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I had an HTC Hero (you know, the one that won all those best gadget awards) before and that was good, but this phone is fantastic. 10 reasons to buy:
1. Large, bright, high-resolution screen. Photos and text look great and really clear – which is good for looking at email attachments or facebook photos.
2. It’s thin and very comfortable to hold. It actually feels less bulky than the i-phone 3GS my girlfriend has in my opinion.
3. It’s really fast – you just click on something and it appears. No lag. Multitasking, you seem to be able to throw almost anything at it.
4. The 5mp camera and flash are surprisingly good, and you can upload photos straight onto Facebook. It is a real step up from the HTC Hero I had before.
5. Google maps is better than ever on it, and you can get instant directions.
6. MP3 player is really, really good – it seems to be much clearer than my old HTC Hero was, and sounds more vibrant, with sound quality very much on a par with the iphone. I’ve downloaded a really good Amazon MP3 app means allows you to buy from Amazon huge amounts of DRM free MP3s recorded at v high bit-rates and download them direct to your phone.
7. Everything is super-intuitive – Really good email, text message and social networking integration. The keyboard is really good, and the way they’ve done predictive text – even when you have typed some wrong letters – is really impressive.
8. Really good, solid-feeling build quality. Nothing feels cheap and plasticy about it like some old Nokia phones I had.
9. It’s much cheaper than the i-phone and the new Sony Ericcson x10. I managed to get mine on T-mobile with (per month) 300 minutes, 300 texts, unlimited internet, unlimited landline calls and free phone for £25/month as a new customer, which is absolutely cracking.
10. Web browsing brill. Flash. Multi-touch/pinch to zoom. Pinch to zoom. With Flash, with Flash 10.1 coming out soon this should get better better.
Rating: 5 / 5
I don’t often write reviews but after being one of the very lucky ones in receiving my contract Desire on Saturday 27th March I wanted to tell the Amazon world just how good this phone is.
I have an Ipod touch and my son has an Iphone 3GS so we both appreciate just how good Apple have developed the feel of the touch screen. Let me tell you, HTC have done a fantastic job in perfecting the touch screen on the Desire. Before I decided on the Desire I had a play with a colleagues HTC phone and liked the feel of the touch screen straight away and was looking at T Mobile’s version of the HTC Hero. I wanted a touch screen with a decent size, Android operating system, 5mp camera but decided against the Hero as it didn’t have a flash and it’s also on the older operating system. The black G2 Touch at TMobile also looked a bit ugly compared to the brown and white models. I had heard about both the Desire and Legend coming out this year and had sort of set on making do with something like a Samsung Jet on PAYG and seeing what came out later in the year. I couldn’t believe my luck when looking on the T Mobile website last Monday that they were offering the Desire from £10.00 per month plus a cost for the phone.
After a research on Jawal123.com comparing the hero, jet, legend and of course the desire I threw caution to the wind and bought a phone that I hadn’t even tried. How glad I was to make that decision. I had a bit of disappointment on Friday when I rang TMobile and they said there were some software problems with the phone (their software not HTC) and they wouldn’t be shipped until the 31st. Oh no. I was offered an alternative phone to which I said you must be joking, I’ll wait. When I got home TMobile had emailed me saying the phone was on it’s way. Wow, they soon sorted the problem and was even confirmed on Twitter. Saturday morning came, 8.20, knock at the door, it was the postman, YES, my Desire was here.
I was very impressed with the box at first, not your thin cheap types you get with nokia and samsung, but a very chunky well made box, very professional, like apple. Taking the phone carefully out of the box I was like a big kid at christams time with my face beaming. In real life the phone didn’t seem as big as in all the pictures of which I was glad. I was concerned that the 3.7″ screen would make it a bit bulky in the pocket but it’s just right, slightly taller than the iphone and a bit narrower, very slim. The screen has a dark mirrored finish with the back of the phone in what seems to be a non slip plastic which is slightly soft. It has a dark bronze bezel around the front and it just looks stunning. The pictures of it just don’t do it justice. A quick read of the instructions to see how the back came off, battery and sim card in and power up. In heaven now. The 4gb micro sd comes pre-loaded in the phone but is replaceable.
