HTC :: Desire Review From A First Time Smart Phone Buyer
May 31, 2010
Well, this is my first post and as the title states i finally took the step to buy a smart phone and the old Nokia 6120 classic is headed for the drawer.I was tossing up between the Iphone and the HTC Desire. Not really wanting to be an Isheep and after reading all the good reviews of the Desire on the net i decided to go with it. First up i'll address the main point i was worried about..... battery life.
All the people saying they get less than a day with theirs made me worry. But after thinking about my usage compared to others i decided it would hopefully be fine. After getting mine about 5 days ago and charging it up overnight i can say that i didn't really have anything to worry about got through my first day (Friday) with a couple of phone calls, played around with it for half an hour at lunchtime, then probably another hour or two of constant use when i got home playing with the settings, widgets etc. It then continued trucking on till the following day (Saturday) where i played around for another hour or so in the morning until about 11am when it started to get low. That was when the battery warning came up on the screen. So i got about 30 hours out of it on the first charge and by the sounds of some other posts this will get a bit better. Without all the time messing around with the new toy and the battery settling in id say i'll be getting at least 2 days without a charge in the future. I realize other people use theirs a whole lot more at work but i have a radio in my car i listen to on the way to work so no mp3 needed and a phone in the office i use, but if your like me and just a casual user to make a few calls and send a few texts, check the weather out and surf the net a bit it will be fine. I realize that im not using it to its full potential, but thats fine with me. Code...
View 2 Replies
Oct 22, 2010
This may have been asked but I can't find what I am looking for in search.Anyway, we have 2 droid phones, we want to use them in the house in a hands-free phone mode, with some sort of external speakers.I found some blueant speakers for cars, and was recommended this one S1 Sun Visor model.
View 25 Replies
View Related
Nov 4, 2009
Phandroid's Extensive Droid Review with Video Review
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jul 20, 2010
I am sending an xml request to google checkout and getting the xml response too. Now, I dont know what to do with this response. I am very new to Google Checkout. The redirect url that i get if opened in browser then shows error. How will the buyer be redirected to enter his Google account.How to proceed with this response?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Mar 29, 2010
Had the phone a couple of days and had a fair old play, so thought I would share my first impressions.
I have had various smartphones over the years, but my last was an iPhone 3G, so some of the comments may make comparison to that. This isn't intended as a direct comparison or comment on the respective platforms, but simply early observations.
Hardware
In the box
Quite a small box, contains the phone, some documentation, Mini-USB cable, plug adapter, headphones (havent even opened these yet, instead electing to use my good quality seinheiser in ear buds), battery and that is it. Only a quick start guide included, the manual is on PDF on the phones SD card.
Looks
In my opinion it looks really classy. I know many people are saying it lacks the style of the Legend, but without having seen the Legend in person, I think that the Desire stacks up pretty well.
Size/Weight
It is almost identical in size to an iPhone 3G with similar weight. Subjectively it probably weighs slightly more, but feels really good in the hand. The screen fills the device nicely with probably an ideal amount of space round it to allow you to grip and hit the buttons without accidentally hitting the screen.
Finish
A combination of metal round the screen/top section of the phone and a sort of rubberised finish on the back, with a glass screen. Again, feels really good in the hand. The back surface means it is easy to hold and gives a good grip.
Buttons/Controls
There is a power button on the top, click to lock/unlock, hold for power and profile options. This sits on the slope of the top and always seems to come to hand really nicely. Volume buttons on the side are standard fare. Click all the way down for silent and then down again from vibrate on the home screen. Home, menu, search and back keys are well placed at the bottom and a lot more responsive than the iPhone dimple. There is also an optical trackball which you can click to select (used in camera app amongst others). You can use it to swipe between homescreens without having to touch the screen which is useful. I haven�t really used it that much, but is nice to have the option.
Connections
3.5mm jack at the top, slightly angled so a bit of a strange fit for normal headphones, but nor real problems, seems to fit standard headphones with no issues. Mini-USB connector at the bottom which sit out slightly from the curved back. The mini-USB cable supplied has a nice rubberised feel to match the back of the phone. J
Rear
Rubberised finish with embossed logo and camera, flash and speaker placed at top. Camera extrudes slightly, but not significantly Has metal surround and glass cover. LED flash sits next to the camera and there is a speaker grille next to that.
Screen
I will come back to the quality etc. of the screen, but in physical terms it is big (obviously), bigger borders than say an HD2, but smaller than the iPhone. It is nice to use, I have seen some comments saying it is slightly sticky, but I haven�t really noticed this. Does collect fingerprints, but I wouldn�t say it is that bad, no worse than the iPhone 3G or any other glossy screen.
