[HD2 General] Shasarak:
You're bound to think Windows Mobile is wonderful if you've never used any of its rivals. You need to spend some time on an iPhone 3GS, and then on a high-end Android phone (the Google Nexus One, for example) to get a balanced opinion.

As LordLugard points out, the HD2 is (in many respects) the best Windows Mobile phone out there; and it achieves this by compensating for, or simply hiding, many of the OS' deficiencies. It's a bit like a well-laid-out house with a monster lurking in the cellar - so long as you stay upstairs, you're fine. ;)

Most of the day-to-day operation on an HD2 is not controlled directly by Windows Mobile, but has been skinned by HTC as part of its "Sense UI" front-end. If you ever have to venture beneath that, then things get much uglier. For example, go onto the settings tab, Data Services, and click ActiveSync. This gets you into the SenseUI screen for ActiveSync settings; looks quite nice, very finger-friendly. But you'll notice this is incomplete: there's no way to set the Peak Times. To do this you need to go Start Menu, Tools, ActiveSync, Menu, Schedule. Now you're in the default Windows Mobile screen for controlling the same settings (as opposed to the Sense UI skin). Notice the immediate visual difference, and how difficult it is to click the checkboxes accurately with your finger? Raw Windows Mobile is like that all the way through; it's just that HTC has managed to hide it most of the time.

Performance is another issue. Windows Mobile 6.5 is based on the Windows CE 5.2 kernel - which hasn't been seriously updated in 5 or 6 years. That means core OS operations are coded in such a way that they cannot take full advantage of any CPU that was designed more recently than that. This means that Windows Mobile always runs much slower than competing OSes on the same hardware. It also (for other reasons) is a memory hog. Again, you don't notice this so much on an HD2, because the Snapdragon processor is fast enough, and there's enough memory, that even Windows Mobile generally doesn't slow it down too much. But there are exceptions. If you look at the specifications for HTC's not-quite-released-yet Bravo phone, for example, this runs on very similar hardware to the HD2 (also based on the Snapdragon chipset) but it offers playback of 720p video clips, and the ability to capture 720p video using the camera. The reason the HD2 can't do is because it's running Windows Mobile.

There are general usability issues, too. Notice how many "tweaks" are advertised on this forum that require specially written utility programmes or registry edits to enable? On other OSes you generally don't need to do this: everything works in a sensible way as soon as you take the phone out of the box. Windows Mobile phones are very much ongoing projects - it takes weeks or even months to get them working the way you want. If you're the sort of person who enjoys that, great. :) And, arguably, if you are an inveterate tweaker, WinMo offers a higher degree of customisability. But many people prefer a phone that just works; and Android and iPhone do a much better job of that.

There are many other issues, too; the complete lack of multi-touch support in the OS is an obvious one.