Went through the tutorial and was now ready to customise and play with the phone. On the supplied sd card it comes with HTC Sync to sync with your pc but unfortunately doesn’t work with mac which is a shame but the mac still reads the sd card when you put it into mount as drive mode. This is really handy to transfer any music photos etc from the pc. It also has full bluetooth not just for headset and I managed to bluetooth ok from my mac and from my old phone to it. It’s most important though to read the full manual which is loaded on the sd card and set up the phone with your personal setting first with little things like set a tone for messages because when you blue tooth to this phone it puts a little symbol in the top left hand corner which is hard to see and you have to drag that down and click accept. A larger box that appears in the centre of the screen would have been better. It does the same with messages as well and this is my only beef with the phone. No doubt I will be able to get an app to improve this. Other thing I don’t like is although it has 7 different screens to customise you can’t set a different wallpaper for each screen. You pick one then it’s on all 7 screens which I didn’t mind until the wife complained that she didn’t want me looking at Fergie from Black Eyed Peas all the time!! Last little moan is that am used to having my messages in inbox, sent items etc but the phone groups them. This does come in handy though because it does keep a thread going if you are sending messages back and forth to the same person so I will learn to accept this. Basically that’s just 2 things I don’t like. I always try and give honest opinions and if I thought this phone was rubbish I would be telling you not to buy it.
To me this phone is nearly perfect. My son was very very impressed comparing it with his 3GS and said he would buy it if only he could download direct from Itunes and it would fit his docking station. Now that’s not going to happen anytime soon so if you already have an Ipod and dock for your music then this phone is the best. Remember though it has a massive memory capability, as good as the Iphone if you buy a bigger card, and it has a 3.5mm output so you can still use it for music. Downloadable apps from Android, wifi, widgets, 7 custom screens, 5mp camera and flash (something the Iphone doesn’t have), 1ghz processor, nearly twice as big as the Iphone, optical scroll wheel, makes this a fantastic phone. It’s cheaper than the Google Nexus 1 which carrys a very similar spec. I have tried the camera indoors and am impressed. In daylight it produces an excellent picture and in low light it’s good. I played with the light sensor to improve the quality on flash and it performed ok.
I love this phone and am so glad I didn’t buy the HTC Hero 2 weeks ago or the samsung jet last weekend. I went out both weekends to buy a phone and am so pleased I waited. I have been playing with this phone for the last 2 days trying it out and have got it set up perfect for me. The wifi is very fast and the internet on 3g is good too, testing it on a Utube video. As with any smartphones the battery life is going to suffer having all these capabilities and charged mine up until last night, played with it today and it’s dropped to half full. Now I don’t think that’s bad as under normal use that’s going to last at least 3 days. My son has to charge his Iphone up nearly every day. On one of my home screens I have the icons for wifi, bluetooth, gps and internet which all use a lot of power so I can just turn these on when I need them. If you are going to buy any smartphone don’t be whinging about battery life. Some maybe better than others but with lots more things running, better screen, bigger processors, something has to give somewhere. All smartphones need more power.
To sum up, if you have this phone on your list then put it to the top. It’s a great phone and you won’t be disappointed. Thanks to HTC for manufacturing a great phone, TMobile for their very friendly service and the Royal Mail for getting it to me so promptly.
Hey, I got first review on Amazon for this phone WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!
Rating: 5 / 5
review for htc desire, may 2010
===============================
Already having an iphone 1st gen, I was slightly biased towards them and my choices boiled down to iphone 3gs, htc desire or sony x10. After a fair bit of research and
with a hands on play with the htc in the shop I finally bit the bullet and went down the
android road. I was holding off android for a whilst reading the intial android release
was a little buggy so I was eager to see how android 2.1 which the htc ships with fares. Needless to say I wasnt disspointed! As a long term (now ex) iphone user, I will compare this phone to my iphone experiences.
The htc desire has its own user interface built on top of android 2.1 and to be honest
completely blows my first gen iphone running on firmware v3, out of the water (and I thought the iphone was great!) Htc have really outdone themselves and will find themselves hard pressed to keep up front as no doubt everyone will soon copy this. The concept isnt a new one, but implementing it on a phone and so well as it has been done is just so awesome.
