HTC diamond 2 or iPhone

the touch hd is an outstanding piece of hardware and pretty upgradeable. there are currently some uber geeks working on getting android totally functional for touch hd which will be mega.

the touch HD is possibly the nicest bit of hardware i've seen. it's fricking excellent, and as soon as someone gets Android running (and stable) on it, then it will be brilliant.

I am a fan of HTC hardware but I hate WinMo, which pretty much kills any chance of me using any of those phones (the Samsung Omnia is another example of decent hardware shackled to WinMo and pretty much sucking because of it).

imo open source is the way forward but beware of being an early adoptor as you will get the base issues, for example, the g1 is a 'cheap' piece of hardware (also manufactured by htc) but android is a winner. the diamond 2 runs in a very similair fashion to the touch hd and also uses touch flo 3d which is nice but merely gloss for the win mob 6.1.

I don't know why HTC apparently didn't bother using any proper industrial design when it built the G1. it feels like a prototype to me, that accidentally got made into a real product. the Magic looks much better, but i have become a fan of physical keyboards, which it lacks.

Also there will be Android phones from Samsung, LG and Motorola (if it survives that long) by the end of the year.

There has been a lot of buzz about Android being based on Linux. this is kindof true, but irrelevant because the application environment runs in Dalvik, which is (roughly) Google's reverse-engineered version of Java. So from an application developer (and user) perspective, there is nothing Linux about Android.