Htc Desire

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
This is a great android phone for the price it is offered at and is very good value for money. you can pick it up if android is your thing.