There are seven screens that allows any widgets to be added. A widget is rather like
the widgets you get on stardock for win xp, or widgets in vista/windows7/most linux
distributions. It allows data or information to be displayed without opening the
program usually used to get the info – like displaying the todays items from the
calendar etc. There are a large number of htc/android widgets to choose from and loads
of free and paid ones from the android market.hat it does particularly well are the
social widgets (facebook/twitter etc) where you can catch and make updates straight from
the homescreen – why isnt all this stuff implemented this well on the iphone?
At the time of writing (apr 2010) this phone is avaialable unlocked(!), so if the
simfree version is costing too much buy the pay as you go or contract version instead. I confirmed this at carphone warehouse when I got the htc on an orange contract and have used this phone on both orange and t-mobile sims. Saves having to jailbreak the iphone which I have had to do with every firmware upgrade – firmwares 1.x all the way to 3.x on the iphone.
The htc desire has a very similar size and weight of my 1st gen iphone, and the display
and touch control is as good as each other. Accelorator is pretty much same in both
devices. Speed wise the htc feels noticably faster and has a much longer screen. Space
wise, htc wins hands down with the removable micro sd card. You can upgrade the space
for a fraction of the cost on the iphone – the iphone and itouch doesnt have upgradable storage/sd card so if you want more space you have to buy the next model up!
Like the iphone the apps on htc/android is limited to a smaller partition of the space
available for applications, but as with the iphone you’ll get quite a lot off apps and
you are hardly likely to hit this limitation. In the older version of iphone firmware I
used to create symbolic links to move the applications to the media partition to allow
more application space, but in practice found I didnt actually need to do this. In fact
I ended up with screens and screens of apps on the iphone, thats even when i didnt
bother moving the apps partition, bit of a mess with so many apps even with careful
planning of each screen. With the desire, I already have a large number of apps, but it
is all beautifully encpasulated away under the very useful htc desire user interface,
that allowed me to place the most usefull widgets and shortcuts in each home screen.
Moving between the home screens on the htc desire is a dream, you can either swipe left
or right like the iphone or uniquely pinch in and select the screen from the screen
thumbnails you are presented with – awfully fast way of navigating , you get so used to
using it even within a short time. It even has a gesture system for the screen lock(!) and works surprisingly well – I thought I would turn this option on just to try it, but I like it so much I will leave it on.
The camera in my honest opinion is the only let down (!) in this marvelous phone.
However comparing it to the iphone, well the iphone camera is, how shall I put it, crap
at the best, so Im still doing well by moving from the iphone to the htc desire. The
htc desire phone does rather well with functions like recognising faces (very fast too),
but for a 5MP camera, doesnt compare to the same MP camera in a nokia or sony.
Dont get me wrong, the htc desire does shoot some very nice pictures and will keep a lot
of poeple happy, but dont expect it to looks as good as sony or nokia 5MP camera. Video
is very good on the htc, you can see where the extra processor power in the htc desire
comes in very handy. Overall camera and video functions are way better than on my 1st
gen iphone, plus its already bundled with the camera so no extra purchase needed here,
unlike on my iphone.
Battery life is about the same as iphone which is remarkable as I presumed I wouldnt get
as good usage as I do – common sense does prevail though – for example if you dont use blue tooth, wifi, mobile internet, gps all day long then just turn them off when you dont actually use them – battery life will increase considerably. The htc already ships with power widgets allowing you one touch to toggle these options straight from any of the home screens.
Browsing the web seems a lot more easier, although the controls are basically the same
on both iphone and htc desire. One nice feature on the htc is pinching to zoom in, the
htc automatically sizes the text to fit the screen. I found i didnt actaually use
the web a lot on the iphone, but the widgets and other features on the htc already has
me on wifi at both work and home, perhaps the extra screen estate, with the htc desire
having a longer screen is the clincher for myself?
Android market is nowhere near as comprehensive as the Apple iTunes store, but does
already come with a large number of applications avialable. Some of them are incredibly
useful – in less than 10 minutes on the market I had a number of free apps, one even
let me browse straight to my pc windows shares from within the htc over my wifi.
