[HD2 General] Snarksneeze:
Rant

[RANT=1]

I hate Microsoft. The company and 99.9% of their so-called "products". Yeah, so they brought the idea of "User Friendly" to the masses, but overall they are evil and uncaring of the feelings of their conquests (read: people who bought their product already).

My problems with Microsoft can be traced back to the way they deliberately fixed it so that files created by previous versions of Office Documents could not be opened by the newer versions and vice versa. This forced the business community to purchase the newer versions in order to keep up with the rest of the community and this in turn forced the private sector to follow suit.

This hatred has gone so far since 2001 that I actually dropped Windows altogether and only run Linux (openSUSE baby!) on my personal computer.

But then there is the other 0.1% of their products that I just can't get enough of. Like the XBOX360. God, I love that thing. Paired with my 52" 1080p LCD, the games will blow you away. Of course, I come from the "Atari" generation, so I may be a little more easily impressed.

And of course Windows Mobile. No, I really don't like seeing the "Windows" icon on my phone, considering my aversion to MS in general, but even I have to grudgingly admit that this is the very best phone OS on the market (Yes, I have had the iPhone, the G1 and the myTouch).

That being said...

[RANT=0]

Saying "The Best" or "The Worst" is mostly a matter of personal opinion, which can change over time.

I remember looking on in envy as the rich-types walked around sporting their brand-new StarTac phones. It was the smallest and coolest cell phone in the history of cell phones. And it cost a cool grand. Yeah, $1,000 for a phone from the analog era.

They called that phone "The Best" in every news article that popped out for nearly a year. But that year marched on...

The iPhone has had a long run (if you count the 4 different versions as the same phone like the media tends to) and has enjoyed unprecedented popularity thus far. To me, this goes beyond the fanboy stage and directly into StarTac phase, where everyone wants one because everyone else has one. But if the iPhone was a POS, no one would buy it. You have to be good to keep popularity, not just new and exciting.

On to the HD2: I love this phone. It is by far the best phone I have ever owned, and I owned the StarTac (bought 2nd-hand two years later, but it was MINE!) :P

It took me nearly a week to get my pudgy fingers trained to use the phone properly. I even built a stylus for it from a ink pen and a sew-on snap, but now it's responding perfectly.

I still have my Wing, my wife uses it now. i had my Kaiser for over a year and would still be using it if it hadn't been the victim in the infamous Bathtub Incident of '09. My TouchPro2 is likewise still in the house, albeit in the nefarious hands of my evil sister-in-law. My Dash is somewhere in a drawer upstairs, waiting for the day my daughter grows up enough to graduate from her iPod Touch (2g).

In the meantime, my iPhone, G1 and myTouch are all out and in the hands of the less-fortunate (read: Craigslist).

I don't plan to retire the HD2 for a long time. Unless of course I brick it, then I'm hoping that Windows Phone 7 doesn't suck as bad as I think it will. If it does, I may just have to move on to Android.

After all, I am a Linux fanboy...