[Nexus One Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] maxawesome:
I will be returning my Nexus One to HTC for repair/replacement due to a faulty power button.

My only real gripe with the phone itself is that the power button is used to sleep & wake the device by default. There is no single button more important than the power button, imho, and it was a poor choice for HTC to design it so.

I take that back, the other huge gripe I have about the phone is HTC's decision to embed the radio antenna at the base of the phone where it is covered by the meaty part of the hand while holding the phone to your ear. Maybe they just assumed everyone would use the headset or bluetooth, but I don't. It is annoying to see it drop a bar of signal because I'm holding the phone naturally in the palm of my hand.

Once I get my replacement phone, I will not be unlocking or rooting it. I will be keeping it intact (and possibly sealed) until this summer, when I can see the next gen iPhone in action, and possibly as late as November, as Windows Phone 7 is already shaping up to be pretty slick.

Here are the things I want in my phone:

1. Just works. Most important thing. Dialer, Contacts, Bluetooth, etc. These things should just be a flick of the finger away.

2. Feature-rich. Integrated search, multi-touch browsing and maps, GPS nav, Native Internet Tethering (bugs the **** out of me that Android doesn't offer this OOB still).

3. Business AND pleasure - don't make me choose between personal email and contacts and enterprise features. HTC has saved Google's ass on this one with their amazing Sense framework from the Desire ROM. Exchange with ActiveSync is a MUST. Also where's the love for Blackberry mail server?? I guess Android is not for law firms? /shrug

4. When something says "Full web browsing", if it doesn't include Flash, HTML5, or Silverlight support, that's false advertising.

Other stuff:

I'm starting to write my apps for Windows Phone 7 SDK, I have been writing apps for the iPhone OS (now looking at iPhone OS 4 beta SDK), and I have written a few for Android.

The Windows Phone 7 SDK using Visual Studio 2010 is bread and butter for me -- its perfect. Working with Xcode on the iPhone SDK always felt clunky, and inefficient. Working with Eclipse on the Android SDK has come a *long* way since I started two years ago, and is much easier now than then.

But VS 2010 makes writing apps for WinPhone7 dead simple. I've already ported across my apps from the iPhone and Android platforms without any 3rd party cross-compilers, and it took a very short period of time.

These days it is the ecosystem that drives the market for handheld devices. iTunes made iPod what it is. The iPhone App store with 180,000+ apps made the iPhone platform what it is (we all know it certainly was nice hardware when it was released, but is definitely dated now). The Android Market has been a blessing and a curse for Android. Many solid apps, but no unified Android platform to develop for (to be addressed in Froyo -- or so they say). No single set of hardware to develop for. It's literally like shooting at a moving target. And developing with open source tools is fun for a while, but gets tiresome when there is so much more effort involved in some of the simplest things.

So that's basically where I am personally at. I love my N1. I will be getting it replaced due to hardware failure. I may not use the replacement, and may sell it instead to finance a Windows Phone 7, or possibly (but not likely) an iPhone over the course of the summer.

And before anyone calls me a hater on any grounds: I have used WinMo in the past, I am using Android now, I have good friends who use iPhones and I hold nothing against them for that. I develop my code on a Windows 7 machine, and I am typing this message on my Mac, which boots Win7, OSX, and Ubuntu.

Lastly, I will say this. There is a sad saying in business that "good enough beats best." This means that despite the technology or ability out there to produce unquestionably excellent goods and services, those which are "good enough" and produce a higher profit margin will win. We will likely always feel like we are being forced to accept mediocrity, but fortunately, the devices we have today will still be outshined, outclassed, and outdone by nearly everything to come in the future.