HTC Desire – In Depth Review Pt 1

After using the HTC Desire for two weeks I can finally take some time off to do a proper review. If you’ve missed my initial impressions on the HTC Desire you can check it out here.

The one most obvious thing that sets the HTC Desire apart from other Android devices is the Sense UI. Aside from the hardware changes from their award winning HTC Hero the Sense UI has also been revised to include new context icons, new animated wallpapers and the unified Widgets. Even though the HTC Legend comes with an AMOLED screen and the new sense UI, the Desire offers sharper images compared to the Legend due to it’s higher pixel density (252 vs 180 ppi).

Sense UI

There are three virtual keys and an arched scroll bar which indicates on which of the 7 homescreens you currently are on. The left key launches the main menu where all the applications are listed, the middle key is a shortcut to the Phone app and the right key launches the “Add to home” menu. The new Sense UI also introduces something called the Leap View which shows all 7 homescreens in small thumbs. Tapping on one of them will open up the particular homescreen.

Homescreen with three virtual keys

Leap view

Sense UI makes use of Scenes, which is customisable to your liking. By default it comes with six custom homescreens HTC,Social,Work,Play,Travel and Clean Slate. Each scene changes the wallpaper and widgets on the homescreen. When you customise any of the default scenes it will prompt you to save the changes as a new scene.

Default scenes	HTC scene	Social scene
Work scene	Play scene	Travel scene

The main menu where all the applications are listed displays the typical grid layout but if you have a lot of application locating the one you want could be quite a task, switching to a list makes it much easier plus it has an alphabet scroll.

Grid view

List view with alphabet scroll

You might think that 7 homescreens is a bit of an overkill but once you start playing around with the multitude of widgets available you might soon find yourself running out of space to fit them all in. Plus you can even create shortcuts and folders on the homescreens making launching your favourite apps even easier and quicker.

Add to home	Android and HTC widgets
Application widgets are also listed	Even more widgets

Selecting a widget allows you to choose several styles and sizes to add to the homescreen. Take the clock for example, the HTC Desire comes with 12 different syles !! Yes 12 styles to suit your theme and mood to add to the homescreen.

Style 1

Style 3

Style 8

Phonebook

The People application holds all your contacts and clicking the details presents you a basic info for the person. One thing that you’ll notice is the 5 icons at the bottom of the app. The first one is the contact info, second – text messages received, the third hold a list of emails exchanged. The other two tabs is what makes the Desire such an amazing social network tool, the fourth tab integrates the contact with their facebook profile and the fifth to their photo albums from Facebook and Flickr.

Contact info

Messages tab

Mail tab

The People app is tabbed as well, you have all your contacts, groups, Online Directories as well as Call Logs. Online directories provides a listing of friends on your social media sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Plurk, Twitter and even your company exchange directory. Another neat feature of the people app is it allows you to view contact’s Facebook status updates just under their name.

People app with Facebook status

Online Directories

Adding a contact is easy, launch the People application and click on the Add Contact. There’s a lot additional information you can add to the contact, more than you’ll ever need.

Adding contact

Add more info

Making calls

The HTC Desire is missing the noise-cancellation secondary mic but so far there’s no issues in terms of voice quality, the ear volume is also good and you don’t have to set it to maximum to hear the caller’s voice. Typing in the name of the contact search for the closest possible match, which makes looking for contacts easier.

Phone application

Searching contacts

Messaging

The HTC Desire can do SMS,MMS and email out of the box.  Messages apps in the Desire are displayed in a threaded view. Clicking on the New Message shows the compose message screen, which has the compose box and send key. A counter will also display on the right once you have 10 characters or lesser remaining to the 160 limit. One thing that I don’t really like about the mssaging app is how little space the text box takes up even after hiding the keyboard. Sending a MMS is just as easy, attach an image or audio to the text message and it will be automatically converted.

Messages app	Threaded view	Compose message
Attach media file	Composing MMS	Sending MMS

Will be reviewing the multimedia and web browsing capabilities of the HTC Desire next. Stay tuned

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