Getting things on and off the htc is going to be darn lot simpler than on the iphone –
with the ridculous imposition of tying the iphone per iTunes that was one of my major
anoyances with iphone. A lot of the time in order to use good apps you have to
jailbreak your iphone because of Apples cencorship issues on developers. However the
interface for android market doesnt compare well, especially if you think about the
ITunes program running on your mac/pc. For all its downsides iTunes can be pretty useful too.
With the htc you can connect like a usb pen drive on a pc/mac/linuc box and simply drag
and drop media as you want. I can see this being a benefit and a problem to other users
- if your used to buying (and want to carry on buying) from iTunes then this would be a
problem. In its own way iTunes does have it place, and its advantages.
One area that most phones will find hard to beat the iphone at is music. Iphone still
rocks at music and I guess it always will. I found without headphones htc was too tinny, however testing it with my sony heaphones I normally use on the iphone I was reassured by some good quality music. So with a good pair of headphones the htc does rather well, however was very annoyed on the htc to find the 3.5mm headphone jack is not quite flush on the htc – on the iphone its actually reccessed in, so headphones (the thin type, as most good headphones are) sits well into the iphone, on the htc a tiny piece of the headphones stick out no matter how hard you push your headphones in – this does not detract from the playing in any way, or even make the headphones loose, just a tiny part they forgot about when designing the htc phone. Luckily the htc works similar to the iphone in that as soon as you take the headphones out, it automatically stops the music player, useful when coming back from a long walk/cycle – you just pull the headphones out to stop the player. The music player app although whilst working well, doesnt really wow you like the iphone player app does. I guess its only a maatter of time before someone designs a better one (or copies the iphone one) and puts it on the adndroid market.
Another thing that really impressed me with the htc is the contacts – it can be a bit
confusing at first – I set the phone up and then going into my contacts expecting it to
be empty – it had loads of entries! What the htc does it takes all your of sources for
contacts and brings them into one convenient place – it even looks up contacts and gives
suggestions for one click linking. For eg if you had a separate tel contact and
facebook friend, it list the other in the auto sugesstions window – you only have to tap
to link or unlink them together. Once linked you only get one entry on your list and
viewing that person shows all his details from all the linked sources. You can even set
up your own groups and use them later for emailing/texting etc.
This flexibility does mean you have to spend a bit of time linking your contacts, but it is well worth it, and the htc does most of the hard work and auto suggests likely linked contacts – this is what the contacts on the iphone should have been like, it is just a dream to use on the htc.
Searching on the htc is similar to the newly added spotlight function on iphone
(firmware 3.x), excepts imho it works slightly better and faster on the htc, plus it
does it across all your contacts whether in your contacts/email/facebook etc. You even
have some zany google widgets, for eg I was playing with a google widget yesterday,
where you start drawing the letters and it starts searching – so no need to even use the
keyboard! Worked surpisingly well!
The bigger processor on the htc desire does make a lot of difference, and everything
works extremely smoothly on the htc desire. It also truly multi-tasks (unlike the
iphone) which is running more than one thing at a time. I found with the extra physical
keys along the bottom of the phone and the excellent user interface, navigation on the htc is a lot more enjoyable.
For those more into tech/dev, I can see the android being much more useful platform –
with the iphone your virtually restricted to buying a new mac everytime a new sdk comes
out (I only just got my old creaking mac boxes to run leopard, but the latest sdk
requires intel based leopard to run – grrr!!! You can get unofficial black hat windows
toolchains but setting this up is very complicated. Android on the other hand was
surprisingly easy to start developing – download the sdk, unzip, download an IDE e.g.
eclipse and your good to go!! (obviously you need to configure the paths to where the
sdk is stored etc, and everything is in java/javascript and stored in xml files but this
is soooo much easier than what Apple puts you through.
****************
Bottom line: Will let you down on the iTunes front if your a heavy iTunes user, hence I
dont see the android as an iphone killer, however currently at the time of writing the
htc desire has a much better interface than the iphone. I can quite easily see Apple
making notes and making frantic changes to firmware 4.x which will come out with the
iPad, so its possible both platforms will be going loggerheads with each other for quite
a while.
