the plague kernal to be fine tuned for the connect. ^.^