[Off-topic] Will_nonya:
Hi all, my name is Will and I am addicted to phones.

The seeds of that addiction were planted on this very site circa 2004 with the arrival of my shiny new SX66. A Seimans distributed version of the HTC Blueangel. It was a marvelous device which still works today. There were many devices to follow. Wizards, Touch Pros and HD2s among many devices in between. On this site I learned to keep the devices fresh with the cutting edge software of the day. I started to get into mods like Co0kies Home Tab and ROM’s like the venerable Energy Rom. Then I set up a kitchen and started tweaking my own roms to be exactly what I wanted. All of the latest OS features, my preferred mods and other files to streamline the setup. This is a progression that I am sure is familiar to many on this forum. Man those were the days.

Whether I was using a ROM I cooked up myself or one of the more polished ones offered by others there is always a little instability or a feature that doesn’t quite work. Eventually you get into a cycle of Flash-Fix-Flash. It’s great fun because there’s always one more tweak or a new mod to try. However you get to a point where the frequent unavailability or unreliability of your device becomes a hindrance, especially if you rely on your device to make a living. You start to justify why you need to do this next build or try this other ROM to solve all of your problem and then everything will be ok. I promise...

One morning I looked up from a keyboard to a disturbing buzzing sound echoing through the house. It was my alarm clock. At that moment I realized that I had spent the entire night doing flash-fix-flash trying to solve a particularly annoying but admittedly minor issue. Still wearing the clothes I’d worn to work the day before I fired up the coffee pot and headed for a shower. Clearly something needed to change.

I had been watching a new phone by HTC running a different OS. It had a fresh look and a quirky chin. I was ready to take the plunge but there were carrier issues and a wife growing weary of my constant phone upgrades. So I waited. Eventually I succumb to the pull of the new and tried a flurry of phones, some android and one fruity one. My biggest accomplishment with the fruit phone was not breaking it before it was returned. Most frustrating week of my life.

Anyway I eventually moved to Android and everything was grand. Shiny new hardware, a fresh OS and no more ROM of the week. Soon though my hardware was no longer shiny and the OS was no longer fresh. Not unexpectedly the community on XDA had grown rapidly and like phones before this site enabled me to run newer software on my phone than the OEM or my carrier dared to allow. Then came mods, and ROMS and kitchens and before I knew it I was back to Flash-Fix-Flash. Things would be better this time though. I knew it would be. I willed it to be. Between work and family who had time to learn all of those new technologies and techniques anyway.

I’d come full circle.

About that time the second wave of hardware for the newly born Windows Phone started to become available. It turned out to be a good match. A unique and fluid user experience, features that you still can’t find on other platforms and no Flash-Fix-Flash. I was content for a long time to use a WP device as my daily driver and just tinker on Android when the itch was too much to bear.

Unfortunately this couldn’t last. MS has systematically removed any features that are unique or useful and their latest effort WP10 is particularly disheartening as it removes the last of the unique features and offers little more than the WP launcher and a fairly polished experience in return. I relegated my WP device to work and started carrying an Android device as a personal phone to start catching up on where the community had progressed to. This was equally disheartening as Android is just as disjointed a user experience as it has been for years. Yes there are great things about Android. There are great things about windows too. If I could get the polished user experience of WP with the flexibility and app playground of Android on descent hardware I’d be a content man. Sadly it’s not an option. I can have polish or flexibility but apparently not both.

For the first time in over a decade I find myself without a shining star in the mobile arena. No piece of hardware or software that just grabs me as a gotta have device. I look at the variety of phones currently sitting on my desk and they all have something the other is missing. This isn’t a flagship phone dilemma or a desire for some obscure hardware or software feature. I accept tradeoffs, this is about the whole experience. There’s no vision for how a phone achieves its potential, at least none obviously trying to reach that potential. Android continues to improve behind the scenes but there’s nothing new or exciting coming to the OS much less anything addressing its long time flaws. What good are a great hardware selection and more fart apps than you can shake a stick at if the underlying UX is just blah? In contrast Microsoft is trying to become irrelevant by moving to be as bland and vanilla as possible while not addressing its main shortcomings such as app development and hardware selection.

I’m not trying to fire up any trolls or other heated discussions. I’m just a man on a journey wondering whether something fun is around the corner. It appears not.