gdgt

I've had one other phone I really loved for its physical design - the original Orange Nokia "brick". But the T-Mobile G2 Touch aka HTC Hero feels great, looks great and huge fun to use. It makes the iPhone look positive old-fashioned - and I'm no iPhone hater.

Some people have complained about the HTC TouchFlo interface being a bit laggy but I don't really see it. It could be down to the number of simultaneous apps that may be running. There are "task killers" out there, tho, which you can use to clear those out.

Internet integration is excellent: gmail, GMaps location services, Facebook, etc, etc. You can use it as a 3G modem for your PC. Adding apps is easy and the majority are free. Even when you have to pay the cost is minimal. The biggest problem is finding the specific variant you want within a given family with so much choice. You have to spend a lot of time reading people's reviews!

Minor niggles include absence of universal cut'n'paste and that apps can't yet be installed to the SD card. But Google is working on those issues. And that, I think, marks a big difference from other phone OS suppliers: Google is listening and constantly enhancing the Android OS.

My previous phone was an HTC Hermes running (after my last update) Windows Mobile 6.0 and it simply isn't a patch on the Hero. So incredibly slow.

Is Hero an iPhone killer? No. But only cos there's room in the marketplace for different products to suit different tastes. Does the Android OS provide strong competition for the iPhone? Absolutely. It's only in its infancy and yet offers pretty much all the capabilities, look and feel of an iPhone. Future products will provide yet more variely and capability.