David Mankellow

The HTC Desire

The HTC Desire arrived yesterday. I was so excited I felt like it was Christmas when I was little! Sad I know. Needless to say I was playing with my new toy all last night, much to the despair of my girlfriend!

I unboxed the phone and straight away was taken-a-back by how thin and sleek it was. In the box was a micro USB cable, plug with USB socket in it, earphones and the manuals. There is a 4GB micro SD card already in the phone with all of the software pre-packed etc.

Once the device was charged I was away. When you first turn the device on you need to set it up. It’s not just a case of sorting out the home screen it was 7 or so steps for setting up email accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, internet connections etc. This took around 15 or so minutes. I went slow to make sure I didn’t miss anything or mess anything up! The home screen(s) are instantly beautiful. The default look is my favourite at present. The GEO look-up found my location immediately and adjusted the weather accordingly. Now it was time to play!

The resolution seems very bright and colourful. The screen really is impressive. I’ve had a Samsung Windows Mobile 6.1 device for a while and that doesn’t compare in the touch screen department. The HTC Sense UI is very good. Navigating using the touch screen is a breeze and everything seems to be intuitive. I’d never used an Android device before but it didn’t matter. I was quickly up to speed. Once i’d messed around with the home screens I think i’ve found a good formula. I couldn’t find enough good widgets for them all so I use Weather, Messages, Bookmarks, Home, Custom (Contacts and some regularly used shortcuts), Twitter and Facebook.

I’ve installed and uninstalled a few apps. Not found my feet in that department yet. One app that is essential is some sort of Task Killer. I use Advanced Task Killer. That seems to be the best although i’ve not used them all. This is so that you can kill some applications that are running in the background and needlessly wasting battery. This brings me to my next point. I think the battery usage is going to be the most pressing issue with this device. If you’re using a number of apps, with 3G on for a while the battery will go down fast! You need to manage it well, something that i’m trying to find a good formula for.

Next job was importing my contacts. The cynic in me thought that they might force me to port all of my contacts over to Google contacts and then upload them to my phone – not at all! When I installed HTC Sync it was immediately apparent that I could sync them directly from my Outlook to the phone. This took no time at all. I was very pleased. Next came something quite cool. You now have a load of duplicated contacts as it automatically imports your Facebook contacts. This is thought of however. If you select someone in your phone book that you are friends with on Facebook, Google or Flickr you simply link all of them as one. This then draws a big profile for someone – clever! One thing that wasn’t too clever is the lack of a “link all suggested” or something. The device suggests links where names exactly match but you still have to manually link them individually. If you could do loads at once it’d save a load of time. Still though, for the sake of 30 or so minutes it was worth it!

So here I am. This is the point where I am writing this. I will have more insight into the device when i’m used to it. First impressions are that the phone is fantastic. The looks, functionality and speed is a superb combination!