[HD2 General] _tangent:
What a bizarre thread. If WE'RE the kind of people who get emotionally attached to a device?! You're the one making a thread in a forum you no longer have any reason to use, about why you chose to stop using the device to which it pertains. Sounds like a deliberate effort to start an inflamed discussion to me.

I have a hard time believing you can buy an HD2 in a country the native language of which isn't supported by the phone itself. As for the rest of this point, you're simply comparing feature sets. We could write a huge list comparing the two platforms in terms of capability, power, flexibility, range of applications, supported functionality etc. I can save you a lot of work though by telling you right now the iPhone will come off worse.

I'm not experiencing this. Messages are all in the correct order both in conversation view and within individual conversations. Is this widespread?

This sort of crap makes me highly suspicious. Scrolling full desktop web pages is perfectly smooth on my own handset, at all zoom levels. I've only ever had a quick play with an iPhone. How does it do rendering full desktop content? You're also neglecting another important consideration. At any given level of zoom, the HD2 is rendering a significantly larger portion of the website due to it's higher resolution screen, the other huge advantage of which is readable content at a much lower zoom level than on the iPhone, which makes browsing desktop web pages a much more practical prospect.

Actually i've always thought that for experienced users of the desktop windows platform, windows mobile is perfectly sensible in terms of the way its menus are laid out, and the structure of option trees etc. It is far more complex than the iPhone user interface because it offers a far greater level of customization and flexibility. You can do more with it, and the UI needs to support that. I think you're mistaking complexity for "user friendlyness."

Now, it isn't very pretty, you can certainly lay that criticism at microsoft's door. Nor is it very finger-friendly out-of-the-box. The former is simply because ms have spent years designing this platform for business customers who don't really care so much about fancy UI - more about a functional one - and the latter is just a case of shifting technology - capacitive screens are relatively new in winmo devices.

I haven't compared any aps side by side, but the applications i need and use on my device work perfectly well.

There may or may not be too many bugs in HTCs first ROM. The comparison with apple however, is a flawed one. Apples platform is closed. It's a much easier task to control stability when you control all the code which is run on the platform. It's simply a function of adequate user testing. You're quite right to say bugs which are a consequence of HTCs own shell are unacceptable though. HTC have control over their own software and clearly haven't put sufficient time and effort into stability and testing. These are definitely things they need to improve upon. The Winmo platform itself is perfectly stable though. I had a kaiser for a long time. Never updated the rom, and it worked without incident for two years.

I think the whole tone of this thread is telling us the sort of user you are, and that isn't the sort of user who really wants the benefits a winmo phone can bring. The iPhone OS is orders of magnitude less powerful than windows mobile. It affords far less customisation, far less flexibility, far less user access to the underlying system, it can't multi-task, for a very long time it didn't even support copy/paste. You're forced to use the device in the way someone else has decided you should be using it. You have no option, no personal choice. This approach serves the mass market rather well, where most people don't really think of their phones as computers. They think of them as peripherals on the same sort of scale as mp3 players or digital cameras. Windows mobile is the opposite of this. Apple has chosen one compromise to support its target demographic, and microsoft has chosen a different one - power and flexibility at the expense of simplicity and occasionally stability.

Good software engineering is no black-art. Microsoft are just as capable of producing good software as apple. The degree to which the above compromise has to be adhered to is contingent on the amount of money you're prepared to throw at development.

Obviously the ideal world solution is the best of both worlds, but good luck with that, because it's a hard and expensive problem to solve. The HD2 is trying to be just that solution - winmo wrapped in a glossy easy-to-use skin. It isn't perfect as we have all seen, but it will get better.

This is a great case for communism. I don't agree with any of it. If you're trying to argue that consumer choice and open architectures are a bad thing, I'm afraid you wont get very far on here. I'm not interested in putting my software and hardware choices in the hands of dictators in the blind faith that they'll choose better than i could.

According to their own definition of "better." No thanks.

Eh? Language semantics do not a point make. I wish people debating on the internet would realise this.

Flexibility and ease of use are not mutually exclusive. Windows 7 is leagues ahead of any apple OS.