Had my Desire for 2 weeks now and works great. Looks stunning too, steals more glances than anything else ;)

But you have to work on it, install 'Advanced task killer' to close things properly, get 'antivirus' so you don't catch cold :), '3G watchdog' to see spent net quota, 'Astro' file manager and so on. Everything free of course.

And apart from that only the inability to install on SD card and a proper 'close application' standard button is bugging me, but not so much.

Go HTC! :D

"There won't be the simple deployment of over the air updates that vanilla versions of Android benefit from"

Except there will. Both the Desire and the Legend support it

The main issue I find is that while Nexus owners will be enjoying froyo next month, desire owners will have to wait for HTC to get around to releasing it. Going by the other Sense UI android phones that doesn't seem like it will be a priority.

For the Telstra Australian version of the desire (who have an exclusivitey deal for 3 months), you're also at the mercy of whether they've decided on releasing the update over their network.

Far too many links in the chain for my liking.

Sure, there's the custom firmware option if you want to be on the bleeding edge, but that both becomes a hassle and voids your warranty.

I know I know! I cannot wait for the Samsung Galaxy S!!!

Thanks for the app tip, I've been looking for a while now...

BOTTOM LINE: This HTC Desire phone ROCKS MY WORLD!

@Mark
For the next Android release, Google is presumably working on a solution to allow apps installation on external flash memory.

@Someone Special

At least one android phone, the Samsung Galaxy Spica, can read divx using the included app.
It seems there is at least an app that can play divx on the market, YXFLASH.

This is a great phone, fast and never slowing even when you launch lot of apps and switching between them.

Android is a great OS, there is a ton of apps, a lot being free. Almost 60 000 today.

On the downside, the apps UI lack constancy to say the least.

Must be an adverse effect of Google's market openness.

The most annoying is the "Return" button does not have the same effect in every app. In some app you go up one level, on some other you switch to the desktop..

Android is very flexible, you can use an alternative desktop (I use helix), SMS client (handcent is great) etc..

At least i don't have to circumvent some OS locks if I want to run some app not coming from the official store.

I've had my Desire for about a month now and have found what I consider to be a fairly limiting 'feature' that seems to be overlooked in all reviews I've read.
Apps can only be installed to the internal memory and not the micro-sd card. I've already had to uninstall a load of apps before I could try out new ones, because I'd filled it up... and I've not installed anything massive or an excessive number of applications.
HTC support's answer about why you can't install to the SD was just "you can't".
I don't really want to root the phone if I can help it, but even my 3 year old Nokia N95 can install to wherever you like so it's looking like I might have to. Here's one for iPhone users to throw back in our faces, they may only have the 8GB version, but at least they can use all that space to fill up with apps if they desire.

I agDXree with the ugly, using it a little too much will drain it like crazy, I've thought about getting a bunch or micro usb cables, just to make sure I can always charge it, because tufts pretty sweet that you can charge it via usb, I know HTC usually does that but its still a sweet feature, and the only counter weight to the battery issue to me.

I'm one of the few people this work who never owned an Iphone, but I have handled a few and the screen on the desire is definitely better, not because of the resolution, it's so much clearer, OLED is nothing short of amazing, now the whole sunlight issue, to me I had no problem seeing it in sunlight, but I guess other phones must be better at this because the phone I had before my Nokia E51 it was basically impossible to see in sunlight.

The keyboard took me a few days but today I write perfectly on it.. or rather I make million typos and it recognizes what I was writing, this is exactly how a touch keyboard should be, again I've only handled a couple of Iphones and from what I remember it didn't have the autocorrect feature. My only touch phone I had before this was a Motorola A925, and even with the pen it was annoying as hell, so I was sceptical when I heard of the Iphone and what seemed to be the rise of touch phones, the desire have definitely sold me on this.

The apps is a problem., and I wrote this on my blog before I got the HTC desire, I was looking for an app that would show me the phones ip info when I was on wireless, mostly because I plan to use this phone for work and often I will get asked to set up a router, so I thought that ip apps wouldnshow all the info, but no, took me 4 apps before I found one showing info like default gateway or subnet, its so annoying that I've thought about learning to program for the Android myself simply to not get stuck like that, but there are good apps, just takes a while and a Google search to find them.

