Double-tangentially related. My contract with Vodafone (UK) is up for renewal soon and there's the HTC Wildfire, Nexus One, Desire, Legend, Tattoo listed on the website. Just to be clear, this is attempting to narrow it down to one carrier, one manufacturer, one operating system. How about a clear flagship model and a budget option rather than all this shitty confusion? Then maybe you'll have the engineering resources to keep the two or three models up to date.
This is similar to my laptop rant the other day. It's sad to see companies shooting themselves in the foot.
Agreed that they're making things way more complicated than they should be. As far as the parent poster, I have no idea why the Devour even exists; it's inferior to the Droid in every way. In your case the Nexus One is clearly the way to go; nothing else is significantly better spec-wise, and being Google's "official" model it's guaranteed to get updates first.
In your specific case, the only clear "dumb" redundancies are the wildfire and legend (the differences seem trivial). And yes, I agree, it makes little sense for HTC to be making such similar models.
The Desire is the flagship (to htc), the tattoo is the low-end budget and the legend/wildfire is mid-range.
All of the other models HTC makes seem to be due to deals with carriers/other companies. The Nexus One is a google-branded phone sans sense. The Sprint hero had changes from the regular due to Sprint. The last goes on.
I imagine HTC is somewhat forced into this position. They don't have enough market power, so if a carrier wants something different, they generally have to comply.
This is similar to my laptop rant the other day. It's sad to see companies shooting themselves in the foot.