Design

The dimensions of the Desire are 119 x 60 x 11.9mm, while its weight is 135g. Considering this is HTC’s flagship Android phone complete with all the latest features, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the Desire is quite compact and light.

The front of the phone is taken up mostly by its 800 x 480 (WVGA) 3.7-inch display. This extends almost to the left and right edges of the device, so there’s hardly a bezel to speak of. The Desire is among the first few products from HTC to bear an AMOLED screen. We didn’t have to worry about implementation immaturity as it held its own compared with other LCD-based screens when it comes to clarity and color reproduction.

There have been concerns that AMOLED screens cannot be used under direct sunlight. In our test using the maximum brightness setting, we found text to be readable under the noon sun even though it was somewhat dim. In other words, don’t expect the brilliant LCD performance offered by products such as the BlackBerry Bold.

Aside from a metallic finish around the screen, most of the HTC Desire is encased in a soft-touch plastic finish. This felt good in the hands, while the dark colors used give the handset a professional look. Under the screen are four standard Android shortcuts–Home, Menu, Back and Search–with two on either side of the optical navigation pad. This is where the design of the Desire differs the most from the Nexus One. Google’s phone comes with touch-sensitive keys in a row above a trackball. We prefer the physical keys offered by the Desire, but some will argue that the Nexus One presents a cleaner, less cluttered front facade. This is a matter of personal preference–both phones have their own merits in the buttons department. The optical navipad is also a selector when depressed. It worked well when we used it, which wasn’t very often–mostly during fine text edits.

Other buttons on the Desire include the volume controls on the left edge and a power toggle on the top. Ports are pretty standard with a 3.5mm audio connector and micro-USB port on the top and bottom, respectively. Its microSDHC card slot is found behind the battery cover and requires you to remove the battery if you want to swap cards–a tiny inconvenience.

Features

Connectivity features on the Desire are comprehensive, including HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Those who travel to the US frequently do need to take note that the dual-band cellular radio (900/2,100MHz) does not support the 3G frequencies used by the operators there. If you need that feature, the Nexus One is a better choice as it has tri-band 3G (900/1,700/2,100MHz) support. You still can depend on GSM though as the quad-band radio in the Desire makes it compatible with most networks worldwide.

The Desire also has GPS built-in, so satellite navigation is possible. In Asia, you will need to install third-party applications for turn-by-turn directions as the free version implemented in the Android Maps application doesn’t work in our part of the world.

The greatest defining factor of this smartphone is HTC Sense, a custom software from the company that changes the way Android looks and works in the Desire. This is evident the first time you turn on the device as it allows you to key in credentials from social-networking services such as Facebook and Flickr. If you want to see your friends’ activities on these services all in one place, there’s a Friends Stream widget that will aggregate everything in chronological order. This is useful for an overview, but we found ourselves using only third-party Twitter and Facebook apps after a while because they had more features pertaining to their specific services.

Other preinstalled widgets include one to monitor stock quotes, another for weather information and various settings widgets to quickly toggle items such as GPS and Wi-Fi. All these go on a modified Home screen that spans seven pages. Instead of having to swipe horizontally many times to move between screens, you can perform a pinch action on the Home screen which will cause a thumbnail view of the seven pages to appear. Tapping on any of the thumbnails will then bring you to the corresponding page, making it more convenient to access widgets littered across the horizontal span of the Home page.

Like HTC’s other Android phones, you get a custom keyboard which includes an alphanumeric keypad option. We found this to work better than the default Android keyboard both in layout design and accuracy of word prediction. Our only gripe was that in the QWERTY version, there’s no one-tap option to turn off prediction. This makes it cumbersome when keying in acronyms or colloquialisms–especially if you don’t want them to be automatically added into the custom dictionary.

There are still quite a number of other HTC Sense features not detailed here including support for Microsoft Exchange and USB tethering for sharing your mobile data with a notebook. These are generally the same as those found in the HTC Legend, so read our review of that device for more on that. Of course, you also get the full benefits that come with Android by default. These include tight integration with Google services such as Gmail and Calendar, as well as access to Android Market where a wealth of third-party apps are available. Take note that most countries in Asia still don’t have access to paid third-party apps, so you may be limited to just using the free ones.

The camera found on the Desire is a 5-megapixel one with an attached LED flash for dark situations. It comes with lots of settings in the software for those who like to tweak their shots before snapping. Images shot with the Desire gave good details, although color accuracy wasn’t perfect–shots taken indoors looked slightly dull compared with the subjects. One annoyance we noticed was that the camera tended to lower shutter speed in low-light situations when the LED flash was turned off. This would sometimes result in blurred shots because our hands weren’t able to hold the camera still enough. We would rather that the software chose to underexpose the shot than allow hand shake to ruin it.

Performance

With so many features and options to constantly stay connected, battery life will naturally be a concern. We turned on everything to test this out, including auto-sync of two email accounts, Twitter, Facebook, weather updates and stock quotes. The result was a flat battery from a full charge in about 20 hours. That was a pretty intensive trial that also included Web browsing and the usual phone calls and messaging. After adjusting our usage pattern, setting certain items to manual sync or reducing the update frequency, we managed slightly over a day on a single charge. Still not great, but not unexpected for a high-end smartphone.

Sound quality from the Desire was good, providing clear voice for both the user and the other party. Those who frequent noisy locations may want to opt for the Nexus One instead as that device comes with an added noise-cancellation feature which we tested in this video.

The 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 576MB of RAM made sure things chugged along smoothly. We didn’t feel any slowdowns at all during our test period, so that’s admirable.

Conclusion

If you want the latest and greatest Android smartphone, the HTC Desire ticks all the boxes. Its advantage over the (also HTC-made) Nexus One is HTC Sense which gives the user many convenient features. Another important distinction is that operators in Asia will be making the HTC Desire available with subsidies from an accompanying mobile plan.

Even if you aren’t going with the operator subsidy model, the full retail price of about US$648 is quite reasonable. In fact, this cost is almost identical to the Motorola Milestone’s, which we said presented good value for money.

This Android 2.1 smartphone just edges out the rest of the pack, including even its non-identical twin, the Nexus One. Though the Desire isn’t perfect when it comes to battery life and camera performance, its strong combination of hardware and software features makes it stand out from the competition. We highly recommend the HTC Desire if you are looking out a high-end Android smartphone.

However, if you are still undecided and don’t mind waiting, Samsung’s Galaxy S is another device that should be hitting stores soon. The Korean company has a pattern of undercutting the competition when it comes to price, so we suspect potential buyers will have a tough decision to make between the Desire and Galaxy S when the latter becomes available.

By John Chan