[Touch HD General] eaglesteve:
Hi Matterhorn,

Looking out location OUT of the car can be done much better with iPhone than with the likes of Tom Tom. It is only when come to turn by turn voice navigation with speed limit warning, red light camera warning that iPhone's GPS is crappy. For other non-driving type of GPS software, I find iPhone to be ahead of winmo's offering. Example of this would be applications that shows you how to get from where you are to the bus stop and to tell you which bus to take to the specified destination. Others are telling you where the top rated Japanese restaurants are around you, etc, and how to walk there. Connection by 3G is not expensive as long as you have a data plan, and I believe most if not all who own iPhone or HD would have such a plan.

I agree with you that TomTom and iGO are very good softwares which is why I use them. iPhone does have navigation software that has voice spoken turn by turn instruction but it is not as good as TomTom or iGO.

Most of your other points are valid, but I do not agree that HD has better phone connection. It is actually not as good as iPhone's. I had lots of call problem with HD, with both cooked and stock ROM. Problems includes drop calls, calls coming in but I miss it because the ringtone stopped working, call voice quality with VOIP having echo effect, VOIP call quality broken up, etc. All theser are non-issue with iPhone in my own experience, so I'm very puzzled by your friend's comments.

As to jailbreaking, it should not be an issue for a person who can deal with flashing ROM, installing third party programs, perform registry entries and so on. I think winmo users have very high level of tolerance for annoyance frankly. For me, it is far more annoying to have to flash new cooked ROM every week and having to swtich from one imperfect ROM to another imperfect ROM. I have also tried winmo 6.5 and Dutty's Extreme 3.3. There are issues with seems unresolvable. Some issues comes from the hardware difference between Topaz and HD such as the absence of zoom slider, thus preventing controllable zoom in Dutty's ROM. Problems in Album, daylight saving time error.. the list just goes on. I do not see any annoyance that you speak about with jailbreaking. Apple cannot force you do any update. Users must explicitly agree to updating the iphone firmware before it could happen in iTune.

I'm well aware of the setting to choose between battery and performance, but even with battery saving option, it is still consuming battery much more rapidly than the iPhone.

Besides far better user interface, iPhone just wins hands down in terms of third party software which are very good and cheap or free. The list is very long, so I will not attempt to be too long winded. So, just a small sample here:

- Specialised internet banking software which quite a number of my banks are only available on iPhone but not winmo devices.

- Camera software that lets you edit photo taken on the spot.

- Far more feature rich music identification software called Shazam (which also has been released for Google Phone) beats Music ID hands down.

- Photo viewing software that lets you keep sensitive pictures completely secret.

- Weather programs that are so feature rich (e.g. show not just the usual temperature/rainfall/wind forecast but also radar, pressure chart, airport open/close condition, snow conditions in alphine, number of lift chairs in operation,.).

- Book/CD/DVD identification software that lets you take a picture and send it for automatic identification, and list of suppliers with their prices.

- Really really good ebook readers, many with free books to entice you first.

- Software on iPhone to search for movies/pictures/music and to stream or download into iPhone.

- Specialised news reading for popular newspapers such as Wall Street Journals, Bloomberg, etc, coupled with radio and video news.

- Education softwares that teaches you how to cook, dance, exercise, to prepare for nursing examinations, to prepare for high school exams, etc.

I could go on and on but the list is just endless, and it is up to the users to explore the applestore to find them. This is where I spend my time with iPhone - enjoying using the applications, rather than to flash ROM and reinstall my applications every other days.

I do not see myself as an iPhone die hard. I was a winmo diehard just a few months ago, and never thought I could want anything other than winmo devices then. Similarly, I may or may not stick to iPhone, even with firmware 3.0. The thing is, technology changes too quickly. I'm actually a very open minded person and will explore and use what's best out there. I actually intend to explore HTC Magic when it is available because I want to find out if it can offer anything even better than iPhone. Similarly when winmo 7 is available I'd take a close look again. At this moment iPhone is the best device for my needs but I do'nt expect everyone to agree with me.

Cheers.