All in all I've felt that no matter what phone I changed to it always felt like I had to do a tradeoff from whatever Nokia I had and eventually would end up with a Nokia again, before my Nokia E51 I had a HTC s740, before that I had a Nokia E60(it broke because of coffee :( ), so I went from a nice business phone (E60) to probably the most buggy phone I've ever owned (s740) , and back to Nokia yet again, this is the first phone I've had that felt like a complete upgrade, with the exception of battery time.O

Yep, I agree with the reviewer - the desires address book is not intelligent enough.

I had to go through all my facebook, gmail contacts and work exchange contacts and then manually sync them all up together.

All of which took far, far too long.

Also Twitter contacts and their accounts aren't always obviously the same person as the Facebook contact, even though those details are listed on their own facebook info page - which isn't brought in to the address book and synced up.

There does need to be a more intelligent engine behind all address books, and not just on Android.

Steve

I had an Iphone 3GS and 'upgraded' to a Nexus One. The display is bright and beautiful, everything runs very snappy. There are some problems though.

First of all the apps are atrocious. The app store is fragmented, apps only run on certain handsets, no overall UI standards, most look very amateurish and at worst crash your phone. Second no dedicated music/video player. You view videos in the photo app. I expect at least a basic player to come as standard. Third terrible battery life mostly thanks to poorly implemented multi-tasking. Every app I leave I don't want run in the background! Task manager was hidden in options and not great. Fourth no proper Skype you can make Skypeout calls with. There are alternative apps but sound quality is poor.

Don't get me wrong I think Android will be excellent in a year or two. Right now it is definitely second rate.

@timcato This is a review of the Desire, not the Hero. What are you blithering about? Perhaps you've got sour grapes because the Hero wasn't all you'd hoped. I sympathise, I really do, but still, GTFO.

I have had a htc hero for nearly a year now and the apps are total rubbish . mostly designed by children and have very little practical use . my old nokia n95 was easily able to stream slinbox , connect to my SIP account anywhere in the world and easily play music through the bluetooth system via the cars speakers , the only thing the hero can just about manage is stream internet radio through a jack plug .... very CUTTING EDGE .
WAKE UP the HTC is ALL HYPE and no action.

"What's missing is an intelligent engine behind the address book to weed out and integrate everyone's details automatically and save the user the effort of manually editing when first starting up the phone."

Except again it does.

"There won't be the simple deployment of over the air updates that vanilla versions of Android benefit from"

Except there will. Both the Desire and the Legend support it

Been running mine for a month now. Utterly amazing, best thing ever to shut up the Iphonies in the office :D "oh can you view this site? what's that? you can't? no app for that?" mwhahah. The onscreen keyboard is also utterly great at getting the Iphonies annoyed as it kicks the Iphone's typing abilities well into the long grass.

Battery wise I found the first few days awful how it depleted it so quickly, but after a few days of charges it increased performance massively. Been able to get over 20 hours of browsing, email, twitter, facebook and navigate from it. Games really zap it down fast, but on normal tasks when full syncing is off it lasts easily all day with all features running happily. No idea why it needs to get the battery run in a few charges first though, no doubt someone can explain what's going on chemically though? But hey ho, worst off if you need more time can always buy the optional big 2800mAh battery which HTC offers (if adding to the thickness).

Have to contradict the review about Sense though. Love it. Most other none HTC users who've played with it prefer it over the basic boring Android. Don't think it needs to many other bells and whistles, the HTC Exchange app's better than the basic Android one, as is most of the Sense app's.

The oddest GUI thing though has to be where you play video's from...the Photos app...urmm odd place to put it *shrug*. But once found it's a nice experience, or just download a proper video player for other formats from the market which does the job. Great phone all round, utterly amazing bit of kit.

Had this for a week now, replaced my old iPhone (non GS)

Great phone...a bit annoying to hunt through the "market" (app store) to get the good apps...

My gripes?

No built in mkv playback or divx etc.

This is not the phone's fault, it's a limitation of the OS.

Awesome phone nontheless.