Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon in a min from TechnoBuffalo and this is an overview for you of the HTC Desire this is one of HTC's newest Android devices back at Mobile World Congress they announced this device along with the HTC legend and the HD Mini and of those three devices the desire this one right here is absolutely the most powerful device that HTC has ever released that runs the Android platform on the inside it's very much like a Google Nexus One but actually a little bit better it's got the qualcomm 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor and it has a tremendous 576 megabytes of RAM compared to the Nexus 1 which has 512 megabytes of RAM that's still a lot so let's talk about the hardware on the HTC Desire then we're gonna get into the web browsing and we're going to talk about the Sense interface really everything else so the screen is 3.7 inches diagonal as a comparison to the iPhone that is point two inches bigger also the screen is much higher resolution so we've 800 down and 480 across whereas the iPhone is 480 down and 320 across which means on the desire icons are super crisp text to super crisp photos look fantastic and video comes through very very nicely compared to a device like the HD 2 well then the desire doesn't look so impressive anymore the the HD 2 has a 4.3 inch screen but it has the same resolution 800 down and 480 across now the screen on the desire uses AM OLED technology like the Nexus One which means that blacks are ultra black and power consumption is improved so let's take a look around the device new to this device compared to the Nexus One is that it has a slight chin and the benefit of the chin is that it raises the optical d-pad slightly towards the user so that's very very comfortable to hold in one hand and to navigate like so on the Nexus One if you remember there is a d-pad but it's mechanical and it's placed a little bit further below the row of buttons down towards here those mechanical D pads aren't as nice as the optical keypads they're not as they can get covered with dust and move slower and those sorts of things on the side with a volume rocker on the top there's a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and the standby button nothing on this side on the back we have a 5 megapixel camera like the nexus one and we have a single LED flash with a speaker large HTC branding we have this nice rubbery coating on the back so it feels really secure in the hand it's also a bit thicker than the Nexus 1 by a fraction of a millimeter although it after after but after having used both devices I can say that the desire feels significantly thicker but I really don't mind because it makes the device feel more sturdy in hand for some reason okay so let's turn on the device and talk about the Sense UI experience all right so I'm going to unlock the device and look at this really cool background animation this is Android 2.1 which means that it supports live wallpaper so I'm going to go over to a blank screen and you can see the really awesome looking live wallpaper and I'm going to change the wallpaper to something else so we've got a live wallpaper and this particular one you just saw is HTC's own live wallpaper but of course we have the other ones that come from the Google Nexus 1 so we can choose the nexus wallpaper which is quite cool anywhere you tak you'll see kind of a ray of light with lots of colors coming from there so we'll leave that on for now let's talk about the Sense interface so the Sense interface is comprised of seven home screens onto which you can put a ton of awesome widgets and thanks to the really fast processor and the large amount of RAM these widgets perform very very well the best we've seen yet now a problem with having seven home screens and I'm going to go through these in a second is how do you get from the one all the way on the left to the one all the way on the right well this was a problem in previous devices from HTC but now they have this pinch feature where you pinch of your fingers and you get a zoomed out view of all of your different home screens you can quickly jump around so I can go to the weather I can go to the one all the way on the right or the one all the way on the left it's a very very smart way that HTC's to get around your home screens furthermore you can get to that zoomed out view by tapping on the home screen button when you're on the home screen okay so let me show you how I have my home screens laid out then I'm going to show you some other configurations that you can have so right here I've got the clock and the time of course and the the weather so if I tap on the clock I am taken to this beautiful HTC Sense interface where I can change the alarm where I can use a stopwatch so on and so forth I get to see my weather I can quit dial somebody that I call on a regular basis I can go right into settings I've got my mail here calendar internet things like that if I go over to the left I've got Twitter so I can in an instant type what I'm doing I'm going to Opera Mini got the XD application here I've got a link to peep which is the full HTC Twitter application which works quite well and I also have in a shortcut to a website over here on the Left I have the weather and all the way on the Left I haven't put anything here yet so I'm going to go back to the center to the right I have a list of my favourite people with beautiful pictures to the right of that I have the text messaging carousel so I can flick through my text messages like so and on the right I have nothing now I'm going to change my scene and scenes are from HTC that allow you to have different widget configurations so let's say you want one scene for the weekend one scene for the work day one scene when you're traveling so let's go into scenes and I'm going to go to social and I don't want to save my scene and so we get a totally different widget configuration we have this big clock here over on the left we have an email over on the Left we have a friend stream which will actually pull from a multitude of social networks right now I have it pulling from just Twitter we have a nice calendar here which integrates with HTC's calendar application that's a lot nicer than what you get with just standard Android going over to the right we had a different way of looking at the favorites if you remember on the previous screen I had favourites arranged in a two by three grid and now it's over one by three grid and then I also have a quick toggle for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and the camera there's the text messaging again nothing is over there so let's jump to another scene let's go to travel this time okay so here I have two different clocks and you can see the background just changed these clocks let me see the time in two different areas and here's email again this is HTC's footprints which allows