HTC Desire review

HTC has launched a withering assault in the past two months on Apple’s dominance at the top of the smartphone tree. First the HTC Legend appeared, with its beautiful aluminium chassis and slick operation, and now the attractive HTC Desire is here. The competition is getting fierce.

The Desire is the Legend’s bigger brother in every respect: it has a larger 3.7in screen with a brighter OLED panel and higher resolution at 480 x 800. It’s a chunkier device overall, measuring 60 x 11.9 x 119mm (WDH) and weighing 135g. The finish isn’t quite as lovely as the Legend’s solid aluminium, but the soft-touch plastics that wrap closely around the phone’s core lends to a solid and hard-wearing feel.

The result is a truly luxurious phone and one that, despite its larger screen size and resolution, is no more difficult to pocket than the iPhone 3GS. It feels just as slick in use too. Thanks to the 1GHz Snapdragon processor, the Desire does everything instantly, without pause or delay.

Web pages load quickly, pinch-zoom gestures work without lag, and the automatic screen rotation enabled by the device’s accelerometer occurs as soon as you turn the Desire on its end. Our tests back up that feeling of speed. Load the BBC homepage over a quick Wi-Fi connection and it will take, on average, a mere 10 seconds. That’s slower than the Apple iPhone 3GS, but not by much.

In the Acid3 web-standards test it scored a creditable 91, so it will load most websites accurately, then, as well as quickly. But that’s not the headline the inclusion of the Flash Lite 4 is. Although still not full fat Flash (that’s promised later in the year), we found it worked very well with the majority of interactive web content we tested it on. Embedded YouTube video played successfully, as did video on the PC Pro website. Alas, BBC iPlayer refused to play ball.

Augmenting the feeling of all-round quality is the accuracy of the touchscreen and reliability of the onscreen keyboard. It just feels right to use, and the addition of HTC’s superb Sense UI overlaid on top of Android means text entry works brilliantly, with iPhone-alike text prediction. You don’t have to worry about being too accurate anyway – tap cack-handedly away and, most of the time, you’ll be rewarded with readable text. Even if you find some links hard to press accurately, the optical d-pad beneath the screen provides an effective, alternative means of navigating around.

Just like the Legend, the Desire has a whopping seven home screens, which can be quickly navigated with the handy helicopter view. Just pinch as if to zoom out and up pops a thumbnail view. Other Sense additions include the slickest social networking integration around, with updates from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and Google integrated under HTC’s Friend Stream app, and contact info amalgamated in the People widget. We just love the way contacts from the various services can be “linked” together, with Sense making suggestions to make the job easier.

As you’d expect, the Desire boasts the full array of wireless data support – 7.2Mbits/sec HSDPA, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth – plus A-GPS, an accelerometer, FM radio, proximity and light sensors, and the now-obligatory digital compass. Perhaps the least impressive aspect of the Desire’s hardware lineup is its camera, whose five megapixels looks a little underfed compared with the Sony Ericsson X10’s 8.1-megapixel one.

But it makes up for this a little by including a single LED flash, autofocus and touch exposure/focus. It’s possible to take reasonably good quality photos with the Desire, although the video at 800 x 480 and just 15fps is less impressive.

A bigger potential sticking point is the battery life, but the Desire vaults this hurdle too. Our tests, carried out on all smartphones we review, simulate moderate use over a 24-hour period, and the Desire completed them with 60% of its capacity remaining at the end. It’s a notch better than the iPhone 3GS, superior to the Desire’s little brother, the HTC Legend, and above average for a smartphone with such a large, bright screen. Heavy users will still find themselves charging once a day, though.

The HTC Desire is a quality smartphone, then, and one that has no weakness worth quibbling over. It’s well designed, extremely fast and responsive, and a joy to use in every respect. And not only is it the match of the iPhone 3GS physically, it’s also much better value as a quick trawl of comparison sites reveals.

Deciding on whether this phone could replace the iPhone 3GS as PC Pro’s A List handset was a more tricky decision. Apple’s App Store, after all, is still superior to Android’s Market and that almost swings things back in the iPhone’s favour. But, all things considered, our feeling is the Desire just edges it. Until the next-gen iPhone appears, this is the smartphone to own.

Related Posts

Samsung Galaxy S7 Review: A Great Phone in its Day, but Don’t Buy One How to Share Your Spotify Playlist Pluto TV Review—Is It Worth It? CyberGhost Review Private Internet Access Review Best VPN Services 2023: What’s the Best VPN in the US? What Is a VPN? How It Works and Common Uses Best VPN for India: Surf Safely and Freely While You’re in India How to Record a Screencast in