People talk about how this phone is not competitive, when HTC sold millions more phones than Apple. This phone is going to wipe the floor with the iPhone 2, which from the 2.0 firmware we can see will be almost exactly the same as iPhone 1, but with 3G.
First, HTC has been doing the phone thing for over a decade while Apple has been at it 10.5 months so I think it's a little unfair to be drawing conclusions about superiority based on phones sold. As far as what iPhone 2 is going to be, it's anybody's guess -- you really don't know anything about it. My guess is it will be even sexier than before.
That being said, the firmware is going to do amazing things for the iPhone's existing user base that I feel we won't really know until we start experiencing -- by that I mean the Apps store. An amazing thing happens when you let creative people have a shot at doing something great for a device they love: they do some awesome things and they do them by the thousands. Konfabulator and Apple's own Dashboard have shown us that people will write the neatest software with the most compelling graphics for the computer community. The WIDGETS for both Konfabulator and Dashboard number in the thousands.
To me, the iPhone's appeal to write software for it is a magnitude greater than for the computer. Over time, I believe that the iPhone will be able to do just about anything one could want or need. Up till now, no other phone has really given me that impression and I've owned a BB.
When people do a side by side comparison this phone will look a lot more interesting than an iPhone. The weather app will look better, the text messaging and e-mail interface will look better, YouTube will look better, even the clock will look better. The phone itself will be more pocketable.
That's your opinion, one that you're entitled to. Perhaps it will. Certainly the hundreds of people who bought a Zune this year knew about the Apple lineup of iPods and chose to go with the MS player. Good. Competition is good for business and for the consumer. Also, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder too. Don't forget that. I honestly like the back of the Touch Diamond. The prisms are nice. The front is a tad too iPhone to go unnoticed, but from here on out, touch phones are going to be looking a lot alike with big glass fronts. I like the higher resolutions and feel this is great. It just means higher resolutions for iPhone users in the future. How far in the future, who knows. It is known, however, that the iPhone software as it is now can playback back video that is twice is resolution which should say something about where Steve wants to go with this.
The iPhone is now a very common phone, and people want something different. HTC has delivered.
With less 10M iPhones sold, it is hardly common. I have only seen a couple in the wild besides my own. People hear a lot about it but that's not the same thing. As it becomes available in more countries and as Apple rolls out new devices and new features, all at better prices, I think you'll see that the people won't consider it common at all and will be buying them faster than you're giving Apple credit for.
