[HD2 General] dcoales:
I've been a HD user since they first came out and had WinMo for years before that. I'm now trying to decide between and HD2 and an iPhone. I keep getting tempted by the iPhone but so far have resisted. My reasons for wanting an iPhone are down to a few specific areas:

1: The media playback experience is much better. I've tried CorePlayer, S2P and currently use Nitrogen but I still find the iPhone implementation to be slicker and you can control the player with the headphone remote (the winmo workarounds for this are slightly cumbersome if they work at all).

2: I live in the UK and bbc iplayer on the iphone is an order of magnitude better than on winmo. To be fair this isn't due to any greatness of the iphone but because the bbc makes a better stream available for the iphone than they do for other plaforms. I find this a common frustration - 3rd parties provide better support for iphone/android than winmo.

3: Safari intelligently spots that videos embedded in some of my favourite tech sites are available on youtube and if I click on them it opens the youtube viewer to run them. Once I'm finished it takes me back to the browser where I left off. I know you can get flash lite working in Opera to play videos but I've tried it and it's just too laggy to be any good. Of course flash 10.1 is supposed to be coming to WinMo this year so maybe that will change things here. I hope so.

4: Many companies who make apps for multiple platforms (or at least for the apps that I use) seem to make slightly better versions for iPhone. A case in point is Evernote. I use it all the time and the iphone version seems much better (in fact Evernote has stopped working for me on wm 6.5.3). You can save important notes locally which the winmo version doesn't support. Salesforce have an iPhone app, so does Webex (my company is a big webex user).

5: SMS texting seems much better on the iPhone but this is a minor point which tells me I've run out of the main issues.

So why haven't I bought an iPhone then (other than the one for my daughter) ? There are only a few barriers left for me. Interestingly screen resolution isn't one of them. I really thought it would be but after using my daughter's iPhone for a short while I didn't really find it a huge problem. Text on the browser isn't as crisp and gorgeous but it's still perfectly readable. So I find screen resolution to be more about aesthetics than function and the difference in look doesn't worry me too much (maybe that's because with my 40+ year old eyes nothing looks that crisp any more). The real problems for me are:

1: No text reflow in Safari. This on its own is probably a showstopper for me. I access our company intranet via my phone pretty regularly and Opera does a great job of reflowing various text columns so that I can read without scrolling left and right. Safari doesn't reflow at all so by the time I've zoomed in so that I can read the text I can't actually read the paragraph without manically swiping backwards and forwards. Basically it's almost unusable in any real way for this specific use case (which is important for me).

2: There are a couple of apps on WinMo which I really love and need to find their equivalent on iPhone. I really, really like AlReader. It's a brilliant yet simple ebook reader which handles a wide variety of formats really well. I have a lot of books in txt and rtf format and Alreader is perfect for them. I've heard of Stanza on the iPhone but have yet to see if it stacks up. I also really like YomoMedia an RSS and Podcast aggregator/player. There are a lot of RSS readers on iPhone I just haven't had the time to check them out yet.

3: I've heard from friends that have the iPhone 3G that battery life sucks and that they have to find a charger about 2 thirds of the way through the day. This probably means they use their phones a lot (which actually bodes well implying that there are lots of good reason for using it) but it's still a worry for me as I'm out and about a lot and need my phone to last from dawn till bedtime on a single charge. I don't know what the 3GS batter life is like though.

Things I'm not that bothered about include the "flexibility" of the winmo platform. Don't get me wrong I flash my phone about every two weeks, just to try out new features and hopefully speed things up, and have tried all the various replacement shells and they are great. They're just not essential for me. I can't think of a single piece of functionality that I've gained from this "flexibility" that would be significant enough to add to my list of barriers to change. Equally I'm also not that bothered by the size of the iPhone app store. I've browsed through it many times looking for interesting apps but rarely do I find anything that I would find essential and use long term. Most I would download out of interest for a quick play and stop using after a short while. A fun way to pass some time but not vital. There are a few specific apps on iPhone which tempt me (as I mention above) but the sheer number is not very relevant.

So why did I take the time to write all this (besides the fact that I have too much time on my hands). Well I really am trying to make a decision here and writing it down helps clarify things.

My final conclusion is that if anyone can show me a way to enable any sort of reflow while browsing in Safari then my major reason for not switching will have gone and I will probably jump in order to get the benefits in the first list.

If not then I will hang around and see what promises are made at WMC in a couple of weeks. Actually that's close enough I'll hang around anyway.