Bang for buck, the HTC Desire gives you good value for money, and an exellent user interface that imho (at the time of writing) is much better than the iphone.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve always thought that Nokia and Sony Ericsson made the best mobile phones. However, that all changes when the iPhone appeared. It certainly changed the rules on what a phone should be. The last phone I had was a Nokia N95 8GB – not a bad handset but kind of restricted in its functionality as an all-in-one solution for my personal and business communication needs. Once my contract expired, it was time to look for a new handset. I was dead set against the iPhone as Apple locks its applications on its products. Understandable that they want to ensure the software and applications work properly on their phones. But the fact is – nearly everyone has an iPhone. The iPhone is a great piece of kit but it just didn’t appeal to me.
The Nokia X6 was a hot contender but the Symbian operating system was clunky and to be perfectly honest with you, it just didn’t feel right. I had taken a look at the N900 but that was just too big and heavy as a phone. The Xperia X10 was another phone I looked at. Looked very promising until I read that the `pinch and zoom’ function that is part of the iPhone and Android 2.1 operating system could not work because of hardware limitations – nice one Sony Ericsson to cripple your phone from the start. So what was left – HTC was a company that I had heard of and my attention was subsequently drawn to the HTC Desire.
First thing I need to mention – the Desire’s sibling, the Legend, is an equally attractive phone but with three main differences. The body on the Legend is a block of aluminium which looks stunning. Shame this wasn’t carried over to the Desire. The screen is 3.2″ compared to the 3.7″ on the Desire and the Legend runs on a slower but capable processor.
Initial observations – saying the phone has the `wow’ factor is an understatement. The phone feels robust and weighty with a lovely texturised back cover which makes holding the phone a pleasure. The camera lens is not protected (a design flaw) with an LED flash above it. There is an on/off button at the top of the phone with a 3.5mm headphone socket. On the left hand side of the phone are the up/down volume controls. At the bottom of the handset you have four buttons – the Home button, Menu button, Return button and what appears to be a magnifying glass symbol is a Quick search button. There is an optical mouse in between both sets of the aforementioned buttons which also acts as a shutter button for the camera. At the base of the phone is the micro USB connector although be aware it isn’t the traditional micro USB connector. I hate proprietary connectors as hardware manufacturer try to tie you in to their hardware.
So, setting up the phone is straight forward. Remove the back cover, insert the battery and SIM card. The phone comes with a 4GB micro SD card with the HTC Sync applications and some music. Best thing is to charge the phone overnight to condition the battery. It is worth mentioning at this point that the phone comes with the USB data/charging cable, charger adaptor, headphones, micro SD card and of course, the phone itself.
The magic begins when you press the `On’ button. The screen is based on organic LED technology that is appearing in new flat screen televisions. The screen is stunning – it’s brightness and clarity is a joy to behold. The colours leap off the screen. Once you start up the phone for the time you are invited to personalise your phone with e-mail settings etc. The instructions on the phone are clear and precise. Be warned however, that if you need to access mail other than google, you’ll need to obtain the appropriate settings from your mail provider. Setting up Wi-fi and Bluetooth is straightforward. Remember to make your device `visible’ otherwise you won’t be able to establish the pairing with routers, computers and other devices upon initial set-up.
At this point I have to mention that fantastic screen. It is sensitive but just the right amount of feedback. Looks like HTC have been analysing the iPhone thoroughly.
HTC advertising talks about making the Desire `your phone’ and I would be inclined to agree with observation. The phone already comes preinstalled a series of `themes’ where you can change the look of the phone with various widgets and shortcuts. The preinstalled ones are very good and can be customised and saved with new names. Some of the preinstalled widgets such as Friendstream integrates your Facebook, Twitter and Myspace accounts. It provides you with a limited but useful update on your contacts going-ons. You can view a person’s profile, messages from Friendstream. The in-built Facebook application is a delight to use. The BBC newsfeed that is installed as part of the HTC theme is simple and effective. If you want to view the full article, you select it and the phone will go into deeper detail by connecting to the net. Please make sure you have a data plan on your phone – it does eat up data. If you have Wi-fi, that’s better but be mindful of your usage allowance.
