HTC Desire

April will see the release in the UK of the new HTC Desire – which aims to be a great new smartphone for business mobile phone as well as individual users.It is blessed with some pretty top notch hardware in a slim case, so how much is it going to shake up the Smartphone business mobile phone market?

HTC have used the android operating system with the HTC Sense UI.

As HTC built the Google Nexus One this is actually a very similar phone just with the thinner, easier to hold shape and size.

It seems that when building the HTC Desire they looked closely at the Nexus One, took a lot of feedback and basically ironed out all of the weaknesses.

One major difference is that the trackball, which is used for navigation is missing from the front of the phone – and has been replaced with an optical option instead, this means that it is less of a touch based experience to navigate, which just takes a bit of getting used to for those used to a trackball Smartphone such as on the Nexus One and many Blackberry mobile phones.

HTC Desire buttons

There are now physical keys on the front of the phone instead of the touch sensitive buttons which are a slightly nicer and quicker way to navigate.

The HTC Desire also doesn’t have the dock pots needed for the stand and they have made a much more economical business mobile phone through getting rid of the active noise cancellation – this makes it a lot more accesible for the small business user.

The HTC Desire has a 3.7 inch true colour AMOLED screen and it has an extremelly powerful 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor which makes the phone incredibly fast to navigate around the various tools and apps. it also has a number of widgets that make the phone great for personalisation.

The Sense UI is excellent, this phone is multi-touch enabled and has perfect sensitivity so is a fast phone to use for both email and messaging.

Like the i-phone you can just pinch in on one of the home screens, and you will see all of the displays currently running with no need to scroll from right to left.

The WM Sense overlay lets you run your finger along the bottom of the device in applications to open up extra elements, this functionality is available in the contacts, music and messaging as well many other functions.

A great little addition to this new version of the Sense UI for business mobile phone users is that there is a new calendar widget that shows the agenda as well as the month, and more importantly tabbed emails which makes it a much easier and faster phone to manage your communications on.

The 5 mega pixel camera is fine for general use and has a flash, but is not a special point of the HTC Desire.

There are a number of great widgets that work well with the powerful processor, one that falls a little short of the rest is the weather widget which is a bit shaky when moving through the cities.

The HTC Desire is a superb phone for messaging – although it doesn’t have a physical keyboard, it has an incredibly responsive and sensitive touchscreen with a great auto-correct function.

Also great for business mobile users, the Desire has exchange support, webmail and threaded text messaging.

The contacts view is good, with apps for Facebook and Twitter as well a useful app called Friendstream for managing Friends updates. This widget sits on the front screen of the phone and lets you see all of you friends’ Twitter, Facebook and Flickr updates all grouped together in one place, including new photos, shared links and statuses.it also lets you post updates to both Facebook and Twitter at the same time.

The HTC Desire with it’s WVGA screen is spot on for multimedia as well – you can simply slide through artists, albums and songs at the bottom of the device.

With the powerful processor, Video on the Desire is incredibly fast with moving images so the video looks silky smooth, you can watch loads of different codecs on the phone and the 3.7-inch OLED screen has very bright and clear colours.

HTC have also pulled out a great phone for internet browsing – it is fast to load web pages and is clear and simple with the large screen. it also has a function so that you can select and hold a piece of text and look it up on Wikipedia or Google translate.

The phone has a text reflow option which lets you zoom right in on text and constantly refocuses as you zoom.

A really nice little touch is that the ring volume automatically reduces when you pick up the phone – great for reducing interuptions in meetings.

Overall the HTC Desire is one of the best mobile phones for business users (and others) that we have ever tested – it obviously blows the Android out of the water and I felt was on a par with the i-phone.

I really hope that this opens up greater competition for Apple and Blackberry for business mobile phone users.

Check out this short overview

HTC Desire Deals

Tags: business mobile phones, business mobiles, HTC Desire, HTC Smartphone

This entry was posted on March 14, 2010 at 10:39 pm and is filed under HTC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.