[Touch Diamond, MDA Compact IV General] someone1234:
Ergonomically the diamond wins because its much smaller!

The old metal look of the 2g iphone is replaced with a plastic back on the 3g one, so its not as elegant as it used to be.

User experiance i would say the iphone wins hands down. There's no having to cope with lags and ill thought out menu systems. You can get what you want down really quickly, and not have to worry about screen sensativity problems and some behind the scenes WM6 window poping up.

You'll find some hard core WM users arguing WM is better, but trust me its not. Its still laggy and dated, and needs a serious overhaul.

Software... now this is where the decision for WM usually gets made. Let me clarify some things here.

iPhone CAN multitask, but doesnt have a task manager as such. It just closes programs when memory is low, or if they specifically don't request to be left open in the background. iPhone essentially runs linux and you can use BSD tools on it like top, ps, etc so under the hood it is a fully multi threaded multi tasking OS. There's very little bloat, like on windows, and you can get low level access to the hardware without having to go through multiple api's like in windows. This make programs alot faster, and screen updates as fast as the hardware can handle.

With the iphone, the phone is 'jailed'. That means you can't access the OS partitions. Software must be signed (by apple) for it to run. On WM you can run unsigned stuff out of the box (you might have seen the popup, this application is from an unknown publisher). Essentially what this means is that anyone can make an app for WM and distribute it, whereas for iphone you have to ask apple to sign it first, or your phone wont accept it.

Apple have said that they will sign free apps, but comercial apps they take 20%. All apps will be hosted on the apple app store and you buy/download through itunes.

With the 2g iphone, people found a way to jailbreak the phone. This allowed you full root access to the phone. They then made an iphone toolchain using the old arm linux toolchain. This contained api's to contructs apple style menus etc. ALOT of free software was written for iphone.

With version 2.0 all the api's changed. The beta is all over the internet, so developers have been looking at it. Alot of the old developers can't be bothered to change to the new API's and update their software. But at the same time alot of new developers have emerged and are using the iphone SDK. Despite what people say here, you can expect ALOT of iphone software in the future.

The main problem is that you will never have total control of the phone like in WM. You will be stuck with what apple aprove. That means fun, maybe not so politicaly correct software (eg dope wars!) may not get aproved.

Its possible and probably the new iphone will be jailbroken too, but apple have a bunch of live connections to the developer site which will probably cause problems. You can expect a ping pong game between apple and hackers every software revision.

.....

Some other notes.. the iphone has unbeleivable talk time. On 3G it can do 5 hours! Now thats ALOT.

iPhone doesnt have copy and paste (yeah go figure).