The HTC Sync application comes on the memory card with the phone (it is Windows only at the time of writing this review). To access it, you need to `mount’ the drive. When you connect your phone to the computer for the first time, the phone will ask if you want to charge/sync the phone. Select the sync option and then copy the HTC Sync application over to the computer and install it. Once installed, it will ask you if you want to synchronise your Outlook/Mail contacts. You can set conditions so that your phone contacts, calendars etc are synched together or which takes priority e.g. any updates on the computer replace or update the ones on the phone or vice versa. However, there is an added bonus to this. The Contacts function on the phone is seamlessly integrated with Facebook so if you have friends on Facebook that are also on your phone, you can bring in their photographs and other contact details. Now of course, you’ll be concerned about back-ups. The phone does a back-up each time a change is made on the phone.
So what about applications, games etc. There is a button called Market that connects you to the Android market place. There is a mix of paid and free applications but bear in mind that the Apple iPhone has literally hundreds of thousands of apps so don’t be too disappointed with the limited range on offer. Note that some of the free applications have `adverts’ built into them and they will update themselves so be careful. I’m not going to recommend any applications as that it up to personal choice. Let’s just say you are bound to find something you like. One word fo warning though – applications are installed to your phone’s memory at the time of writing. But hopefully, Google will update the Android operating system to allow applications to be installed onto the memory card.
Browsing the internet is a joy on the phone. As with the iPhone, can you can pinch and zoom by making zooming in on images and making text larger. It amazes me that I can do this never having had this function before. It’s a definite must have.
So what about the photo and video capabilities of the phone? If you are taking pictures in well-lit environments, the photos are clear but don’t expect magnificent results – it’s only a camera phone. Video is very good but not HD. I haven’t played any films on the phone as yet so I can’t comment on this aspect of movie playback. The sound is mono but clear. The camera is very simple to use. You can point to a particular area of the screen and the camera will focus on that particular point. My compact camera can’t do that! The flash is an LED – it’s effective but only a point. In poor-lit environment, photos will have loads of noise in them.
So what’s there to not like? Firstly, music isn’t as straight forward as with the iPhone. You need to `mount’ the phone when connected to the computer by copying/dragging music into the MP3 folder of the phone. And if you want new ring tones, you need to create a folder called alarms and stick them in there. Not exactly intuitive but there are programs on the Android Marketplace which would simplify this process but as yet, haven’t come across any suitable utilities.
Predictive texting is a pain in the backside. The phone makes a pretty good educated guess in what you want to type but it isn’t perfect but you can save new words to the internal dictionary. If you have big fat fingers like me, using the keyboard in portrait mode is challenging and frustrating . Fortunately, landscape mode is available for those with large fingers. Battery life isn’t great but there has to be a trade-off. You can get a day or two out of the phone. Switching off Wi-fi and Bluetooth conserves power. There is no built in equaliser for the music player so if you like bass heavy music, you’ll be disappointed. The inbuilt speaker isn’t terrific. It’s very tinny but considering the slim factor of the phone, I think the designers at HTC had to compromise.
I could have written an interview running into thousands of words but the truth is this – a phone is a personal thing to each person. I love the Desire and you may equally hate it. Seriously though, this is the best phone I’ve had in 15 years. It’s a far cry from the days of the grey Nokia brick I had with a one line display. If you’re after something different, look at the Desire. You might just like it.
Rating: 5 / 5
About the Desire
The HTC Desire is a smartphone, very similar in look and functionality to Apples iPhone. Released in April 2010, the Desire has already attracted a large fanbase at it attempts to dethrone Apple from their perch at the pinnacle of the smartphone market.
The Desire runs on the Android operating system which is owned by Google. This means that the phone contains many of Google’s ordinary desktop features such as Google Maps and Google Mail.
The Desire Interface
The Desire uses what HTC call the HTC Sense interface. This interface is very much a people orientated experience. You can now view all interactions with a friend from the one screen, meaning that you no longer need to go into Facebook or Twitter to see what people are doing. All of this information is now stored against your individual contacts which is an extremely innovative approach which has certainly paid off as the interface is a delight to use.
Much like the iPhone, the Desire uses a touch screen with gestures controlling the navigation and zoom features within applications. This works really well and is very easy to control. A gentle swipe down the page will only move you a short way down the screen but an aggressive swipe will move you all the way from the top to the bottom of a large document or web page. This is really simple to get used to and within a handful of attempts, it will become second nature to most people.
