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Getting an HTC Desire HD -- Android Phone

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Darwin:
* 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.)
-Renegade (November 10, 2010, 07:50 AM)
--- End quote ---

I just bought an HTC 7 Surround and love it. Love it. L-O-V-E it  :-*

I've never had a smartphone before, so there is no cross-platform learning curve, which I suspect helps. I was actually a breath away from choosing either an iPhone 4 or an HTC Desire when I thought to ask if the store had any Windows 7 phones (they weren't in any evidence anywhere) and the sales rep pulled this out and handed it to me. Love at first swipe.

FWIW, I spent a lot of time playing with the other two phones and liked them both. The iPhone was definitely the easier to navigate and use, but I can see the attraction of Android. My only major quibble with the Windows Phone 7 OS is that there is no syncing with Outlook?! C'mon! Apple does this really well with the iPod/iPhone. I suspect/fervently hope that this is coming in an update soon...

EDIT: correct a few typos/missing words for clarit... Don't even have the excuse of having typed the above on my new phone, cuz I didn't...

Darwin:
 :-[ Neglected to mention above that the irony of my endless ranting against HAVING to use iTunes with an iPhone/iPod Touch and the fact that I've bought a phone with pretty much the same limitation (I MUST use Zune software with the Windows Phone 7 device) isn't lost on me...

FWIW, the Zune software is pretty slick. I haven't explored it fully - if it will play my DVD's properly I'll probably rip WMP off my system - but it seems good, so far. In fairness to Apple, this is what I had planned to do if I decided to go the iPhone route. Note, however, that I am surprised that Zune was deemed necessary with WMP installed by default on all Windows machines. I suppose it must have to do with the Apps store. BTW, the apps store keeps growing everytime I visit. There's even a fair amount of free stuff that looks OK.

Now, the important stuff:

I just rebooted my computer and note that there are three Zune services installed but that none of them are running and that there is one Zune exe running (Zunelauncher.exe) and that it is using 2 MB of Private Set memory (7MB Working Set). I didn't check what was running at system start with iTunes installed last time I had it (about a month ago).

Renegade:
I had 2 things against being forced to used iTunes.

1) It's simply miserable, horrible to use.
2) It's nothing more than a store front masquerading as software.
3) Goto 1.

How's the Zune software compared to iTunes?

I've not done anything more than recharge my phone yet.

What I really wish is that the hardware companies would create SDKs for their products and put out a basic version that gives you most everything you need to sync your phone and back it up and load some files into it, then let 3rd parties work with the SDK to create rich sets of functionality and specialized versions for business and the like. It would take effort to put out an SDK like that, but it's not that hard.

Darwin:
Zune is completely different - GUI-wise - from iTunes or WMP. It shares some GUI elements with WMC (which I also tore out of Windows 7, mostly because I never used it) but has two GUI modes. On the one hand, there is the screen that appears when you launch the program from its icon (ie without plugging the phone/Zune player in):

Getting an HTC Desire HD -- Android Phone

This is the "Quickplay" screen and it function as the media player. Clicking on any of the links in the upper left takes you to a different GUI. Here's the Collections tab:

Getting an HTC Desire HD -- Android Phone

I scrolled down to show two things - what the software does with unknown album/absent album artwork files and what happens to some, but not all, unicode file names (note Johann Pachebel... the rest of the name was in hangul EDIT: with the smaller pic sizes, you'll need to zoom into the image to see it) and yet it handles other unicode, for example the Chinese below. In this regard, it functions no differently than WMC/WMP/iTunes. I suspect it has to do with the tagging, but playing around with files in the past, I've discovered neither rhyme nor reason behind WHY this happens.

Getting an HTC Desire HD -- Android Phone

Selecting a file to play gives the player:

Getting an HTC Desire HD -- Android Phone

One the other hand, interacting with the phone looks like this:

Getting an HTC Desire HD -- Android Phone

All of the same tabs are available BUT they now refer to what is located on the phone. This is REALLY obvious because the name of the phone stays to the left of the screen and at the bottom is the graphic of a pc. If you click on that you go back to the collection stored on the PC.

I just tried to play a DVD using Zune but it looks like a no-go. DVD's files are not listed in the file types handled by Zune, so it looks like I'm going to be keeping WMP around  :(

Getting an HTC Desire HD -- Android Phone

Sorry, my attempt to show the GUI is ham-fisted at best (I'm not good at this!) and my intention to show the two GUI modes discretely  is an epic fail, but I hope you get the idea.

In sum, I haven't really used the software enough to form a definite opinion about it. It's no worse than iTunes; whether it is any better remains to be seen.

EDIT: uploaded more reasonably sized screenshots and clarified a couple of points...

phitsc:
:-[ Neglected to mention above that the irony of my endless ranting against HAVING to use iTunes with an iPhone/iPod Touch and the fact that I've bought a phone with pretty much the same limitation (I MUST use Zune software with the Windows Phone 7 device) isn't lost on me...
-Darwin (November 13, 2010, 08:22 AM)
--- End quote ---

Besides price, this is the main reason why I didn't go for an iPhone 4.

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