you to tag coordinates to a picture and you can add more information about a particular place that you've been so this is assuming that you're traveling it's also going to load the weather and you can flick between multiple areas for the weather quite nice over here on the right I have a music player right on the home screen friends stream so I can update my status to multiple places at one time the calendar and then there's nothing over there let's jump to another scene this time we're going to go to work let's see what HTC thinks we should look at for our work scene so the background is probably going to change and it did so here we have calendar right out in front so you know where you need to be to the left we have email to the left of that we have stocks and Calendar let's go back to the middle here's the same looking thing we get a quick view of the weather and of course tapping on that will bring you into HTC's weather application to the right of that we have news and we can subscribe to oh saint BBC news and very fast that's going to load news headlines you can scroll through very elegantly and to the right there is nothing let's go to the one one more scene just to make sure we have all the different widgets go to play and here's clay we get a similar-looking clock to what we had before we can set a new photo album so I'm going to go to all photos here and now that is buzz killington now I can flick through and I can see all of my pictures right on my home screen very handy if you've just been somewhere you want to show your friends where you've been you can tap on a picture and it will zoom in and you get this beautiful photo display we can go into landscape and this is your photo gallery and you can tap on a particular photo to make it bigger and of course you have really fantastic multi-touch to zoom in on the image let's see what else we have here the friend stream once again makes an appearance and weather is back again and over here on the right we have a different look to the music widget what happens is that when you add these widgets you can choose a variety of different layouts and here's the bookmarks widget you haven't yet seen that so if I tap and hold and I go to widget any one that you see designated with the HTC lettering means it's one of the HTC is made and and and it's better than the Android counterpart that exists on these devices so if I go to say music HTC I get a two different choices of how I want the widget to look I can go for the small widget or for the larger widget I'm gonna choose the larger widget and here it is right on the home screen and of course I can delete it so in terms of widgets in terms of performance of the home screens HTC has nailed it I find myself staying on the home screens and not actually having to dig into any applications because these widgets are so powerful that they are applications themselves and thanks to the really fast processor and the huge amount of RAM the operation is super smooth whereas on some earlier devices that had these widgets like the HTC Hero performance wasn't as good okay so let's take a look at the Internet the web browser so I'm going to go to TechnoBuffalo and so here we go and by the way the screen on this device seems to be more solid than it is on the Nexus one kind of like the iPhone so typing on it just feels more solid okay so here it is it's already coming up we can go into landscape I'm going to zoom in here Internet performance is really fantastic on the HTC Desire let's go to Engadget and we have the other other kind of keyboard here I should learn how to spell alright let's see how fast that comes up and we've got the mobile view here so let's find classic here it is full and gadge experience okay so I'm gonna pan around here very smooth I don't see any checker boards to zoom in of course I can DoubleTap reflows the column where I can pinch very precise zoom control let's see how fast this web browser is compared to the iPhone okay so here we go we've got the iPhone 3GS here on the right and the HTC Desire on the left let's go to a website let's go to pocketnow.com and we'll bring it up there and have to type the whole thing it looks like that there it goes so I'm going to tap them at the same time if possible one two three they're both on the same Wi-Fi network and they're off very very close oh it looks like the desire won by half of a second that was very impressive well actually it seems to be loading more stuff now okay so let's move around on the page and click on a permalink so let's go to here and this I have to say that the multi-touch is more smooth on the iPhone but the desire is definitely capable and something I want you to notice is the difference in screen clarity so if you look at these two images here it looks so much more lifelike on the AMOLED display compared to the iPhone you can see that the iPhone just kind of seems washed out so I'm going to tap on these headlines at the same time and hopefully they will load okay and they're off okay the desire beat the iphone 3gs again sort of yep there goes it's done and we'll wait till the 3GS finishes loading okay and let's do a screen rotation speed test so we are going to zoom out a little bit here and let's see which one rotates faster okay it looks like the desire was faster because it doesn't have that screen animation that the iPhone does let's try it again okay the desire was faster again overall it looks like the desire is a slightly faster web browsing machine compared to the iPhone 3GS which is extremely impressive the iPhone 3GS beats almost every device out there whether it's running Android or Windows Mobile webOS or even blackberry so overall the HTC Desire is a killer device it's like the Nexus One but in my opinion better because you have this gorgeous Sense interface you have more RAM and the hardware is different so we have this optical d-pad we have a screen that just feels more secure and let me give you a quick example of typing so I'm just gonna launch into a word processing application really quick okay here we are it's just an email so I find that I'm much faster in typing with the HTC Desire than I am with the iPhone or that I was with the Nexus One when I had it so let's see here I'm gonna say this is a test of the keyboard on the desire and I'm not even looking and look how fast very very fast probably one of the best on-screen keyboards that I've ever used on any smartphone and that's saying something I've used a lot of keyboards and there's just something about the desire HTC has got it right with this device so if you have the opportunity to import this from Europe I'd say give it a try this device is awesome unfortunately it's not going to come to the US as far as we know it's in the US sort of as the Nexus One but the Nexus One really isn't as good as the desire so that's it for the look at the HTC Desire that's a try now