Dave Burrows – Tech / iPhone Blog – Technical Evangelist

Day 1 of using the HTC Desire (Android) and the HTC HD2 (WinMobile) as a replacement for the iPhone have been a lot better than I had originally thought it would be.

HTC Desire (Android)
- Has most of the apps I have installed onto the iPhone
- Facebook works well although doesn’t show my inbox for some reason
- Seesmic is a great Twitter experience on Android as it is on other platforms
- Android widgets work really well, love the ability to customise the desktops
- Gmail access works well although the Opera implementation of m.google.com is very poor (same on iPhone)
- Exchange Sync email/calendar/contacts works as well as the iPhone
- Friend Stream is good, but if you have Facebook and Twitter and follow a lot of people on Twitter it will override your Facebook contacts so I had to disable Twitter access, which was a shame
- Evernote works really well for all of my note taking
- Palringo works well for all of my messenger needs (same as iPhone)
- CoPilot (Satellite Navigation) works just as good as it does on iPhone
- Unfortunately no Skype access but I have installed Fring to do this instead
- Market Place is good, has lots of apps, hate the mixed $ vs £, I’m in UK so should just show £
- Market Place has a lot of apps but no where near as many as iPhone which is a real shame

HTC HD2 (WinMobile)
- Only have a few apps installed
- Facebook works well (uses same Facebook app I was running on WM6.1)
- Peep is the Twitter client, works okay but severely limited, e.g. doesn’t use Twitter lists
- No Seesmic on WinMobile Market
- No widget support (HTC TouchFLO 3D instead)
- Gmail access works well although the Opera implementation of m.google.com is very poor (same on iPhone)
- Exchange Sync email/calendar/contacts works as well as the iPhone
- Disappointed that although HTC built into TouchFLO the Twitter app, there’s no Facebook app
- No Evernote in the Windows Market unfortunately so I can’t scan through my notes
- No Palringo for my messenger needs (very disappointing)
- CoPilot (Satellite Navigation) works just as good as it does on iPhone and comes with a Free 15 day trial
- Unfortunately no Skype access or Fring access (Very Disappointing)
- Market Place is only just starting out so not a lot of apps or games there, but more are being added.

Overall if I were to use one of these devices as a complete iPhone replacement, the closest one that would come to this is the HTC Desire (Android). The Desire comes very close to the iPhone experience, unfortunately although the HD2 looks really nice with the bigger screen and the TouchFLO UI it’s severely lacking third party applications from the Windows Market.

The thing I’m struggling with is the keyboard, the keyboard implementation both on the the HTC Desire and HTC HD2 are identical. I find the keys too close together, although it’s nice to have the vibration feedback on typing each character, I would have preferred an audible alert because I can see if you do a lot of typing the vibration (although small), will deplete your battery more. I also keep finding that I’m typing the wrong characters. Trying to reposition the cursor to go back and retype to correct a word one or more words prior is real finicky on both HTC Desire and HTC HD2. I really thing Apple have got this 100% right with the iPhone. Also the iPhone’s Copy / Paste is much better than on the HTC Desire and HTC HD2.

These are my initial observations after only 1 day, I will continue using both devices to see whether I would be able to use these as an iPhone replacement, but the iPhone so far is still the clear winner both from ease of use, but also beacuse of the sheer amount of iPhone App/Games that are available int he AppStore.