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Getting an HTC Desire HD -- Android Phone

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Renegade:
Well, I've decided on getting an Android phone. It was tough to come to that conclusion. Here's a bit of my reasoning.

* iOS - My wife has an iPhone, so I can use that for iPhone development. Rules out iOS phones.
* Windows 7 - While Windows 7 looks promising, and I love .NET and know they support it, there's not enough devices for it out there. (I plan to develop for whatever platform I buy.)
* Symbian - Symbian? Huh? No. I do not smoke crack nor am I mentally handicapped.
* bada - The Samsung Wave - a bada phone... Man... I would LOVE to get one. I know the bada platform inside out, and it ROCKS! (I have done a lot of work for Samsung on the platform.) Sigh... I know too much and can't wait for bada 1.2 to come out. But I need a phone now... (The possibilities in bada are phenomenal.)
* Palm - Like Symbian, I was not dropped on my head repeatedly as an infant.
* webOS - What OS?
* Blackberry - I'm not really interested in them. Meh. That's it.
* What else is there?
* Android - This is the only truly viable platform at the moment. bada will be an up and comer, while Windows 7 will make inroads as well.

So the HTC Desire HD is now available in Australia, and is pretty much the slickest phone out there. It's got specs that will last for a while, and that gives me a few years to work with it. The screen still isn't as good as the iPhone 4 screen, but it's better than others.


Now, is anyone else using Android out there? I'd like to hear what things people like or don't like about it.

Having looked at different phones, if I were to pick one simply out of UI and beauty, it would come down to the Samsung Galaxy S or the Samsung Wave or the HTC Desire HD. (I've currently got a severely allergic reaction to iOS.)

I plan on going to pick it up today/tomorrow (depending on your time zone).

Any last words of caution, encouragement or whatever? :)

phitsc:
I've ordered a Desire HD as well. Been waiting for it for over a month now. I hope I should be getting it sometime within the next two weeks.

I have been using (still am, actually) a Windows Mobile 6 phone until now. But the UI is really not up to date any more and I'm not using any of the business features really. I considered Windows Phone 7, but just think it's too new. Maybe for the next phone after the Desire HD.

Why the Desire HD? I've been looking at the Samsung Galaxy S, but it really looks too much like an iPhone 3GS, but all in plastic. That might make it very light, I agree, but it just looks cheap I think. I also like HTC sense and didn't read much good about Samsung's Android 'addendum'.

The Desire HD might be big, maybe almost too big (I've never actually had one in my hands yet). I actually might have preferred the Desire Z, i.e. the one with the slide-out keyboard. But its specs. are disappointing for a new phone.

Deozaan:
I really love my Android phone. Unfortunately I was (unwittingly) an early adopter (I have the G1, the first Android phone in the USA) and the hardware inside just wasn't made for all the new Android stuff.

I highly recommended Android to my family and 3 of my family members now own a Droid X. Unfortunately with the X, Verizon did some stupid crap with the UI, integrating Facebook with it. So all your facebook friends show up in your contact list when you try to find someone to call. You can filter them out, but it's not done by default. And strangely, one of the features I most loved about my phone--the fact that any contact you added on your phone would sync with your Gmail contacts, and vice versa--doesn't happen with the Droid X.

Anyway, I still highly recommend that Android, but I'm nervous about it since the phone companies slap their own crappy stuff on top of the OS/UI.

For what it's worth, I'm running a custom firmware that allows me to get Android 2.2 on my phone (running Vanilla it can only handle 1.6) as well as adding many more improvements and I love it. It's called CyanogenMod. But as I said before, the G1 wasn't really built to handle it all, so on my old phone it runs a little slow. I'm sure on a modern phone if you didn't like the slapped on UI crap you could run CyanogenMod very nicely.

Eóin:
I recently installed Android on my HTC HD2, which was a WinMob 6.5 phone, but the excellent hackers over at xda-developers have managed a near feature complete port. I've been so impressed with Android that I use it as my daily OS. Certainly when I get my next phone it'll be native Android from the start. The build I'm running is based on CyanogenMod like Deozaan.

You'll be getting yourself a Desire HD at the right time too, it's just be permrooted so you can now install custom firmware.

tsaint:
Got a desire hd last weekend and it replaced a samsung galaxy i55503 which I gave to a friend. She really liked the galaxy until she saw and played with the hd.
Now she keeps grabbing for the hd :(
  Anyway, so far the only thing I wasn't happy with was the lack of inbuilt proxy settings which i need for work. (I thought I'd read that that had changed from 2.1->2.2 but I was mistaken)
I did find a proxy app eventually, so now I have absolutely no complaints. It's GREAT!

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