The Desire is not content with giving you just one homepage. Instead, there are seven fully configurable pages which gives this phone so much flexibility. For example, you could have a page for all of your social networking requirements, a page for news and weather, a page full of downloaded applications and widgets, and so on. The list is endless and how these pages look is entirely down to you.
Tour of the Desire
The Desire is a fairly hefty phone, weighing in at 135g which is considerably heavier than most standard phones on the market. The front of the phone is mostly taken up with the 3.7 inch touchscreen with just enough space on the top for the speaker. The bottom section of the phone consists of the home button which takes you back to the main homepage, a menu button which gives you options related to the screen you are currently on (for example, the menu button on your web browser gives you options such as add favourites and view favourites.) and an extra large button which doubles up as a back button and a search. As well as these buttons there is touch sensitive joypad which can be used for navigating menus but the touchscreen method is a lot easier to use, making this joypad almost redundant.
Widgets
You can add widgets to any of the home screens to save you from going through the menu screens each time you want to use it. Popular widgets which you might want to add to a home screen could be settings for Wi-fi , GPRS mobile internet, GPS and Bluetooth as well as more personal widgets such as picture albums and music stores. These widgets can be moved around the screen and even removed should you no longer wish to use it on a home screen. Removing a widget from this screen does not delete it from the Desire.
Applications
As well as widgets, the Desire also allows full Android applications to be placed on its home screens.
Typically, an application will take up more space on a home screen than a widget and you will, in most instances only be able to fit one application on a home screen. Examples of popular applications that you might add to your home screens will include your web browser, the news and weather and your music player. Any application that you do not add to a home screen can still be accessed from the application menu.
The Android store
As well as the pre-installed widgets and applications, you can add more from the Android store. If you are familiar with the iTunes Application store then the Android store works in exactly the same way. The beauty of the Android store is that 80% of its content is completely free, meaning that if you require an application that tells you how far you have ran or you want some games to play whilst on the train, there is going to be something for you in the store for little or no extra cost. Of the applications which are not free, the most you will expect to pay will be between £2-3 per application which represents great value for money. Applications from the Android store tend to be very small in size meaning that they will not eat into your devices memory.
Wi-fi / GRPS
The Desire allows you to connect to the internet through a wireless internet connection or via your providers internet service with a GPRS connection. If you are using a wireless internet connection then you will not be charged any extra by your network provider however it is worth remembering that if you are connecting via the GPRS link then unless you have a data plan with your provider then you will be charged for this usage.
Email
Sending and receiving email from the Desire works so well. As previously mentioned, the phone comes with the Googlemail (or Gmail) application preinstalled. This not only allows you to maintain connection with your contacts via email but it also updates the Desires internal calendar system with any appointments which you may have in your Google calendar.
If you have an email account with anyone other than Google, you can set this up manually and, with the HTC sync software which needs to be installed on your PC, you can also synchronise contacts and calendars with applications such as Microsoft Outlook. The Desire doesn’t limit how many email accounts you can have meaning you could have your Googlemail, Hotmail and work email all coming through to the Desire meaning you will never be out of touch ever again.
Camera
The Desire comes with an excellent 5 Megapixel camera with flash and face recognition and autofocus. The quality of the photographs produced by the camera are second to none and are comparable to any dedicated digital camera I have used before. As well as taking standard photos, there are various themes within the camera application which you can add to enhance your photos such as black and white and negative themese.
Music
As a music player, this phone is the real deal. The sound quality is really top notch, especially through the headphones. Navigating music couldn’t be simpler, by using the drag gesture, you can change tracks so easily and by using the menu options you can select the artist, album or song you required with very little fuss.
Verdict
This is a seriously good phone. A lot of people have gone as far as saying it is better than the iPhone. I’m not going to jump on that bandwagon but it is certainly no worse. HTC are the second biggest manufacturer of smartphones in the world and the Desire will do wonders for their image as it is pretty much faultless. The only downside would probably be that the battery life between charges is slightly shorter than what it should be but that’s just being picky. The HTC Desire is a work of art and should be enjoyed by everyone. If you are in the market for a top of the range smartphone then this is the one to choose.
Rating: 5 / 5