I have an HTC Desire and I'm really happy with it.
Recently, the Google Maps Navigation has been activated here in Italy (with voice search, which I thought was available exclusively on the Nexus One).
Last week HTC released an OTA update with android 2.2, which also added an app for tethering over wifi (tethering via USB was already available) and 720p video recording.
A: There are no patents on the 555. Signetics did not want to apply for a patent. You see, the situation with patents in Silicon Valley in 1970 was entirely different than it is now. Everybody was stealing from everybody else. I designed the 555 Signetics produced it, and six months, or before a year later, National had it, Fairchild had it, and nobody paid any attention to patents. The people at Signetics told me they didn’t want to apply for a patent, because what would happen if they tried to enforce that patent, is the people from Fairchild would come back with a Manhattan-sized telephone book and say “These are our patents, now let’s see what you’re violating”. It was a house of cards – if you blew on it, the whole thing collapsed. It took about ten years to change. I guess it was some new companies that didn’t have ancient history and did have a strong patent, and started enforcing, and that changed to whole situation. It is very intense now. The same thing – I have a patent on the phase locked loop, and that would have been a very strong patent, but no enforcement.
Just after releasing a phone that uses a metal ring all around the chassis as an antenna (which is something that perplexed every engineer living outside of the reality distortion field as soon as they saw the first pictures of the phone), they discovered that they've always used the wrong algorithm to calculate the signal strength.
It's always better to do a hard reset before selling your Android phone anyway.
Edit:
Ops! Missed this part: "... and even a full reset to factory settings failed to eviscerate the indiscreet imagery."
I believe that these screenshots are cached to appear as previews for bookmarked sites. But a full reset should wipe everything. If this is not the case, it could indeed be an issue.
I switched from the iPhone to an Android phone too. And I disagree.
Copy and paste on Android works just the same, if not better. On Mobile Safari, for instance, I always select some text when I just want to scroll or zoom in some part of the page. This doesn't happen on my Android phone (but this could be just because Android waits a bit more before acknowledging the gesture).
Apple does a lot of choices that are aesthetics over functionality. A physical trackball/trackpad or arrow key pad, for instance, is invaluable when you need to move to some specific point in text. But Apple touchscreen devices just have the home button, to look more futuristic. And revolutionary.
I forgot to mention that I've used a cheap knockoff (and even goofier) model of these chairs for a couple of years. And it was quite comfortable indeed.
By gaining access to these accounts you can do a lot of damage (eg. steal money from people accounts or destroy a label presence on last.fm).