Android smart phones have become all the rage lately. The HTC Desire is the newest addition to the Android Smart Phone line. Since the concept of the HTC Desire was first announced in February (at the Mobile One Congress) critics, cell phone companies and consumers have been on the edge of their seats waiting to hear more about this new smart phone, as well as when they can purchase it. However, does it really live up to all the hype?
The Good
1) The HTC Desire features an extremely accurate and responsive touch screen. The screen is also very large (3.7 inches) and features an AMOLED display and a 480×800 pixel resolution. The touch screen also features a multi-touch option which comes in handy when using things like the internet browser or Google maps.
2) The Desire features a 3.5 mm headphone port (on the top) and a microphone and USB port on the bottom. The bottom line is this phone is wired for connectivity in many ways, and it’s great.
3) It has a 5 megapixel camera, one of the highest megapixels on any smart phone. It also has LED flash, as well as many different camera settings like black and white, sepia coloring, and much more. It’s a fantastic camera if you love to take pictures. Also, when it receives pictures, they’re extremely clear. It has a photo viewing software on it which makes viewing, saving, downloading, and sharing photos to be a complete breeze, and the photo viewing software is also available with the multi-touch technology option.
4) The battery life is absolutely incredible, especially for a smart phone. The Desire features a 1400mAh battery which has around 2 days of power, depending on how often you use it. If you use it frequently (and use apps like the web browser, which can drain your battery) then the battery life is about a day. Still, that’s significantly higher than most phones. Especially most smart phones.
5) Text messaging (SMS messaging) is definitely made easy on the HTC Desire. The phone features a QWERTY on-screen touch keyboard which can be a little hard to get used to, but it’s great once you do. The on screen keyboard can go in either landscape mode, or portrait mode, which makes it a lot easier to get used to. It also comes with a great email server which makes it easy to send and receive instant messages and emails. Plus, it features things like text correction, the ability to support POP or IMAP email servers, and much more.
6) Connectivity is definitely state of the art. The Desire features WiFi capability, GPS, Bluetooth 2.1 software (which can also be used for things like transferring files and photos), and much more.
7) The web browser is one of the best. The Desire’s web browser features fast speeds, a 1 GHZ processor, zooming (with a pinch-zoom feature), Adobe Flash support features, and landscape/portrait settings. It also comes with Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Google Translate and Google Dictionaries already built in with a cool feature that allows you to copy and paste from the browser into any of those features. It truly makes accessing the internet from your phone simple and hassle free.
8) The Desire is loaded with apps. It features many pre-loaded ones such as Google Calendar (which can sync with the regular phone calendar), an FM radio, Facebook, Twitter, Friend Stream, many news apps, The Weather Channel app, Google Maps, pdf viewer, stopwatch, alarm clock, Quickoffice, and much more. It also gives you access to the Android Market where thousands of apps are available. And, because the phone’s memory storage is great (512MB of internal storage, and 32GB memory card storage), you’ll have room for lots of apps.
The Bad
1) It’s not exactly the most lightweight smart phone out there. The Desire weighs about 4.75 oz (or 135 grams) and has a pretty large interface. Still, it’s slim and thin, and so because it doesn’t feel bulky it’s not too bad. But it’s definitely not the most lightweight smart phone on the market.
2) Although the call quality is fantastic, the earpiece doesn’t get very loud. At all. I have very good hearing, but with things like road noise (while driving) and my children screaming in the background..no matter how high you turn up the phone it’s earpiece volume just isn’t great. The speakerphone isn’t any louder. Although the call quality on the speakerphone is also great, it’s just not loud.
The Ugly
1) For a smart phone of this capacity, the music player is pretty low-key. It’s about what you’d expect on a traditional/plain MP3 type of phone. It features very straight forward features (like play, shuffle and repeat) but doesn’t feature any options to adjust the sound quality (which, isn’t very high to begin with). I really expected much more of a music/mp3 player from this line of phone.
Bottom line: The HTC Desire is one of the best smart phones on the market. It features everything you’d want in a phone (great battery life, awesome connectivity options, a great internet browser, unique features, a great camera, and much more) and if you can live without the MP3 player/music player aspect of your phone, then it’s absolutely fantastic.
