not so sure about HTC products tbh. But XDA Dev are a great community

ive owned a HTC Prophet, HTC Charmer, HTC Touch Pro and a HTC Shift. The prophet charmer and touch pro all developed major hardware faults within a year, and windows mobile isnt an operating system, its a plauge that xda have had to spend years slowly nurturing, so ignore that straight out of the box.

HTC shift is different, some issues but i do love it, i think its windows 7 that makes the difference.

The key i think with a device you rely on so much like these is to make sure the primary supported os is going to do the job for you, the other hacked os' are usually great but theres usually something missing in them that sends you back to the origional os, and windows mobile . . .ugh

if youre going htc get an android based one that you can put other secondary os' on