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If you’ve seen the Google Nexus One, you’ve seen the HTC Desire. End of story. We liked the Nexus One so be our guest, HTC Desire. But is it all that simple?

HTC are so good they build phones for the competition. HTC are so mean they have no issues competing with their own clients. And is it us or are the clients ultimately left with a rather disturbing question: do HTC work for us or do we work for them? Go ask Sony Ericsson and Google.

It doesn’t quite make sense to go as far back as the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 and the HTC Touch Pro. Today’s story is about another couple of twins. And because the children are nearly identical, we’ll try to see what it’s like being mom’s favorite or dad’s.

The Desire produced a good deal of anticipation and its prompt release after this year’s MWC proves HTC know good timing. But by no means can it match the hype that surrounded the Google Nexus One. What’s in a name? No, really.

And while we’re at it, any other – less cheesy – name would’ve really suited the top HTC Android better. But well, that’s minor stuff compared to what’s inside. Here it goes.

Key features:

• Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support
• 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA
• 3.7″ 16M-color capacitive AMOLED touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480x 800 pixel)
• Android OS v2.1 with kinetic scrolling and pinch zooming
• Slim profile and great build quality
• Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 1 GHz processor
• 576 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM
• 5 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geotagging
• WVGA (800 x 480 pixels) video recording @ 15fps
• Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS
• microSD slot, bundled with a 4GB card
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
• Optical trackpad which doubles as a button
• Smart dialing

Main disadvantages:

• Disappointing video quality
• Limited system storage available to the user (you get approx. 120 MB for apps)
• No DivX and XviD video playback
• No voice dialing
• No dedicated shutter key
• Non hot-swappable memory card

While the Google Nexus One is still confined to selected countries, its twin, the HTC Desire, is already in stores across the globe. And that may be great news for users on markets still ungraced by Google. It’s the same phone – take away the Google logo, and add a few nice little things.

But it’s not the differences that you’ll care about. It’s what both devices have in common that make them so attractive.

Of course we mean the large capacitive AMOLED touchscreen, the fresh Android OS v2.1 they run, the great performance on the 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and the 5-megapixel autofocus cameras they come with.

Eventually, you’ll notice that these are actually two different phones. The Nexus One’s trackball is gone for an optical trackpad. The controls on the Desire are actual buttons instead of the capacitive keys on the Google phone. On the homescreen, you’ll see the latest Sense UI waving Hello.

Some platforms just don’t seem to change for years. The Android OS is evolving at amazing speed. The Desire is one of the first devices to come with the latest version of the Android operating system but more importantly, being so powerful, it’s among the few to reveal what ?clair is actually capable of.

Those lines sound as if the Desire is free from sin. It really isn’t. There is always room for improvement – and that’s especially true for Android handsets. But before we get to that, join us on the next page first to see what’s hiding in that tiny retail box.

HTC Sense likes it on big screen

HTC Hero pioneered the Sense UI on Android handsets to tap the company’s existing user base. The Tattoo was the next HTC-customized device, but Sense just didn’t feel natural on the QVGA screen.

HTC Desire is Legend’s bigger brother upping the CPU and RAM, along with screen size and resolution. It runs the latest Android v2.1 and takes full advantage of its performance boost and full color support. As a result, the pre-loaded Sense UI is faster, more attractive and fluid.

The main differences between this Sense UI version and the one back on the Hero are the new context icons, a bunch of new wallpapers and the unified Widget section. Whether you are using the People, Mail, Music or Gallery Tabs, the scrollable icons at the bottom will please you with new color skins. We like it this way – the old ones looked a bit dull against the otherwise graphically rich and colorful UI.

We should also acknowledge the role of the AMOLED display in making the new Sense UI look even more attractive compared to HTC Hero’s.

But let’s take a closer look for those who haven’t met the latest Sense UI yet.

The arrow button at the bottom of the screen that used to pull the main menu up is now gone, replaced with three virtual keys and an arched scrollbar.

The left key launches the main menu. This time around you simply tap to get to it, you can’t drag the menu out, though you can drag it back in.

The middle key is a shortcut to the Phone app and the right key brings up the “Add to Home” menu. And there’s plenty to add to the homescreen but more on that later.

The scrollbar at the bottom is just an indication of which homescreen you’re on – it can’t be used for actual scrolling. HTC have extended the homescreen to a total of seven panes instead of the usual three (in stock Android). Even if it sounds too much, with all those widgets (which are quite useful too) it may not even be enough.

In addition, they’ve added a fancy new way to access any homescreen without scrolling. A press on the home button will show all the seven desktops in small thumbs. Tapping on a thumb will get you right on it.

HTC Sense UI revolves around Scenes, which are essentially six custom homescreen setups (Work, Travel, Social, etc). Each scene changes the wallpaper and the widgets on the homescreen – for instance, the Work scene has a stocks widget, while the Social offers a Twitter widget.

You can’t modify the scenes but if you rearrange the current homescreen you are prompted to save changes as a new scene.

The Clean slate scene in turn lets you start from scratch – it’s just the default Android setup with a Clock and a few shortcuts underneath.

Switching between scenes takes a couple of seconds but sure allows wide customization – the business and personal modes that some competing phones offer seem quite limited compared to the HTC Scenes.

Scenes are far from perfect though: the Travel scene has the HTC Footprints widget but nothing on GPS or maps. And as we already mentioned, you can’t edit the default scenes. Your only option is to save a new modified Travel scene under a different name along with the original.

