[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
WM6.5 in thd HD2 was pretty stable for me. I've never felt the need to run a cooked ROM on my HD2. Everything seemed to work as expected and the thing I liked about WM6.5 is that there really wasn't that much need for third-party applications, unless you were a gamer. Sense had Twitter and FB integration. There was an RSS Reader. Voice Command was easy to get. The Bing App gave TBT Navigation. Office Mobile. Perfect Exchange Support. Outlook Mobile was pretty good. Windows Live for Windows Mobile for Push Hotmail/Live Messenger.

It's pretty damn extraordinary how little you actually had to add to a Windows Mobile phone, at least a sense phone. But even when I had a Samsung Jack I never felt I needed to add much to it, if anything...

The HD2 came pre-loaded with Opera incl. Flash Lite as the default browser so there wasn't a huge deal with browsing, either.

Oddly, my HD2 gets much better battery life than my Vibrant, for some odd reason. And that's with letting apps use the GPS whenever they wanted, and having two email accounts (Exchange + Hotmail) getting Sync'd to it instead of one (Sense Sync's FB/Twitter/Weather/etc.).

I'm not talking about using an Auto-Killer. FroYo+ has a Task Manager built into it, sort of like Windows Mobile's Task Manager. Android has the same issue as Windows Mobile, which also managed processes in a "similar" manner (will shut stuff down if resources are needed).

Some apps do not exit when you back out of them, and there are multiple stock apps like Contacts and Music Player (12-20MB RAM used each) or the Browser (40-60+MB after a decent browsing session, especially if Flash was involved) which do not close after you back out of them, and there is no exit option.

FireFox for Android uses obscene amounts of RAM, but it has an Exit button, so it's not that big of a factor. When your phone slows down you can Exit it and restart it, or just Exit it when you're done.

For those stock Apps I mentioned, you need to go to the Task Manager to Force Close them. This is in addition to other processes running, BTW. Apps like WhatsApp, Trillian, PayPal, eBay, Exchange ActiveSync Client Service, some Bank and Airline Carrier Apps, etc. have services running in the background.

It can get to a point where the phone slows down, or you can get stalls when performing some tasks.

That is why Microsoft is favoring Tombstoning over full-on pre-emptive multi-tasking. It helps keep performance optimal, as well as preserving battery life (since most developers with a clue will standardize on Push). If you want to play Dungeon Defenders on a Galaxy S phone you have to go back to Windows 98 and "shut down all the stuff you don't need running" else the device won't have enough free RAM and leeway to run the game optimally/efficiently.

Smartphones are not desktops and laptops. They don't have either the resources or the horsepower to operate in a fashion mimicing a computer. That was the core issue with Windows Mobile. Microsoft treated the smartphone like a computer, and it's a bad idea... Symbian and to a lesser extent Blackberry did the same.

Another issue with Android is simply it does not look pretty and the UI, save for some ridiculously overspecced devices, does not perform as well as iOS and WP7 (or even WebOS on a Pre 2). By that, I mean beyond an HTC Sense Home screen. Most widgets look terrible, barring a couple clock/weather widgets and some widgets shipped with applications. Too many applications in the marketplace are catastrophically buggy (catastrophically as in causing your phone to lock up or reboot buggy), and applications simply don't look good.

Android also has generally bad battery life.

I don't have the will, want, or time to spend tweaking my phone. I just want a good user experience.