This is where the disagreement comes in. (Keep in mind that this is one person's view and I'm upfront about this being a personal set of opinions.) The Hero looks very nice, but it suffers from having a lot of unnecessary junk. It's shaped oddly. Its buttons look very cheap. That back looks like something out of the 80s. I don't like the plastic iPhone back, but the Hero's is worse.

The UI looks very chaotic (except for the web browser, which looked terrific). That home page with the two clocks and the smaller icons below it? Horrible. I also don't like the three-button curve that appears on the bottom, and how I can't tell from looking what the two buttons on either side will do, because they lack context within whatever application that is.

Graphically, there's a lot of random crap that doesn't seem to have a reason for existing. A ton of gradients, a ton of stylistic decisions I dislike. For instance: putting the letters on the numeric buttons for the phone dialer. Those letters will never be used on the Hero, because there's a better solution (display a separate keyboard). They're there just to emulate older, poorer phones, and they add clutter where clutter's not needed. (I could be very anal and say that I dislike the slight space between the various numbers, because when you're dealing with a nonphysical interface there's no need for space between buttons, and there's no aesthetic advantage for it, and it adds visual complexity.)

Compare that to the iPhone. There are absolutely no unnecessary parts to any of it. The only custom image you get appears when you have to unlock the phone, and it only appears there so that there's no blank space on the unlocking screen. The main phone OS has a black background. The only added elements are the icons, which serve as instant distinction between functions. The OS's options appear only as an icon (similarly to how System Preferences on the Mac runs as an application instead of a special function). You get a simple grid of every single function on your phone, bar none, and the way you customize how it looks is by moving applications around. The only stylistic choice in that layout is the rounded curves of the buttons, but there's even a logic behind that: by trimming the buttons down, Apple reduces the clutter that would otherwise appear in a screen that's a single grid, and the rounded corners add a physical limitation to the graphic's design. If they'd stuck to boxes, then you'd get a lot of ugly icons like I see in the Hero, a lot of attempted complexity. By rounding the corners Apple added a slight style that compels designers to adapt to that shape, and adaptation to that shape usually means making something simple and user-friendly.

Look at the globe icon on Hero's Bookmarks pane. Or the seemingly meaningless simplicity of the home page shown in Image 8 of that last post. Or in Image 5, how the selector bubble on the bottom would overlap the selector bubbles of the unselected icons. Image 17 shows it most clearly: Look at the iPhone next to the Hero. From the iPhone's screen I can make out twelve separate actions from the image alone, barring the knowledge I have of the other apps (that twelve discounts the Twitter and Facebook apps, as well as Safari). I can tell that there are four pages of applications and that there are six new Mail messages. Even the top bar is simplified: I can make out the reception and the battery life, and see that the time is 6:56 PM, because the design is so high-contrast. On Hero, I can barely make out what the clock says, I can't read the top bar at all because it's multicolored and so doesn't translate with the poor camera quality, I can't read any of the icons except for the Browser (whose icon is incredibly vague), the only other application I can read is that of the Phone, and at most I can make out six buttons, two of which are very vague. It's all on a low-contrast background, to make things worse. The iPhone has the single button visible, and the purpose of it is incredibly simple: it quits applications. With the Hero, I can only guess at the two - Search and Back - and those two make the entire phone look lopsided.

I'll also point out that there is an HTC logo on the Hero and no logo whatsoever on the iPhone. In fact, the only visual mark on the iPhone at all is the square on the button that is shaped like an application button.

This is the distinction in design that I mentioned to jrockway. When I, and others like me (many of whom are iPhone developers), look at things, this is what we see, and we see it instantly. Where other people might get a vague feeling of something not being right, we break designs down almost reflexively. When I use an OS, the very first thing I notice is how the OS handles my clicking the desktop and starting a selection box, and the second thing I notice is the design of application windows; I'll reject a lot of applications and web sites and so on within seconds of seeing them because something doesn't look or feel right. Sometimes I rationalize that by saying I don't want to use a product that wasn't made by somebody with the same insane passion for detail that I've got; other times I think it's one of those small irrationalities that help us all filter the world. In any event, when talking design I don't mean whether or not something looks pretty, because pretty can be deceiving (and Apple's been guilty of this too: see brushed metal and reflective surfaces). I refer more to the logic of a design: Why was each individual design choice made, and how does it add up to the integrity of the overall design?

That's not how everybody ought to judge things. It's just as arbitrary as judging things by how much they let you tinker around with them, or how open their software is. Some people will never care about it, just as I rarely care about open source work. But what I've come to understand is that for each of us individually, this various arbitration isn't just a way of being contrary, it's how we look at the world around us, and dismissing that to parade a bunch of points is ignorant and contemptful. If I were going around mocking the FSF and its fans, I'd be just as much an asshole as the people who insult Apple fans for spending excessive amounts of money on things that don't offer a lot of functionality. You might like the idea of downloadable themes: To me, theming is a terrible abomination. It speaks of cowardice and a lack of design integrity. You probably think that's absolutely ridiculous, but try to understand that I see theming in a similarly ridiculous light and you'll start to get what I mean when I made that point about different markets and different people. It's okay that we all look for different things, so long as we respect those various opinions and don't look down at them for being nonsense.

I'm not just writing this to you, jmonegro. I'm writing it to a lot of the people in this thread and others, who keep clashing by arguing a viewpoint like it's the definitive Truth. A lot of time is wasted bickering because a lot of us here don't like admitting that two perfectly logical people can still disagree on things, and especially where things like Apple products are concerned people occasionally get very vicious. (Not on this particular thread, thankfully.) I'd like it if some of you reading this could take the time and consider the dissenting side's points of view; sometimes, it's okay that people disagree and it doesn't have to lead to the beating of a dead debate horse.

(Thanks a lot for posting those links: I'd never seen the Hero before and I likely wouldn't have if you hadn't made finding information so convenient.)