Change il not change, that’s the question

Hello Habr,
I will devote this topic to the old man HTC HD2. He was one of the first to receive the nickname of a shovel, for the screen, which was prohibitively large, as it seemed to us then. It was he who rallied a large number of programmers and testers who want to try their hand at porting a variety of systems to HD2 (I must say quite successfully) and still it remains in service. I think it's time to test it for viability in the harsh realities of 2011. And another flagship of the HTC Desire HD communicator market will help us with this.

Who cares, welcome to kat (Caution a lot of pictures).


Prologue

Recently, a huge number of new devices based on android were announced, and as a person who was passionate about various gadgets and smartphones in particular, it became interesting to me how relevant my HD2 is still, HTC Desire HD turned up on my arm and I decided on his example verify. Of course, Desire HD is not the most powerful in the smartphone market, but at the moment it is at least in the top five ( proof ).

Specifications

I think it makes no sense to describe all the characteristics, as well as the features of Android, we list only those in which there are differences, and we also note the best of them in blue:

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Exterior


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There are basically no significant differences in the design, the main thing that catches your eye is the difference between the buttons on the front panel, which is understandable because initially HD2 was oriented to Windows Mobile. Desire HD also has touch buttons, and HD2 has mechanical buttons (there are a lot of opinions in connection with this fact, but in my opinion, touch buttons are better, since it is more reliable). On HD2, often when I press the "menu" button, the "home" button is triggered, which leads to the minimization of the application, and this fact, you see, is annoying.

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Modularity prevails in the design of the back side of Desire HD (by the way, therefore, the lower part creaks a little during compression, at least in the device that I had), and HD2 is a monolith. Eyes The camera lenses are located the same way, the flash and speakers are interchanged, in my opinion, here it is just “From the rearrangement of the places of the terms the sum does not change.”

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The lower part, ends and volume keys are located equally. The only difference is the power button, in HD2 it is lower on the right, on the keypad, and in Desire HD on top, like most Android smartphones. For my taste, the button layout of the HD2 is more convenient, especially if you turn on the phone with one hand.

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Cross-platform

As you know, at the moment, four operating systems are available for installation on HD2: Windows 6.5, Android 2.2 / 2.3 , Windows phone 7 , Ubuntu . However, for normal use of WP7, you need to get a key for Live services (Zune, Marketplace and others). And Ubuntu is limited in terms of functionality. In addition to the above OS, work has begun on Honeycomb .

Ubuntu / Android port status summary table: Desire HD has Android 2.2 / 2.3 in its arsenal. The functionality of the latter is identical for both HD2 and Desire HD. There are attempts to port the FreeBSD of Ubuntu, but there are all sweet.
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Reliability

Both devices belong to the eminent manufacturer and in the vast majority of cases function appropriately. Screens are protected from scratches by tempered glass of unknown origin. However, it beats very easily when dropped or subjected to strong impact.


Performance

Well, everything is clear here, the processor and GPU are everything. Also, when launching a VERY large number of applications, the extra 192 MB of RAM in Desire HD can play a role. Perhaps they will be useful for future versions of the android, but at this stage, with an average load, about half of the RAM in Desire HD is free and about a third in HD 2, respectively.
I bring to your attention a short video in which I, at the same time, launched quite popular applications for android, in order to understand how really the old man is behind his brother.


Unfortunately Quadrant, during the shooting of the video, refused to show me the ratings, so I bring them here:
Desire HD (Android 2.2Stock): 1,591 points
HD2 (Android 2.2 MDJFroYo Sense - = Revolution = -): 970 points

As you may have noticed, HD2 lags mainly in the boot process, most likely this is due to the slower Nand memory. In the gameplay, however, there are no differences between devices. This can be explained by the presence on the market of a fairly large number of android platforms with less productive hardware and in the place of developers, it would be foolish to orient games only to High-end devices.
I think with the advent of the free sale of particle acceleratorThe “Xperia play” balance of power will also not change, since it is based on the same processor and graphics chip (1GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon), which is also Desire HD and is initially oriented to games. Sony will probably try to realize its own - gaming, ecosystem, and I doubt that they will limit it to distribution only on devices of its own production. Based on these considerations, HTC HD2 will also remain in service.

Camera

In addition to 3 megapixels in favor of Desire HD, the updated chip produces more juicy and clear pictures. Here, as they say: How many megapixels do not plug into the phone, all the same, the Nikon D3S has better quality (s) it is better to see once than hear a hundred times (read):
HD2-left Desire HD-right (pictures are clickable, but they are very large because they are not compressed for those who want to compare the originals)

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In the third photos below, the real Odmin tambourine is covered with the skin of an old lamer and X-server. It is believed that with the help of this tambourine, it is possible to restore trouble blocks on hard drives, and you hear it when you boot Ubuntu.
And yes, the photos were taken in March - I live in a warm country.

Price

At the moment, the lowest prices that I managed to find on ebay, including delivery to Russia, are: $ 620 for Desire HD and $ 501 for HD2 TMOUS. Used devices can be taken: for $ 300 HD2 and for 500 Desire HD, respectively. (By the way, I bought my HD2 TMOUS on eBay, for $ 370 about a year ago, with 16GB microSD and all the goodies)

Epilogue

In this topic, I tried to find out: the strength of the influence of urine on the sun's rays on how much HD2 is really outdated, and it is also possible to help people who want to buy a device with a large screen, but are limited in terms of budget. As you may have noticed, the lag in HD2 in terms of performance is not so striking, but it certainly will not be able to compete with the Intel Xeon X7560 2 (or more) core smartphones based on Tegra2, Cortex A9, etc.
I do not agitate to buy old devices instead of new ones, just HD2, in my opinion, is a milestone in the field of cross-platform for smartphones. In the near future, I hope the number of such devices will grow. Thanks for attention!

PS: Thank you so much: Cotulla- This person spent a huge amount of time developing an android for HD2.
And also to all programmers and testers who participated / participate in the project.
Keman - for the tambourine, deniswestside - for the problem solver and the X-server, tomcat - for the Russian language, tormich - for the explanation of the habr-html, Genet - for the food.

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