Final points
My only other point or reservation is that there is a slight join between the screen and the metal facing and between the metal facing and rubberised back/main body section which does seem to collect dust. Think I may get a
protector soonas I wouldn�t want anything getting in-grained. The little finishing touches like the slight chrome surround on the front speaker, embossed HTC logo on the rear and discrete HTC branding are pretty classy.
Getting Started
Turning on for the first time, it takes a minute or so to boot up seems pretty quick from a standing start. There is an intro /tutorial to run through with guides for setting language, using the keyboard, network type, Google location, sign in to Google account/other mail accounts, sign-in for Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, but no Picasa (there is the option to upload to Picasa, but no obvious way to download), finally date and time.
Signing in to Google downloaded all my contact and filled all the relevant fields (first time I have had a phone I haven�t had to add all my contacts again) J. Also pulls in all your Facebook pals, you can then quickly link in a Facebook profile to a Google/phone contact. Not sure if it updates back to your Google account if you add contacts/make changes, havent checked this yet. Minor irritation, is if you link to Facebook, it appears to overwrite the contacts picture with their Facebook profile pic. Also imports calendar and automatically signs you in to all the relevant Google sites.
I wont discuss the out the box set-up as Android is so configurable it isn�t really relevant. Suffice to say, there are a good range of apps/widgets/wallpapers etc to get started.
First Impressions
Screen
First things first, the screen is gorgeous. I havent been able to test it in bright or direct sunlight (as I live in Scotland and we don�t get that here). But in general conditions so far, no problems with readability. Viewing angle seems excellent compared to LCD, brightness is great and colours are fantastic. Back to back comparison with the same photo on the iPhone 3G and the Desire, both in the default gallery apps, the Desire is much brighter, much better contrast and a lot more colourful. Some colours may be artificially bright, but in general it just looks super crisp and clear. Blacks are dark and the contrast is excellent.
General and first time Android user
I will start out by saying that this is the first time I have really used Android or Sense in depth. First impressions are it is really nice. Basic operations, phone messaging etc are intuitive and easy, everything is very slick, fast and responsive. As previously mentioned, all my contacts were already imported, so I simply linked them up to their Facebook compatriots and that was that. Got some texts in from the network, so got to see first-hand the notification system which is excellent, just so much better than the disappearing vague icons in iPhone OS. Zipping about the homescreens is super fast and scrolling through menus equally slick. There is the occasional judder, I have noticed this in the notifications tray and others at times, but nothing significant. Opening and switching apps is also super quick.
There is an obvious learning experience here too, probably a good deal more so than with the iPhone. I can�t immediately put my finger on what it is, but it just isn�t quite as obvious as some other Oss. I started to think of the Desire more as a mini-PC rather than a more dedicated OS and things became clearer.
Screen responsiveness is excellent, no real problems and nothing obvious like the infamous Nexus One screen videos (this may well still be present, not checked, but not once has the screen done anything I wouldnt expect). Overall everything is super slick, the basics are pretty slick and intuitive and the screen and OS in general are gorgeous.
I have had a few forced closes, not sure if this is to do with something I have installed or something more general. But it appears to recover pretty quickly and I have only had one occasion when I have had to do a re-set when one of the games I downloaded wouldnt close even though it didnt appear in running tasks, but still continued playing the music.
Battery Life
I have been trying to get a few charge cycles through the battery, but so far it has been reasonable. Even with really heavy use with just about everything on, it lasted most of a day on its first full charge. 5 hours into my second day and having fiddled a fair amount and still with everything on, it is just over 60%. Certainly comparable or better than my admittedly slightly tired iPhone 3G. Will see how this pans out.
Included Apps
Picture Gallery
As I mentioned earlier, couldn�t see any way to (easily) pull photos off my Picasa. Copied across several folders full of photos to the default images folder. Imported into the gallery with no problems, though did put all the photos in a single folder in the gallery app despite the fact they were in named sub-folders on the drive. Scrolls through the photos no problem. Amazingly quick considering I have over 600 decent sized photos in the gallery. Thumbnails appear almost immediately. There is a trick to quickly scroll to a given date, if you start a scroll then �grab� the scroll bar at the right, you can then browse by date and quickly move through the gallery. Again, photos appear almost immediately. You can view by grid or a sort of filmstrip view. Overall the default gallery is decent, but I think the Nexus gallery looks neater.
Also no way of filtering, for example to see all videos etc. only options are Facebook and Flickr tabs. Would be nice to have tabs for videos etc. Finally seems to pick up all photos on the SD card, with no real options to set where it looks, for example picked up the Jpegs for some comics I copied across into a separate Comics folder.
