Who Makes It?
The HTC Desire is made by the HTC Corporation; they are a Taiwanese company that manufactures smartphones. Originally their smartphones were based mainly on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS. Then, in 2009 its main focus began to change to devices that used Android instead. The first phone HTC released that used Android was the HTC Dream, marketed as the T-Mobile G1 in many countries.
Price and Availability
Even now, around a year and a half after it was released the HTC Desire is selling brand new on Amazon for around £300. Unusually for a mobile phone it has held its value well, mainly because of its popularity. When it was first released it sold out pretty fast, in fact, I was due to upgrade my phone contract around that time and I asked for the Desire but was told it was sold out and that it could be months until they got any more in stock. These days however it is not so hard to get your hands on one as they are no longer the newest phone on the market.
What's In The Box?
The HTC Desire comes in a minimalist white box, not your usual cheap looking phone box, this box actually looks nice. It is harder than they usually are and the top lifts off completely rather than being a flap that you open and close. Inside the box is the phone itself, the battery, a USB cable, an adapter to plug the USB cable into so you can charge your phone in a wall socket, a small amount of paperwork about the phone, a 4GB memory card which is handily already inside the phone and ready to go, and last but not least the hands free headphones.
I should probably mention now that as much as I like the idea of being able to charge the phone in the wall or a pc without having to buy an extra cable I wish they had just provided us with the extra cable as it is a pain keeping track of the adapter when not in use. Also USB cables themselves are not very good as most people I know that have had this phone have ended up having to replace it within a few months as it no longer charges the phone!
Specifications
• Dimensions: 119 x 60 x 11.9mm
• Weight: 135g (it sit’s nicely in your hands when you use it).
• AMOLED touchscreen, 16M colours.
• 480 x 800 pixels, 3.7 inch screen.
• Gorilla Glass display
• Multi-touch input method
• Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate (can be annoying, but easily disabled!)
• Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
• Optical track pad
• HTC Sense UI
• MP3
• Loudspeaker
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• Practically unlimited phonebook entries and fields.
• Practically unlimited call records
• 576MB RAM; 512MB ROM
• microSD slot, up to 32GB (4GB included in the box).
• GPRS
• EDGE
• 3G (HSDPA, HSUPA)
• Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth
• microUSB v2.0
• 5 mega pixel camera
• Autofocus
• LED flash
• Geo-tagging
• Video Recording (WVGA and 720p)
• Android v2.1 (Éclair) OS, can upgrade to v.2.2 Froyo
• SMS, MMS, Email, Push Email, IM
• HTML Browser
• FM Radio
• GPS
• 340 hours standby time, 6 hours 40 minutes talk time
Features
One of the main features of the HTC Desire is the Android Marketplace, here you can download a wide variety of games and applications, some of them are free, and others vary in price from less than £1 right up to over £50!
Many of the games and applications that cost money have a “lite” version which is basically a free taster of the product that you can download and use indefinitely, with its premium features disabled. If you choose to buy a game or application you have 24 hours to decide whether or not you like it, if you decide it is not for you then you simply uninstall it and you will not be charged. Once you have paid for a game or application it is then yours forever, you can uninstall and reinstall it as many times as you like without having to pay any more money.
You can download official social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter but the phone does come with versions of these preinstalled. There are also other handy applications such as ebuddy for instant messaging and an eBay application for buying and selling things on eBay. There are too many games and applications to mention here, but suffice to say there is something for everyone. One downfall however is that a lot of the big brand applications (such as the NatWest app) are not yet available on Android. The developers of these apps seem to only be interested in the iPhone at the moment. However the Tesco app has recently made its long awaited debut on Android, I don’t know if it is identical to the iPhones version of the app, but it is the official Tesco one.
Many of the games and applications can be “moved to the sd card” which basically means that most of the data is stored on your memory card which frees up the phones internal memory for more apps. Sadly not all apps can be moved to the SD card and the internal phone memory is pitifully low. You cannot have that many apps stored on the phones memory before it keeps telling you that you are running out of space, this is the biggest downfall to the phone I think as it means you have to pick only a few of your favourite apps.
Another cool feature on this phone is the preinstalled weather app, you put the widget on your home screen and it mimics the weather, when it forecasts rain you get little raindrops on your screen which is wiped away by windscreen wipers, there is a little animation for most of the weather types. This feature is courtesy of HTC Sense which is a big selling point of the phone.
The preinstalled sms app is pretty boring and it does not allow you to set a custom tone as your text tone; this is very disappointing as this has been a feature on phones now for a long time, so you would think that a so called smartphone would keep this feature. If custom text tones is your thing don’t worry though as you can download sms apps from the marketplace which allow you to use a custom text tone. The best one I have found by far is GoSMS, they also have themes for it that you can download to make your messages look nicer, or you can create a custom theme.
There are many other brilliant features on the phone, and some not so brilliant ones, but naming them all and detailing them would make the review way too long and I don’t want you to die of boredom!
The battery life on this phone is about average for a smartphone. If you have a lot of apps running in the background and have your social networks updating all day as well as calling and texting then I guarantee the battery will not last the entire day. However if you only keep the essential apps running then it should last pretty much all day and only need charging overnight. To make sure you have turned an app of completely you can download an app called Advanced Task Killer (for free!), this shows you which apps are running and lets you “kill” them (turn them off), you can set it to ignore ones you want to leave running, as well as choosing the intensity and frequency that it kills apps.
My Thoughts
The HTC Desire is my current phone, though I am due for an upgrade sometime at the end of 2011/ start of 2012 and am considering a switch to iPhone. That being said the Desire is a very nice little phone, the main reason I am switching from it to an iPhone is because of the poor internal memory in the phone, as well as the issue I mentioned before about some of the bigger brands being all for iPhone and not interested in Android. I would definitely recommend this phone to anyone who doesn’t mind the fact that the internal memory isn’t great, however if you want to have a lot of games and apps then I would suggest going with a different make of phone. I’d give this phone a 7/10; it lost marks for poor internal memory and the horrible USB cable and adapter that you get with it.
HTC Desire - HTC Sense brings weather alive! 
