I finally got off of my parent's cell phone plan and moved to my own. I ended up going with AT&T for three reasons: (1) I've used them extensively before and within the last year the number of dropped calls went down to almost nil, (2) they're the only provider that actually has a selection of Windows Phones (everyone else has exactly one), and (3) I get a 13% discount on voice and data plans through my employer.
The phone that I selected is a Samsung Focus S. The HTC Titan looked nice, but the screen is just too big (4.7"? I would literally be unable to use it for Internet radio in my car due to it being way oversized), the screen sucked compared to the Focus S and was barely an improvement over my HD7 (Super LCD vs. Super AMOLED -- the latter always wins), and after dealing with the issues from my last HTC phone I wasn't willing to go through the same experiences (camera never autofocused right and the images were crap, even compared to my old "dumb phone", chrome covering easily rubbed off of the screen bezel, and the metal around the camera lens got dinged up badly after two days and no abuse). This phone is light as a feather, the capacitative buttons don't have as large of a touch zone, the screen is absurdly bright at the highest settings, and the camera is surprisingly good at picking up color. It was able to capture the warmth of an incandescent bulb quite well -- something that my HD7's camera was unable to do. There are also a few interesting settings provided by Samsung's camera driver, including wide dynamic range, which I have yet to properly test.
It also has a 1.4GHz Scorpion processor. Now, Windows Phone's UI is buttery smooth even on my HD7's 1GHz Snapdragon (which is the minimum Snapdragon CPU required for a device to be certified), but bumping up the clock a few notches does make a noticeable difference in games, app loading times, and stuff like that.
So...yeah. I are excite. The only thing that I have left to do is apply my shiny developer unlock to it and all will be right with the world.
Edit: Somewhat relevant:
I wound up having to choose between Rhapsody and a Zune Pass. Since I'm actually on a robust 3G network, I can actually stream music now without it cutting off every time I drive down a few major highways around here (seriously, T-Mobile has the weirdest 3G dead zones in my area). While both of them do support downloading the content directly to the device, I think it would be nice to actually be able to select something on a whim and just play it.
Rhapsody is nice because it allows streaming to the PC, would allow me to download music to the iPod app, and has a native Windows Phone 7 app. The problem is that I've been a Rhapsody customer in the past and I'm very familiar with their software -- it fucking SUCKS. When the PC app isn't crashing, it very often will come up with a cryptic error and suddenly not allow you to use the artist/album browser (so it might as well be a crash). Additionally, the iOS app crashed far more often that I would have cared for. It didn't like my old iPhone 3G at all, and even my 4th gen iPod touch despised it. The app was a complete mess. I really doubt that the Windows Phone app would be any better, but even if it were flawless I would kinda like to listen at home, too. The interface for the app was usable, but could have used a ton of improvement. Furthermore, it was very sluggish, even on high-end hardware (Core i7 2.8GHz). Like iTunes on Windows, but worse.
I had a 15-day trial for the Zune Pass. Naturally, it integrates well with Windows Phone 7. And, just as obviously, it has zero iOS integration and there is no app available for it. It has the advantage of blending seemlessly in with any local music that you would put onto the device, but the problem with that is that my phone only has 16GB of storage. I currently have more than 16GB of music stored on my iPod, not to mention gigabytes of apps (speaking of which, I had around 4GB of apps on my HD7, so loading a ton of music on that thing was definitely out). I also greatly prefer the iPod interface over the Zune-inspired one. I could probably get used to the latter and just use my iPod as a gaming device, but the storage limitation throw that idea off the docks.
Technical issues aside, the Zune Pass is great on the software end. As I said, the Zune ecosystem is integrated into the phone and works quite well. The PC software is slick, fast, and very responsive, and makes for a decent media player (though giving up fb2k was, and will be, tough). Furthermore, it seems to have just as good of a selection as Rhapsody without the downsides. Unfortunately, you cannot download 10 free songs per month anymore. I would have happily paid the extra five bucks to be able to do that, but I decided to subscribe too late. Sadface.
Overall, the price is the same $10/month, so we'll see. I'm sure Zune will work out just fine for what I need, but I'm sure I'll make a whiny post here if it doesn't.
Edit 2: Hoo boy, found a major gripe with the Zune software -- tagging songs. Granted, this is a task that most media players fail at (and something that iTunes is somewhat decent at), but this is just bad. You can't arrow down if you only want to change the song title. You have to tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, change one, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, change another, and so on. Ugh! Thankfully, despite the DRM on these files, I can actually jump into MP3Tag and change them in there! Oh, thank goodness.
One more thing that's awesome: you can freely change the tags on the files that you download. With Rhapsody, it would keep changing them back to the hideously broken tags that Rhapsody assigned to some files. I was able to change tags on the WMAs that I downloaded through Zune (mostly to remove the unnecessary "(parental advisary)" tag that was thrown on some tracks -- one thing that Apple does infinitely better (by making that its own tag with its own appearance in the iPod/iTunes software)) and have them actually persist both on the phone and on the PC. Ahh, it's nice when things just work. Now if only I didn't have to rely on a third-party program to handle my tagging. Oh well...
