HTC Desire
I can't speak to the Desire HD...but I do have the original Desire. I have used it, an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 3GS extensively. I was not a huge fan of the iPhone 4...but I did rather like the 3GS. The original HTC Desire on the other hand, I have very little to complain about.
If I were to break the phones down, this is how:
iPhone 3GS:
Reliable. Well thought out and mature product that doesn’t have any obvious flaws. The newer iOS versions are a little laggy on this older hardware. It is the standard against which I judge all smart phones: to date it still may be the best overall smartphone in existence.
iPhone 4:
Mostly reliable. I have had reception issues in areas where the Desire or the 3GS work just fine. On the other hand it’s screamingly fast with fantastic battery life for the performance level. I have seen a few with broken back glass: take care of it! The huge con is the locked-down nature of iOS. It became infinitely more useful once jailbroken – and no, I didn’t jailbreak in order to pirate apps.
HTC Desire:
A tank. Whilst the screen is slightly more vulnerable to scratches than an iPhone 4, it is otherwise capable taking an unbelievable amount of abuse. It is rock solid: it gets a signal where no other phone seems capable. The downside is that Android is not well optimised for this CPU: while the Desire is screamingly fast, simple things such as menu transitions can end up with 4-5 FPS. Great with optimised applications, however HTC Sense is not optimised.
In all, I think the HTC Desire (non HD) is a perfectly credible contender for the iPhone 4. It is certainly a more worthy opponent to the iPhone 4 than the HTC Hero was to the 3GS. In some ways, I honestly believe the iPhone 4 was a step backwards from the 3GS…in others (such as the front-facing camera) it’s a leap into the future. I fully expect that the next generation iPhone will solve all the little niggles.
In the meantime, HTC keeps going from strength to strength. I have my issues with Samsung (mostly over poor support for the original Samsung Galaxy) and Motorola (mostly over poor support for, well...everything.) HTC, meanwhile, is showing the world what Android phones truly can do.
iPhone versus Android really comes down to a philosophical choice. Android is more open: generally, it’s YOUR phone. You have a lot of freedom under Android that you just don’t under iOS. The flip side to that is Android fragmentation: like it or not, the lack of device fragmentation on the Apple side of the house leads to an operating system that is far more tightly optimised for the hardware it is running on.
With the HTC Desire and the iPhone 4 being so close to each other in terms of capability, speed and app loadout, choosing between them is a simple question:
What matters more; the (non-jailbroken) openness of your handheld, or the smoothness of the “experience?”