HTC Desire - Review

“HTC’s Desire is as close to smartphone perfection as technology currently allows. Fantastic usability and features easily outshadow this phone’s relatively minor issues”

HTC Desire - Review

Desire is a top-end smartphone

The HTC Desire has hogged headlines for months, with journalists raving about its deliciously crisp screen, super-fast processer and general “fantasticness”.

But did the Desire smartphone live up to my expectations?

The Desire’s body is pure quality. The phone felt study and well built, while its rubbery rear panel stopped the device from slipping in my hands.

Below its 3.7in touchscreen rests four function buttons: one for the home screen, another that opens in-application menus and a dual-function button for searching the device or jumping back one screen.

The fourth button is technically an optical trackball that provides an alternative way of navigating through the smartphone’s features. The trackball always felt somewhat redundant though because Desire’s touchscreen is just so responsive.

If anything the trackball got in the way because my thumb mistakenly skirted over it, causing the screen display to fly off to the left or right.

HTC Sense

Desire runs Google Android

A small button at the top of the Desire functions as both the power and screen lock/unlock key. Having to pick the phone up to unlock it was a little annoying, though, and I’d have preferred the trackball to function as a phone unlock key.

The Desire runs version 2.1 (aka Éclair) of Google’s Android operating system and has HTC’s own Sense user-interface overlaid that tries to make Android easier to use. For this I commend HTC, even though I often struggled to sense when Sense was doing anything.

From a user perspective, Sense amounts to FriendSense – an app which integrates multiple social network feeds – and a tool that simultaneously shows thumbnails of up to seven windows, no matter what application they’re running.

The 600MHz processor inside Apple’s iPhone 3GS may have won smartphone speed headlines in 2009, but Desire has an even faster 1GHz processor that ensures applications open with lightening swiftness.

The Desire’s fast processor also enables to phone to run multiple apps concurrently and display so-called “living” wallpapers, such as a spinning globes and swimming fish.

I particularly enjoyed surfing the internet on HTC’s Desire. Webpages were easy to read thanks to the smartphone’s big bright screen and navigating though webpages was as easy as alternating between double taps and iPhone-esque finger pinches.

The on-screen “virtual” keyboards of some smartphones have been criticised for their small keys and lack of accuracy. The Desire’s keyboard doesn’t suffer from either issue and emits a small vibration with each keystroke, helping to improve my typing accuracy.

Android Market

Some camera images looked washed out

Google Maps is supported by Desire and, in most instances, maps loaded quickly thanks to the phone’s 3G connection and GPS support.

A compass tool (as found on the iPhone 3GS) would have improved my navigation experience. Google Maps tended to be pretty accurate on Desire, but it often took me a while to find my bearing when simply told to head in a “North Easterly” direction.

Don’t expect Desire’s rear-mounted 5Mp camera to blow you away. It snaps crisp, clear and well-lit images and provides several handy photo features. It just doesn’t replicate the quality of true cameraphones, such as Sony Ericsson’s Idou (read our Idou review).

For everything’s that’s great, nay fantastic, about Desire, the smartphone still has some drawbacks.

For example, Desire tended to get quite warm after several hours of continued use. This occasionally caused applications to crash on me.

Battery life on the Desire is longer than on most smartphones (notably the iPhone), but I still wanted more. After a full day’s worth of watching videos, emailing, surfing the web and playing games on the Desire the phone didn’t have much charge left.

My final Desire peeve focused on email and Facebook duplication. I never really got to the heart of what caused most emails and Facebook message notifications to be duplicated, but I’m pretty certain it had something to do with HTC’s Sense user interface.

Thanks to Virgin Media for lending Mobilechoices.co.uk an HTC Desire to review