Now back to the other stuff beyond the homescreen and the available Scenes. The changes brought by the Sense UI go deeper than just the homescreen.

For instance, the main menu has the typical icon grid layout, but you can switch it to a list similar to what you see in TouchFLO in HTC WinMo phones. With it, you can use an alphabet scroll, which makes locating apps faster.

The widget section has been revamped since the HTC Hero and now both types of widgets (custom HTC and stock Android) are placed in one page. There are so many of them that you may find the seven homescreen panes short.

User interface (continued)

When you select a widget you are prompted to choose between several versions – most widgets have at least two styles. The different versions typically offer at least two sizes of the widget, different look (There are twelve different clocks. That’s right, twelve!).

The phonebook we like

HTC Desire features the same powerful phonebook we first saw on the Hero, and then the Legend. It resembles the one on the HTC TouchFLO but considerably extends its functionality.

Opening a contact’s details presents you with the basic info for the contact – name and photo, numbers, emails and such. What you’d notice though is that there are another five tabs at the bottom and you’re just viewing the first of them.

Telephony

Voice quality in calls is quite good, even though the Desire lacks the noise-cancellation secondary mic of the Nexus One. Volume levels are great – you don’t have to set it on maximum to have a nice audible sound. Reception is trouble-free as well.

Voice quality in calls is quite good, even though the Desire lacks the noise-cancellation secondary mic of the Nexus One. In ear volume level is great – you don’t have to set it on maximum to have a nice audible sound. Reception is trouble-free as well.

The dialer features a keypad, a call log shortcut and a list of contacts beneath (you can hide the keypad). Smart Dialing is also available – no news since the HTC Hero, but quite an achievement compared to most other droids.

Messaging full of goodies

The HTC Desire can handle all common types of messages – SMS, MMS and email. Google Talk is in charge of instant messaging. Email support is excellent with support for Exchange out of the box and social media buffs will be pleased with the level of integration of that content as well.

The on-screen full QWERTY keyboard in the HTC Desire works in both portrait and landscape modes. The individual button size is decent and sensitivity is just fine and we had no problems using it.

HTC Mail and Gmail reports for duty

Gmail is one thing that you can’t expect to have changed much compared to other Android handsets. There are a few HTC add-ons, but nothing major. The batch operations are onboard – they allow multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted.

Multimedia evolution: slow but getting there

Image gallery

The gallery has the usual main menu list-with-thumbnail structure. The Albums app automatically locates images and videos, no matter where they are stored. Images and videos stored in different folders appear in different sub-galleries that automatically get the name of the folder – quite effective file management.

Unfortunately, the gallery undertakes reindexing of the content each time you open it and it does so even when you open a file for an instant and then get back to the thumbnail view. And that’s a bugger as when cards are full of content, it’s quite slow to complete.

Right next to the folder’s name is a figure indicating the number of images stored. Each sub-album has a thumbnail of the latest image. The contextual menu of the main Album view has only one shortcut to the settings menu. There is also a camera shortcut, but it’s only available once you start browsing any of the sub-folders.

Video player is good, native DivX still to come

Video files can be accessed only from the Albums’ subfolder as there is no separate icon for the video player in the main menu. The video files can also be viewed as a grid or filmstrip, and can be shared via Gmail, HTC mail, Messages or YouTube.
Video library • available options

The video player on the HTC Desire has seen some minor visual changes, but is still quite basic. You may opt for full screen mode, where the original clip is stretched / cropped to fit the screen.

Quite contrary to initial rumor, the player is capable of only playing 3GP and MP4 videos, which means that you will have to convert most your videos for watching on the go HTC Desire.

Tabbed music player with “cover flow” interface

Like most of the multimedia department, the music player is basically the same as what we saw on the Legend.

The standard music library view is the Artists section, but you can easily switch to one of the other six tabs beneath, which are for Albums, All Songs, Playlists, Genres, Composers and Purchased.

Great audio output

The HTC Desire pulls off the same remarkable audio quality as the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10, but is louder in terms of earphones volume.

In fact the two frequency response graphs are so similar that we suspect a similar (or maybe identical) hardware has been used inside the two Android flagships. We suspect that HTC have found a way to pump up the volume a bit higher, which has naturally led to the minimal differences you see in the table below.

At any rate the Desire readings are excellent all over, the HTC handset pulling one of the best all-round performances that we have ever seen. Check it out for yourselves.

Good 5 megapixel snapper

HTC Desire has a 5 megapixel sensor for a maximum image resolution of 2592 x 1936 pixels, and a LED flash. This is becoming pretty much the norm for recent upper mid-range and high-end Android handsets so the HTC seems to be on level ground with its competitors.

However thanks to Android 2.1, the Desire boasts a camera interface that is quite competitive outside the Google OS world too. There are a number of customizable settings ranging from ISO speed to aspect ratio and auto focus. Now, that makes perhaps the Omnia HD owners sneer but it’s a nice improvement for Android.

We are yet to see modern-day features such as face and smile detection, for example, but the gap is closing.

WVGA video at only 15 fps

HTC Desire manages WVGA videos at 15 fps. The resolution is excellent for an Android handset, but the frame rate is rather disappointing. There is no word in the official specs sheet on the fps so we are unable to confirm if the 15 frames meet the specs or not.

The interface of the camcorder is similar to the one of the still camera and by usual Android standards there are tons of customizable options with this one. You can set the video resolution, encoding type and recording limit.

As far as image adjustments are concerned, you get exposure compensation, contrast, saturation and sharpness settings as well as color effects and white balances settings.

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