Pretty Desire-able

Smartphone Review: HTC Desire

by May Chua

Updated 10:50 AM Jun 11, 2010

Is the HTC Desire everything you ever wanted in a smartphone? Well, it comes pretty close, if a nice and smooth interface in a sleek outer shell sounds like a perfect handset to you.

With its brown, smooth casing and matt, rubbery back cover, the HTC Desire ($898) is easy on the eyes. Its handsome 3.7-inch display doesn't hurt, either. Videos and photos look rich and sharp on it. The touchscreen is responsive, but its calibration is sometimes slightly off, righting itself only after a short while.

Running on Android 2.1, the Desire has new HTC Sense (a customised user interface) features - Friend Stream, Leap and a news application.

Friend Stream collects all the updates from your contacts on Twitter, Flickr, Plurk and Facebook, and displays them in a single stream. You can view all the updates together or separately. You can also send status updates to all these platforms simultaneously.

The seven-screen Leap thumbnail view serves as a menu of shortcuts to the different screens. I hardly use this as I don't find it a hassle to simply flick through the screens until I get to the desired one.

The news application gathers RSS feeds and displays them in a stream of bite-sized, mobile-friendly items - handy, but nothing to shout about.

The optical joystick, flanked by three other buttons below the screen is a nice touch, allowing you to scroll through home screens, menu items or webpages, but sometimes, this can slow things down.

Though the handset lags a little when scrolling through the applications in the menu, its 1GHz processor does a good job of delivering a relatively smooth experience.

I found HTC Sync, the bundled software for synchronising Microsoft Outlook contacts and calendar events with your computer, simple to install and use.

Pictures taken with the 5-megapixel camera are sharp and decent most of the time as the autofocus works well. The handset started feeling hot in my hand by mid-day - not unbearably so, but enough to make me consider using a pouch.

The battery lasts an average of 14 hours with WiFi, push mail and GPS on, as well as Friend Stream and the news app automatically updating my feeds. I also had the music player running in the background for several hours during the day. Turning off WiFi and GPS didn't extend the battery life much. May Chua