[Windows Phone 7 General] Shasarak:
I know I'm going to get my head bitten off for saying this, but in some ways I'm actually not that big a fan of HTC's phones. They're often ridiculously slow to incorporate new tech (such as faster CPUs). They have a very long track-record of failing to include adequate drivers on their phones, so that even when the hardware is respectable, the software cannot take advantage of it. They fail to include important software elements (compare, for example, the video playing applications on HTC phones with what you get on high-end Toshiba or Samsung devices). And they also have a very tiresome philosophy of treating their own products like feature-phones; if you grumble about the fact that some piece of third party software doesn't work properly on an HTC phone, they don't care - not even when the reason it doesn't work is because HTC has failed to include some important drivers; as far as HTC is concerned, any non-HTC software installed on your phone is not their problem, and they'd be happier if you didn't install 3rd party software on it at all. And (compared to Nokia, Samsung, or Sony Ericsson) the cameras are terrible! :)

And yet, I used to own a Touch Pro2, and I now own an HD2. Why? Because there are three very important things that HTC phones do have going for them.

1) They sometimes have exceptional hardware - not in terms of the internals (like the CPU and GPU), but in terms of the device form factor. The Touch Pro2 has the nicest hardware keyboard I've ever seen on a phone, for example; the HD2 has the nicest screen I've seen on a phone.

2) They do some interesting things with user-interface customisations. The most obvious example of this is Sense UI; but this also includes things like adding pinch-to-zoom support on the HD2.

3) The single biggest advantage HTC phones have, of course, is this forum. There are some very, very smart people here, and the work they produce can transform an HTC phone from mediocre into remarkable.

But... what's going to happen in the WP7S world? Innovative form factors will be a lot harder to achieve, partly because the platform is so locked down, but also because the minimum requirements are set so high. Large-scale customisations of the GUI will also be banned, so HTC WP7S phones can't have Sense UI on them any more. And as for this forum... well, how many keen WM6.x developers around here are likely to become WP7S developers? It seems like most of them are either planning to jump ship to Android, or get out of the free tweaks and utilities game and start selling apps for money through the WP7S marketplace. It's not at all clear that it will even be possible to flash custom ROMs onto a WP7S phone; hell, we may not even be able to edit the registry, for all we know; certainly there will no more .cab installs. So how much of a contribution will this forum be able to make to WP7S devices?

So, while things like the lack of drivers will hopefully no longer be an issue on WP7S phones from HTC (HTC will have no choice but to include them, and MS will write them, so there won't be so much of a problem with Qualcomm being difficult), it is hard to see what features those WP7S HTC devices will have which makes them stand out from the crowd in any meaningful way.

What do you think?