HD2 History

This is a long bit of history about why the HTC HD2 became what it is today, and what technologies gave it such abilities. You don't need to know this to use the phone, but it's good to know how things came together.

{{Note|I wrote this, but I am a relative newcomer to the community, and it has a ton of inaccuracies and missing points. Hopefully you can help out and fix some of them.}}

HTC started out as the creator of the first Windows Mobile PDA/smartphones in 1999, blowing away old Palm PDAs with a dream to bring the power of a true computer to your pocket. You may not have heard this before; indeed, HTC had to sell out to third-party brand-names like Compaq and HP to even get these phones to market.

For the next 7 years, the tech world was swamped with phones running Windows Mobile with that same ideal in mind. But by the release of the iPhone, the quirks that made Windows on smartphones untenable were dreadfully clear; Underpowered CPUs, unappealing design, lack of space, and the dependency on unreliable and uncomfortable stylus-based touchscreens.

Eventually, two camps of phone manufacturers came about, one that would work on reforming Windows Mobile to fight back, and another that wanted to create an entirely new standard operating system, open-sourced for all parties to use without the cost of licensing fees. The latter camp banded together to form the Open Handset Alliance, eventually creating the Android Operating System. HTC itself ended up being the first to create a smartphone based on Android, known as the HTC Dream. (T-Mobile G1)

However, the plucky company was not one to put all it's eggs in one basket, and began the development of TouchFLO on Windows Mobile, to retrofit modern multitouch methodologies on the aging OS. This mix pretty much blew Android out of the water, and the company readied their efforts to create the best phone ever designed. The phone would have true capacitive touchscreens, a massive 4.7 inch display (unheard of at the time), a decent camera, a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU with half a gig of RAM (reaching the abilities of actual PCs) and HTC's newest edition of TouchFLO, HTC Sense.

The result was the HTC HD2, a well-designed, internationally sold, and heavily hyped smartphone right from the start. Unfortunately, due to the unexpected announcement of Windows Phone 7, the HTC HD2 was now a general without an army, unmatched in specs yet obselete upon release. Additionally, Android, HTC's little side project, was fast improving and growing in popularity. Sensing the markets, the company refocused it's efforts on Android and moved it's signature Sense interface there, which would later bring HTC out of OEM servitude into first-party territory.

As for the HD2, Microsoft would not bother to give updates for a WM6 device, no matter how powerful it was. Firesales loomed, hopes broke down, but interest grew in porting Android and WP7 to the superpowered phone. These unique conditions of a phone too powerful to abandon and too big to fail meant that the HD2 had the benefit of a large, international userbase composed of all the last and the greatest Windows Mobile developers, now in a mad rush to keep the phone relevant.

When users couldn't decide on running either Android or WP7, developers split up and worked on both. Early efforts were underwhelming, but things quickly improved with experience and time, once Android phones were introduced with similar specs. Android was discovered to be able to run from the SDCard easily, ported from the pitiful attempts at Linux on other WM6 phones from the past.

But this wasn't enough, and MAGLDR was developed to completely replace Windows Mobile with Windows Phone 7, later gaining the ability to run Android from SDCard, and even Android from phone memory to boot. Another group made an open-source bootloader called cLK, with the ability to interface with adb and fastboot like a plain-old Android device, and added some improvements not found in MAGLDR. It was later found that the method used to run Android on the HD2 could be used to run full desktop Linux.

In the space of a year, the HD2 had gained all of it's signature features, quickly becoming famous for the community's unprecedented longevity, recieving the newest Android and WP7 builds even when phones of it's caliber never got close. The latest development was the introduction of Android (NativeSD), to make Android run as fast as possible on SDCards.

The HD2 is a product of unparalleled design, bad luck, and a massive community's fight to turn lemons into lemonade by giving this lost phone a second life. Who knows when such an arrangement will occur again, or if anything can even think of equaling the HD2's abilities?

Sources

• XDA Developers - A Tribute to the HTC HD2