The INQUIRER - nibbling the toes of the people who have hands to bite
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HTC Desire
Product: HTC Desire
Website: www.t-mobile.co.uk/Desire
System Specifications: Android 2.1, 3.7-inch capacitive AMOLED touchscreen, 1 Ghz Snapdragon processor, 5 megapixel camera, 3.5mm jack, FM radio, 3G, Bluetooth, WIFI, GPRS, GPS, GSM, HSDPA, microSD, micsoUSB, Li-ion battery
Price: T-Mobile, free on £35 contract
FROM A COMPANY that has a history with Android mobile phones, where the OS is really only a few years old, now comes the sixth handset and its flagship model the HTC Desire. This mobile phone is not dissimilar to another of its recent handsets, the Google Nexus One, which it made specifically for the Internet search giant. The HTC Desire has the latest version of Google's Android OS, a fast 1Ghz processor and a large bright touchscreen to go along with its humble moniker.
HTC is not backwards about naming its handsets. With names such as Legend and now Desire for its phones, you can certainly say HTC is confident about its smartphones and their attractiveness.
The Desire's size, weight and dimensions are fairly comparable to the Iphone, although it feels a lot sleeker and a more professional design thanks to the black executive backing, the matte finish and the rounded edges of the metal case. The HTC Desire is 119mm x 60mm x 11.9mm thick, compared to the Iphone dimensions of 115.5mm x 62.1mm x 12.3mm thick.
HTC has opted for an AMOLED screen in the Desire, moving away from the TFT screen which isn't as bright nor as sharp displaying images and colours. HTC used the same type of screen in its Legend phone and the Desire's twin, the Nexus One. The 3.7-inch 480x800 capacitive touch screen happens to be one of the most responsive screens we've ever seen or used on a mobile, so much so that a good deal of this review was written on the handset. The onscreen keyboard in landscape mode was very receptive in interpreting touchscreen inputs, with exemplary auto-correction for misspellings.
There is a downside to AMOLED screens and that shows up trying to use them in bright sunshine, where the display almost disappears from view. We found this to be the case with the Desire, much to our disappointment, as it rendered the handset almost completely unusable outside in full sunlight.
The latest version of Android 2.1-1 ‘Eclair' is loaded on the handset. Older smartphones have not been updated to this version, nor have some newer phones. HTC has taken away some standard Google features of this iteration of the Android OS while adding some of its own. Noticeably missing is the voice recognition feature that was seen in the Google Nexus One for email and text dictation. Support for multiple Microsoft Exchange accounts is also missing, as is the Google Maps Sat-nav turn-by-turn feature though this has been re-introduced with a downloadable update - it wasn't previously available in the UK.
HTC has bundled in its own customised theme or user interface for the Desire in much the same way as it has previously in its Windows Mobile handsets since 2007. Its UI is called HTC Sense on the Android platform, which first appeared in the Hero handset from mid last year and now competes with Motorola's Blur and also Sony Ericsson's User Experience. Sense offers a friendlier user interface for the Android OS, with seven home screens as opposed to the basic three. All of these screens can be personalised with widgets and applications, or you can just use the default themes that are already on the phone. It's a fairly decent UI, although other players in the Android market offer more functionality in their overlays and we would have expected more from over a year's development of HTC Sense.
HTC has updated its original Sense with social networking functionality. HTC Friend Stream is the go to application on the handset for aggregating all Twitter and Facebook updates into one stream. The social notworking functions aren't as thoroughly worked into the phone's user interface as they are in the Moto Blur overlay or TimeScape by Sony Ericsson. But all the bells and whistles of the Desire can be found in various applications on the Android Market repository, or on a decent cooked ROM from Xda-Developers, only HTC has taken away the leg work for the average user.
Due to the involvement of HTC and its Sense overlay, future updates to the Desire won't be a free and easy affair to roll out. There won't be the simple deployment of over the air updates that vanilla versions of Android benefit from, instead it will be a somewhat clumsy effort to update it from the HTC website, as the Sense overlay is far too wrapped around the Android OS to make it easy.
What HTC has brought to the Desire that was missing from the Nexus One until recently is the welcome multi-touch feature. This is very useful for viewing text on web pages in greater detail and for pinch-to-zoom-in on Google Maps. The Desire also has the ability to natively view Flash content on sites from inside a web browser, which previously wasn't possible and still isn't on Apple mobile phones and probably won't be for some time, if ever. This gives the user the ability of replicating a desktop web browsing experience on a large, responsive touchscreen mobile.
Contacts are thoroughly integrated into the address book and from a variety of sources on the Desire, from Microsoft Exchange which is first natively supported on this version of Android, to Gmail and also Facebook. 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.
The battery inside the HTC Desire produced a mixed bag of results in our testing over some time in use. In calling alone without any social notworking features enabled or even email gathering, the Desire lasted for exactly 8 hours of phone calls. In regular operation, just as might be used day to day with the social notworking and HTC Sense features enabled along with infrequent text messaging, calling and a picture or two being captured, the Desire lasted just past the 9 hour mark.
This effectively means that the Desire will need charging at the end of every day. If the phone is used by a heavy social notworker, text messager or email user, the Desire won't make it to the end of a 7 hour stretch before dying, as we discovered.
HTC has opted for only a 1400mAh battery instead of a 1500mAh battery that is more commonplace in flagship mobile phones. This would have given more juice to the Desire and we would have welcomed it, seeing as how the mobile really didn't last a full working day or even through half a day of heavy use.
In Short
HTC's current batch of mobile phones all have names more apt for perfumes than handsets. Don't let that put you off though, as the HTC Desire is a good mobile phone with a large, bright, vivid screen that's remarkably responsive and the best we've used to date. HTC's user interface hasn't really grown as much as we'd have liked over the past year, while new players on the block now add a lot more value and functionality to the basic Android OS. However, other than a few foibles and niggles it is the best of the bunch of Android mobile phones currently being shipped. µ
The Good
Latest Android version, a large, bright, vivid and responsive touchscreen, Flash support.
The Bad
HTC Sense hasn't really evolved as much as we'd have liked over the past year.
The Ugly
Battery life could be better and it should have included a 1500mAh version, instead of 1400mAh.
Bartender's Report
9/10
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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.