[HD2 General] matthewharmon102:
been following this thread from the start and it seems there are a lot of different opinions, but (and i comfess, i have skip-read some of the posts) has anyone factored in the age of all the OS's?

BEFORE READING THIS: i am not a programmer/developer, so if i have made points that are wrong on a technical level, then please correct me, but remember, opinion CANNOT be wrong!!

the way i see it, you kind of have a past, present and future thing going on. you have wm6.5, which is, in my opinion on its way out. i tried several diferent custom ROMs but the lack of apps and the unreliability that i experienced led me to try android.

android was a big change for me. i ran both WM 6.5 and android (android running from the SD card) and i found my self slowly running android more and more. recently (in the last 2 weeks) i have NAND installed android. i was running MDJ's desire HD roms, but i am now using the newer gingerbread roms (about to update to MDJ's new 2.5 release) and i have to say it is, for me, running very, very well.

the one problem that seemed to come up with android was lack of support for certain features. GPS has always been a bit of an issue, but also the buggyness of features such as 720p recording (or the camera in general in earlier builds), data use and usb teathering has meant that although android is the 'now' OS, it makes me think are we gaining anything different with each new build, or are we just enabling features that were already present in WM 6.5? (no disrespect to any dev's, you do amazing work!!)

so this leave me with WP7. i attended a the MS PDC confrence in 2010 (live stream from US), which focused on (amoung other things) WP7. annoyingly, US attendees got a free WP7 device (UK atendees did not :() but the person running the conference i attended had one. after having a quick look and a quick play, it seemed very impressive. it was nice to see a different way of presenting information, instead of the usual home screen with menus to apps. the lack of apps is what is putting me off at the moment, but as whith any new OS, the apps will come in time. MS have the right idea by providing the developer tools, including a simulator and 3-device license (this may have changed since i last looked) should get things going. students can also apply for a developer license for free, allowing submission of apps to the app store (again im not sure of the ins and outs of what is free and what isnt).

I must say, after reading the comments on here, i would like to try WP7. im going to look at a dual boot option between NAND android and WP7 on SD (or android on SD and WP7 NAND) if one exists, or id like to wait until that option does exist.

so i suppose my oder would be

1. Android 2.3.1

2. WM 6.5.5

3. WP7 (as i have not tried it yet)

one thing to bear in mind is that devs customise many WM 6.5 and android roms (im not sure about WP7, but i would suspect they do) so not every rom runs the same. saying android is 'laggy' is like saying that windows (or any other desktop os) is 'laggy'. there are so many factors that affect it. perhaps providing more information such as versions, free/available ram and internal storage, any overclocking applied would help justify your claims. beta/test versions of android and WP7 will be buggy, even final releases will have bugs and issues, but lets not forget that, whatever your preference, this community and the devs are keeing the HD2 alive, which HTC were perfectly happy to kill it off. i think looking at the devices that are out now, the HD2 was a test for the HD7 and the desire HD, to see if high spec, big screen phones would sell.

p.s to whoever said about the screen being unlocked to 16m colours. it was a limitation on wm6.5 (which was an update to 6.1, which in turn was an update to 6.0, all based on a similar kernal). in terms of unlocking it, it would depend on the hardware as well. i think the HD2 supports 16bit colours out of the box, but looking through the registry there is an option for 18bit or 24bit colour (16.7m) but if this works or not i dont know. so to answer your question, in theory it would be possible to enable wm6.5 to support higher colours, but how effective this would be would depend on many other factors such as drivers, hardware and manufacturer limitations. if the OS doesnt support it out of the box, then its unlikely the manufacturer will pay to install better hardware and go to the efford to enable it!

FYI, some apps that use DirectDraw (from my understanding) can overcome colour lmitations limitations providing the hardware supports