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I now had the pleasure of owning the HTC Desire for the last couple of days and here is my review of the latest HTC Android handset. Hopefully I will cover the important bits that people are interested in. Please ask any questions if I miss anything
First Impressions
First impressions on opening the box is of the nice big 3.7 inch AMOLED screen. It takes up nearly the whole front of the device with just small home, menu, back, search buttons and the optical trackball in the center. The power button is on the top next to the 3.5 mm headset connection. As with other HTC Android devices, the volume rocker is on the left and at the bottom is the standard micro usb connection.
The SD card slot is underneath the battery cover, but to change it you will need to take out the battery. Not really a problem for myself, but some people do like to swap and change their memory cards frequently.
On first powering on the Desire's display is bright, sharp and crisp and an improvement over the Hero's display. The display itself is a 480 x 800 WVGA display so that is the reason why the screen looks better than the Hero
Oh and I know that some people have reported having a pinkish hue on the display of thier Desire and Legends but so far I haven't noticed any such hue on my Desire. I'm hoping that the people reporting the hue problem either have a defective batch or a pre-production model that has slipped into their hands.
After getting over the very nice display, the next thing you will notice about the Desire is the 1Ghz Snapdragon processor that makes the Desire just fly. Even now after several days of using and installing a number of apps, the phone runs just as smoothly as when I first turned it on without any lag or delay. The various apps start quickly and the whole thing just runs alot quicker than the Hero that I'm used to.
For the full specifications of the HTC Desire, take a look here: http://www.htc.com/u...cification.html
The Home Screens
The Android 2.1 (eclair) OS coupled with HTC Sense UI makes this phone a dream to use. The 7 HTC home screens mean that everything I need can be put on one of the 7 screens. The new pinch and select feature (also by pressing the home screen from the main home screen) means you can jump to any of the 7 Home screens quickly and without effort.
HTC have re-jigged the way it presents the widgets in the widget selection screen. Gone is the seperate HTC and Android widgets, now they are both shown under the simpler heading of Widgets. HTC have also included a link at the top that looks for more HTC widgets. Handy for in the future when HTC bring out more widgets.
Contacts
HTC have re-done the contacts or people side of the Desire bringing together alot of information from various places including facebook, google, your sim card and even Exchange contacts. This will bring all the information, phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses and display them all under a single contact. As with the Hero, you also get all the SMS, emails and photos from facebook or flicker along with individual call history. Nice.
You can also split things down to only see one particular type of contact, from only contacts on your SIM card, only google contacts, only facebook contacts etc.
A different tab brings you to your Online Directories. Here you can get your Company Directory (Exchange activesync),Facebook contacts, Flicker contacts and twitter contacts (who you are following and who is following you).
Messages
The messages area of the Desire hasn't undergone any major changes as far as I can see. It still lists all the SMS/MMS messages in threaded form displayed by who your having the conversation with. One nice little feature that has been included in 2.1 is old messages now include the time beside the date that messages are recieved.
Phone Calls
With the phone not having a Call or End Call button, everything to do with phone calls is done on the screen. With the phone pad being available from any of the home screens, making a phone call is easy and the same as any other HTC android handset.
It's at the start of recieving a phone call that the updates become apparent. The first thing you will notice is that the ringer volume will reduce when you pick up the phone. Handy if you get a phone call in a public place like a train and don't want to annoy every one with your groovey ringtone
Added to this feature is the ability to silence the ringtone by simply turning over the phone face down.The improvements continue into during the phone call. As is standard nowadays, when you call someone and then put the phone to your ear, the screen goes blank to stop any inadvertent pressing of screen buttons. With the Desire, when you pull the phone away from your ear, the screen comes back to life. Handy for when your calling likes of phone banking where it asks you to input various numbers at different stages during the call.
The quality of the phone call is as you would expect from HTC, clear and crisp and the speaker phone is loud and clear, even when used in a car going at 50.
Internet Browser
There seems to have been a number of behind the scenes changes to the Internet Browser in Android 2.1. Using a Wifi connection the webpages are rendered quickly without any waiting around that I sometimes got with image intensive webpages on the Hero.
And the big thing.... Flash works! The sites that I've had a look around at all work with the Desire. I'm sure if I looked hard enough then I might be able to find some sites built with flash that won't work with the Desire, but so far they have all worked.
One new feature that has impressed me in the Desire's browser is when you select a block of text. You can select one word or the whole page and then are presented with 3 options: copy to clipboard, look up, and share.
Copy to clipboard does what it says on the tin, copies the text to the clipboard to be used in any other application.
Look Up lets you look up the word on Wikipedia, lets you look up the word(s) in google dictionary, and also lets you look up the word(s) in google translate. Handy for when you want to look at those websites written in french
Share lets you share the word(s) via twitter, facebook, email and messages.
Multimedia
I haven't had too much time to play around with all the multimedia functions, but what I have played with, it all seems to be the same as the HTC Hero, the HTC music player has all the basic functions you need to listen to your music.
The video side of things still seems lacking. Although the videos that did play, played well without any jerkyness or stutterting ( a problem that I had with some videos recorded on a N95 and viewed on the Hero) I still had issues getting some .WMV or .AVI files to play.
Exchange
Unfortunatly I havent been able to test the Exchange side of things
If I get a chance, I will update this part with mmy thoughts.Battery Life
With any device that has a large screen, battery life is a big factor in their consideration for picking a device. With the Desire, I have been using it alot over the last couple days, more than I would normally use it day to day and at the end of the day it does need charging. Unplugging at 7am and plugging back in around 10-11pm with the phone reporting around 20% battery left.
The sorts of things I have been doing over the last few days include:
- playing Air Control for about 2 hours at a time. It's dangerously addictive little game available from the market place.
- playing Blow Up LITE several times during the day. Again, although only 10 levels in the LITE version, this game is addictive, trying to get the best set-up for the explosives.
- Wifi on 15 hours. I'm visiting my folks and they live in an area that doesn't get very good phone signal, so I just leave the Wifi on.
- general playing around with the phone, going into various menus and just seeing whats there.
- A couple phone callsabout 30-40 minutes
- SMS/MMS, over the easter weekend, I've been sending alot of texts and picture messages. I'm glad I've got unlimited texts lol.
I think once I get back into my normal routine with the phone then the battery should last me around 2-2 1/2 days. That said, I am already in the habit of plugging in my phones when I go to bed so battery life isn't going to be an issue for me.
Overall
The Android OS seems to be going from strength to strength. At the moment, Windows Phone 7 will need to pull some serious tricks out of the back in terms of one handed finger friendlyness in order to pull me away from Android. As with every OS, there are still areas that can be improved, in this case the video playback is one area that could do with extra codecs being put in or at least 3rd party codecs so that most if not all file formats can be enjoyed on what is a very good screen.
The phone feels like it has been built to last, it's firm in the hand and doesn't feel like it will break easily. While the optical trackball will take me a couple days to get used to, I don't think I will need to use it that often.
The overall feeling about the HTC Desire is that it is a very fast and capable device and should last me for the next 6 months until a better one comes around the corner
