HTC Desire HD Review and Price

HTC Desire HD Price :  US $ 677.98

The HTC Desire gained plaudits from the industry, and now HTC has come back with a bigger - and probably better - offering in the shape of the HTC Desire HD. But don't dismiss it as just another follow-up device - the Desire HD is very much a newest cell phone in its own right; it has a new look, a bigger display and a better operating system. Whatever, HTC has certainly put itself under some pressure to deliver something even better than the Desire, and to offer a plausible alternative for iPhone fans.

HTC Desire HD Review and Price

The Desire HD has very slim proportions, despite that huge 4.3in touchscreen, but it is really long, which makes it a bit cumbersome. We could still fit the device in a pocket, and we're big fans of large screens, but it may put off some users. We love that HTC reviews have allowed the touch-screen to stretch to all the device's sides, apart from the bottom. Underneath the screen are four touch keys for search, Back, Menu and Home - unlike the original Desire, which had hard keys for these functions.
The HTC Desire HD has an eight-megapixel camera on-board, which makes it the best-equipped Android phone in terms of snapper so far (yes, we know the HTC Mozart has a Xenon Flash, too, but that is a Windows Phones 7 device). It's a shame that there is no lens protector, nor a dedicated camera key - instead you have to use a virtual icon on screen to switch it on, which we're not keen on. But we were impressed with the dual LED flash and there are good dozen or so effects to play around with - they also offer the chance to preview before taking the photo. If you turn the phone around from portrait to landscape orientation, for instance, the virtual icons realign too, which is handy? The name will have given away the fact that the Desire HD offers high definition video, but we felt rather let down by the video recording facilities on offer. It's not awful, and does allow you to zoom in and out while recording, to record up to an hour's worth of footage, and to use the flash and the effects offered on the still camera. But we found it a shame that the video camera took some time to get used to changes in light, which resulted in rather amateurish footage.

We have to say; we think HTC offers the best social network integration experience of any of the phone manufacturers, thanks to Friend Stream, which manages to sync Twitter and Facebook contacts with no repeats. Pop a ‘What's on your mind' status and it will add an update on both networks; you can state what sort of news you want to see from which networks and are able to reviews the history of your conversation with specific contacts; you can also see photos they have put up on social networks. We were also impressed with the email facility - pop in your password and email address and you're off. Choose whether you want to have one stream of all your accounts merged together, or filter to look at all your email conversations with one contact, all mails with attachments or unread mails. It's the closest we've seen on a mobile phones device to a real desktop email experience. It's handy that the device remembers your email addresses, so that you don't need to re-enter them to log in to other accounts. The dedicated ‘com' key on the virtual keyboard (whether it is in landscape or portrait mode) is another bonus.

Underneath all this cleverness is Android's latest version of its operating system: FROYO 2.2. In short, it offers a faster user experience, voice search and dictation, and allows you to play flash video, like that embedded on a number of sites such as the BBC. We're generally very keen on Android, but we have to say it is not as smooth as the Apple OS, so it's great that HTC has managed to counteract this by adding its own skin of customisable menus and large icons.