Do I hate it? No way, even in stock form it was pretty good. It's certainly not the prettiest OS and having to cover it up just to make it even slightly usable/desirable means it's a joke, but now with 6.5 custom ROMs available I can get the latest 6.5 versions that look a lot nicer and work better (and are steadily improving). Messaging app, for example, looks really ugly when loading and popping up the keyboard results in an ugly loading sequence, but I get over it. Still, it is what I'd call stable even when running lots of programs at the same time, and my battery will easily last a day through heavy usage and two days or more with light usage. Crappy battery life must be an HTC thing.
I think the iPhone is cool and I've looked into getting a used 2G but to me, it's a fairly expensive locked down toy. Applications are out there, just spread all over the place as I'm sure you know. Still, app stores (like the PPCGeeks
) and the upcoming Windows Marketplace solve that problem (and hopefully the WM will get developers behind the platform again).
So while I do like the phone, I'm excited to see what gets released in the coming months. The Motorola Sholes/Tao for example, that looks great: fantastic looking hardware, beefy processor and specs and paired with Android which could be considered a modern-day version of WinMo, running on many different phones and being fairly open.