I’ve been using my daughter’s HTC Desire, now that she’s moved up in the world, to an iPhone. I have to say, the Desire is a significant step up from my previous mobile, the Nokia N900.

Don’t get me wrong, the N900 is a fabulous device. It’s not a mobile at all, really, it’s a Debian Linux box that happens to have some phone functionality built in, the ultimate geek toy for the smartphone age. The hardware is superb and the software could have been amazing, had it not been for the fact that Nokia abandoned the product and its users twice (first, by moving from the Maemo OS to Meego and then from Meego to Windows Mobile). It’s a supplier error and what could have been a great, great product became another footnote in communications history.

For this reason, I will not buy a Nokia again, not because they don’t know how to make phones because they do, but because who knows when they’ll decide to abandon their customers again?

The Desire, according to my daughter who knows all about this stuff, is an old phone. It’s OK but seriously uncool and nothing when compared to an iPhone. Not knowing better, I think the Desire is user-friendly to a degree that I haven’t witnessed in a while. Also, I’m not really an app kind of person, but there are enough of them available to keep me busy for a while.