[General Topics] eaglesteve:
No, I'm not working for Apple

I'll refrain from responding negatively and be as factual as I can here. This post is just for people who might have doubt on whether I work for Apple or if I'm here to sell iPhone.

My story here are supported by links to old posts and forums which I could not possibly fabricate to disguise my true identity and background. Click on all the links, and you will see.

I had always love mobile computing devices. Started playing all kinds of programmable devices way back in mid 70. Love writing programs to do my own things on them. Started using Pocket PC in late 90, and had used just about every generation of pocket PC, but started using mobile devices which can make calls when Athena was first released. HTC refused to sell it in Australia but it didn't deter me from importing it from overseas. Loved winmo 5 dearly. Love the hugh screen. Spend lots of time networking with other like-minded users on many forums, not just XDA. All my friends said I must be working for HTC and microsoft to be so consumed by my passion towards my phone. Was happy to write long reviews like this because I genuinely felt that it was the best phone available. iPhone was at the stage of infancy then, and I absolutely refused to use it then. This post kind of reflects my attitude toward iPhone then. If time is to wind back, I would still have said the same thing then. I said then to another poster who ask me if I would switch from Athena to iPhone:

My reasons for rejecting the 1st gen iPhone were all valid and fact based.

I did try my best to help others overcome the problem they have in using Athena, and the way others see me then could perhaps be summarised in this post, where the OP said that:

So, I went about merrily using my Athena, spent lots of time installing cooked ROMs, and making whatever contribution to help fellow Athena users I could, and didn't think too much about iPhone. Then I began to notice that many of the extremely active contributors to cooked ROM projects became very silent. One such contributor was a person I greatly respected, as without him, we would not have go the first cooked ROM project going. I bumped into him one day on the Blackstone forum, making this post. I was just about to buy an HD when I read his post, and I wrote this.

You can see from the above post that while I'm a die hard winmo user, I'm also by nature very open minded to better solution.

I appreciated the input of those people who had experienced both WM and iPhone as long as the information they gave could potentially help me. This post reflects my reaction to the posters who were in favor of iPhone. On that thread, people who like iPhone were abused as usual, but I was lucky to have an old friend who were not afraid to meet the abuser head on and to continue provide help to me. His stand was firm yet polite, as you can see in his post here. He pointed us to a few places where I would do further research on iPhone. I went away, did my research, and came back concluding that there are a few areas which iPhone would not meet my requirements in this post. One of such requirement was a golfing software, where I thought iPhone didn't an application for. Then, after more research, I was pleased to find out that it actually did have such an application, on this post. I was able to accurately identify the lack of navigation software and office document software as the major weakness of iPhone as compared to HTC Touch HD. The only solution with regards to the lack of iPhone-based navigation software then was to carry two devices, and I rejected that solution in my post. However, I was sincere in wanting to see if Iphone was really a better phone, so I played with it in the Telco shop, and since I had never used a capacitive touch screen device before, I actually came back negative towards it, and to that, my deal friend said to me:

To cut the long story short, I ended up buying an HTC HD.

After buying it, I met a friend with iPhone and told him that iPhone is too limiting, blah blah, blah. I wanted to show him that iPhone couldn't play flash video and mine HD could. So, I went to the youtube and asked him to do the same. I click the video and the phone became laggy and did'nt recover from there, while his played the video smoothly immediately. I was shell shocked. How could this be? I thought iPhone does not support flash video! Then, my son asked me to buy him a iPod. My son used to play games on my Athena before that but I wanted to show off all the fancy games on the HD to him. He said to me, Dad, that's a lousy game. Watch mine on the iPod. It was the same game on two platform, and the difference is too far that my little kid could tell there's a world of difference between games on winmo and iPod. I then used his iPod for web browsing. The smoothness, stability, speed, and the extremely extremely beautiful user interface and ease of use just blew me away.

To but the long story short, I bought an iPhone.

Sadly, within 3 hours, I regreted buying it, mainly due to the inability to do multitasking on the stock OS. I was debating whether to return it, but then decided to give it a go anyway. I then jailbreak my phone, and the rest is history. It could do so much more than winmo, so much more customizable, flexible, stable, and useable. The only real problem I had after switching over initially was the fact that there was no TomTom on iPhone then and I used my HD for that. Sure there were alternative GPS available on iPhone but I wanted TomTom and nothing else. Luckily, TomTom was soon released as well, and I was the happiest phone owner since....

I was happy, until Steve Jobs made the change to the 3GS bootrom to make jailbreaking difficult, and required tethering. That didn't affect me as my 3GS had the old bootrom, but I was concerned that the 4th gen iPhone could have the same tethered jailbreak requirement or worst could not be jailbroken. I said to myself, I don't think I want to be able to reboot only when there is a computer. What if I'm travelling? What if I have to switch it off on the flight? This will mean that upon touch down I can't use the phone unless I'm tethered to a notebook! This means that I am either being forced to use it stock, or use it with tethered jailbreak, both solutions were not happy ones. Then, I read about HTC HD2 and was told that Android will be released for it. Turned out to be false info, and gave up on HD2. Then Supersonic came along, and my quest for a better phone resume once again.

Is it a better phone? I had absolutely no idea. When I moved from winmo to iPhone, the iPhone folks were nice and helpful. Now, when I try to do the same exploration, I get all kinds of abuses. Apparently there is a group of members whose sole mission in life is to destroy all iPhone users in this planets. They do not seem interested in talking reason or reading anything written by others. Their sole interest is to paint anyone with different ideas on phone as iPhone whoring, as people lacking objectivity, when they are really the one guilty of whoring their own phone, refusing to acknowledge that another solution might be better. They derive lots of pleasure forming a pack of hunting wolf devouring every piece of flesh of any iPhone lover. Strange mental makup.

I'm still hoping to find people with Android experience willilng to help me in my journey.

P.S. I have not responded to some of the last few posts yet, but will be doing it soon. Be patient. Just came back from golf, so that's why a bit of inactivity for the last 12 hours. Some of the recent posts were designed to be just provocative and disruptive, so there is no need for me to respond to them. I have learned a lot from the more helpful members on this thread so far, and based on the feedback, there are people who benefits from the thread and were glad to see information they have not seen before. There are still many more areas that I like to see compared, including phone usage, etc. I also welcome any suggestions on any areas that people think are important to them for comparision purposes when choosing their next phone.