[Windows Phone 7 General] amb9800:
By default, apps have independent file stores, like WP7. If you want full control over file copying, opening local files with apps of your choice, etc., jailbroken apps give you that ability.

I've used Pocket PC and WM phones since 2003 (HTC Wallaby, Blue Angel, Touch Pro 2, and now HD2 as primary phones, and several others for testing) and an iPhone since the summer of 2007 (3G/3GS for testing).

The iPhone's materials and build quality are better than anything else around. Again, the HD2 is the first HTC phone to come close. In particular I have never come across a better-built phone than the iPhone 2G (which had an aluminum case).

Scratches? With HTC phones, you have a lot more to worry about than the level of polish on your Apple logo. My iPhone fell down a flight of stairs (after an initial 4 ft drop) without a case on, and it survived with barely a scratch at all, whereas one 3 ft drop on the T-Mo TP2 left gouges and scratches all over its soft plastic. After almost two years of use, my original iPhone 2G looked just like new, whereas every HTC phone looks heavily used after just a few months (slider mechanisms loosen, scratch up the sides of the keyboard, and/or fail), with paint flaking off (as in my TP2) and the like. There's no question the iPhone is much more resilient than something like a TP2.

And I'm not even talking about others like Samsung-- the Omnia II feels like a kid's toy from Walmart. When I received one for review this past summer, I thought I was looking at a dummy unit until it turned on. The Palm Pre, etc. are slightly better, but not in the league of the iPhone.

I'd say in terms of materials and build quality:

LG < Samsung < HTC other < HD2 = iPhone 3G/3GS < iPhone 2G

Again, the HD2 is the first HTC phone to come close to the iPhone, but having both of them sitting right here, they're at best roughly equivalent-- and that too, only because of the HD2's giant screen.

Battery cover-- Sure, the HD2's aluminum cover is a nice touch, but it's just about the most annoying thing on the planet otherwise (try opening it). I do prefer aluminum to plastic, but only a tiny part of the HD2 is aluminum-- the entire remainder of the phone is all just plain flat black plastic. Compare that to the iPhone 2G, which is entirely made of aluminum (except the antenna cover).

Camera-- the HD2 has higher resolution than the iPhone, but its images are not significantly better than that of the iPhone. It does have flash, but in exchange, the iPhone 3GS has far superior video recording. My HD2 struggles quite badly when trying to take a video in surroundings that aren't perfectly lit (where I don't want to flood the place with flash)-- it looks clearly like a low-frame-rate phone recording, whereas the 3GS is capable of producing much better video.

Display-- sure, the HD2 has a huge display, and its resolution is higher than the iPhone's-- that's partially why I picked it up. But the iPhone's screen is still more sensitive and better calibrated for finger input (the HD2 gets quite annoying at times, because things like WM's drop-down controls are now almost impossible to navigate without the keyboard's arrow keys), so it's a wash.

RAM size-- who are we kidding here? What matter is what you can do with that RAM (running heavy apps and quickly switching between them), and the iPhone wins out big-time here (particularly when jailbroken). The Touch Pro 2 has 256 MB RAM (HTC advertises it as 288 MB, but that includes the 32 MB in the baseband). Yet the iPhone 2G, with 128 MB, is able to multitask much better (jailbroken). My HD2 has 512 MB RAM (+ 64 in baseband), yet the iPhone 3GS is much smoother at multitasking (jailbroken).

The HD2 can barely handle a few apps before it starts to slow down and lag all over the place. Earlier today I wasn't even able to make any calls because (with just one Word doc open in the background) Sense slowed down to a point where it wouldn't do anything when I tapped on a number.

Sure, it's probably because T-Mobile's stock 6.5 ROM on the HD2 is horrible (the phone sometimes doesn't wake up after I turn off the screen, buttons sometimes don't work or lag severely, etc.), but there's currently no way to load custom ROMs onto the T-Mo HD2 (no version of HardSPL works), so all that hardware goes to waste.

Both out of the box and tweaked, the iPhone consistently works better than WM phones. On WM, you're occasionally excited by something cool you can do (like running Ubuntu on my TP2), but with a constant fear of what basic phone function will mysteriously bug out the next moment (or in the case of the TP2, how the case will start to fall apart).

Processor speed-- again, it's not the hardware as much as what you can do with it (see above), but even so, how is the iPhone's processor a weakness? It's got a 600 MHz ARM Cortex A8-- the only faster mobile CPU core on sale in the US is the 1 GHz Snapdragon in the HD2/N1, but it's a wash because the iPhone's GPU (PowerVR SGX535) is faster than Snapdragon's ATI Imageon Z430 GPU-- see here for a mobile CPU/GPU comparison.

Now let's talk about the more important factor than all the specs-sheet games, which is what you can do with the phone.

The iPhone has thousands and thousands of apps that aren't available on WM. And for a lot of them, it's not just a case of having to go to the browser to do something-- a lot of iPhone apps expose functionality not found in sites online. With the Zipcar app, for instance, you can quickly locate, book, and even unlock a Zipcar-- the latter's not something you can do through the web.

My HD2, like the iPhone 3GS, has a digital compass. Great. But what the heck can I use it for besides HTC's compass app? The iPhone, by comparison, has thousands of useful apps that use the compass for productive purposes, like augmented reality maps. This is a matter of APIs, and it's something MS is trying to fix in WP7, but the reality today is that only Apple, Palm, etc. offer rich APIs that developers can safely use to the fullest extent. You don't see very many top-rung 3D games on Android, for instance, because even though new Android phones have powerful GPUs, the OS is fragmented and Android devs are more likely to face a hardware + OS version without much 3D API support than with.

How about something like video playback? Well spec sheets would seem to indicate that the Snapdragon-powered HD2 should be a playback monster, with 720p support at decent bitrates. Yet in reality, the iPhone 3GS is much better in this regard-- my HD2 even has trouble playing back the 480p Transformers movie that it shipped with (stutters and pauses).