For those who just like to be the underdog, the good people at HTC have created a smartphone for you. The HTC “Desire” is the surprise for all those who were looking to get a “Google phone”. Take a quick look at the things the Desire, originally called the “Bravo”, can do right here in this short article.
The speed, the looks, the operating system and even the screen size is the same on the Desire as it is on the much-acclaimed Google phone. The Desire is “desirable” for one extra reason, the “Sense” user interface. The optical trackpad is also superior.
The screen on the HTC Desire is 3.7 inches when measured diagonally. That is 9.4 centimeters for the readers who are using the metric system. It has super high resolution at 480 by 800 megapixels. The screen is at the top of its class in color choices. It can show sixteen million different colors. The AMOLED construction is superior to the old LCD style and uses ten per cent less energy from the battery for longer spaces between charges. The screen acrobatics are all there with multitouch, accelerometer and a proximity sensor. You can pinch and zoom and turn the screen all you like and the Desire follows you.
The important news on the HTC Desire is the Sense user “experience”. This is a view of the more pleasing widget interface, rather than a basic Android interface. A few of the advantages of the Sense user interface is a widget displays your total agenda in one screen. The widget for the weather is displayed on your current position and is installed on the home screen. For your emails, you can view a list of all of the mail, instead of just one email at a time. This is similar to viewing SMS messages. In the WebKit browser some features are not readily apparent. Doing a long press on the screen over text will bring a selection bar into view. This will select the word you want to translate or to define and send it to google for crunching.
The exterior of the HTC Desire looks a lot like the Google phone. The optical trackpad is superior to the trackball because it will never have lint stuck in it. The total size of the Desire is 119 millimeters tall by 60 millimeters wide by 11.9 millimeters thick. That is .47 inches thick or just under half an inch. That is a great size for sticking into your pocket or purse. It is also just .4 millimeters thicker than the Google phone. The Desire even copies the small “chin” that the Google phone has.
The interior hardware is very impressive, especially the processor. It is a Qualcomm QSD8250 processor that runs at “warp speed”. Okay, maybe not that fast, but it does run at one gigahertz. The Desire runs without waiting for a program to load or to stop. This is also great for those multi-taskers who are reading. You can open lots of programs without crashing the Desire. The Desire comes with 512 megabytes of ROM and 576 megabytes of RAM. This is also at the top of the smartphone class.
The camera and audio section are pretty much standard fare. The camera takes photos at five megapixels. It has flash, autofocus, geotagging and smile detection. The Desire also has a FM radio with the RDS function that allows you to read the author and song information on your screen. The camera has an advanced video ability that can take video at thirty frames per second. That particular part of the camera is near the top of class for video.
Voice connections for the HTC Desire are accomplished with GSM and HSDPA networks. The data connections include everything except infrared, which hardly anyone uses anyway. It comes in two colors; silver and brown. The phone is currently selling for 419 euros in some places and will be marketed by Verizon.