Movie Playback
Videos seem to sit in the photo gallery for some reason and not a separate video gallery as discussed above. Playback is pretty basic, doesn�t seem to be any options for subtitles chapters etc. Basic scroll selector to move through the video which is really quick, option to stretch to screen and that is about it. Doesnt auto rotate, always defaults to full screen landscape view. I will look at alternative video players in due course. Drag and drop works without any problems. Quality wise, I have only been able to test with a iPhone encoded movie at 480*208 H.264, but even this looked pretty good. Problems with Handbrake means I have been unable to encode a DVD at a higher resolution, so I will comment further when I have had a chance to play with this. Would have been nice if they had included a high quality sample video to show off the
AMOLED display.
Music Playback
Built in music app is pretty good. Cover flow style album selector and the usual options (shuffle, repeat etc.) Havent had a chance to see if there are any more in depth settings for quality, enhancements etc. but there is nothing obvious. People have mentioned a Dolby Mobile enhancer, but havent been able to find this in the T-Mobile OS.
Email
Had to manually set up my Google push account to work with the mail app, but now set-up appears to work well. Usual views and filters, only issue so far is not being able to select multiple emails for example to mark read/un-read.
Messaging
Works exactly as expected, you can email from contacts, reply to groups etc. all the usual options. No pop-up preview, just notification, unless you install another messaging app e.g. Handcent, but I am undecided which to go for at the moment.
Widgets
Good range here, like the clock with nice little animated weather animations. Power options etc are useful and things like the news feeds all seem to work well. These are all so configurable that it is hard to make any real comment. Only minor problem is that if I change one of the default scenes e.g. Work, it does not let me save over it, so you either take what you are given or have a whole heap of different scenes.
Live Wallpapers
Really funky, love maps with Google Maps 4, like the HTC sense bubbles as well and the snakes like Nexus one is there too.
Keyboard
Keyboard is excellent, love the slight vibrate on keypress. Even in portrait I haven�t had any real issues with typing. Auto complete/suggestions works really well and intuitively. No text to speech though which is disappointing! L Hopefully this will be resolved in due course as I had been looking forward to this.
MarketPlace
Looks pretty comprehensive, a lot more on here than I was expecting. J Confusing that some prices are in dollars and some in pounds. Not sure if you are charged a fee if you buy an app in dollars from a normal bank account.
Like the list of apps I have downloaded, search is pretty good, though I would like to have seen suggestions as I type. Not sure how updates work, do I have to manually update or will I receive notification when a new version becomes available.
Conclusions So Far
Overall I am super impressed. The hardware is fantastic, the OS is really nice and there is so much potential for tinkering and improvements. The Desire is simply the best and most complete Smart Phone I have ever owned. My only reservations are minor, I hope that T-Mobile or HTC release the full retail OS as some of the missing features are a little frustrating, but overall no complaints whatsoever. Awesome phone, would recommend it to anyone with a little bit of tech savvy.
View 12 Replies
View Related
Aug 10, 2010
Does anybody know how to review what permissions you have granted to an app installed from the marketplace without uninstalling and reinstalling it?
I am careful with what I install but I still want to be able to go through my apps and double check that I haven't got something installed which might have some kind of trojan or spyware built in.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jul 29, 2010
So far I've tried Ultra Keyboard on my Desire and have found that it force closed 7 or 8 times during the 24 hr trial and thats pretty poo. So I have uninstalled it and I've found Better Keyboard and someone suggested Smart Keyboard in this forum. I really like the iphone qwerty keyboard and how it works so wondering if anyone else had issues with fc on ultra keyboard or any of these other keyboard apps and what they did to fix it?
View 15 Replies
View Related
Oct 5, 2010
I'm unable to bluetooth files to non smart phones. is there and app for this? or another way to fix this?
View 5 Replies
View Related
Jun 11, 2014
I used the recovery mode first time - it worked, second time playing with NoBloat - it gets stuck in boot screen.I can go to the recovery mode menu, both chinese and english, can do a full clear cache, data, format, but phone still won't boot.
I can use ADB shell, but Smart phone flash tool does not recognize phone, MTK droid tool recognizes it, but I can't backup it.
View 1 Replies
View Related
May 28, 2010
I would like to know, what limitations there are for how far one can go in terms of replacing UI components of current touch screen smart phones, in particular iPhone, Blackberry and android based phones.What I would like to do is create a custom UI for dialing out and incoming calls.
I have some experience with Blackberry development. The theme builder for it, can be used to customize certain items on the incoming call screen, but it doesn't look like that you can increase the size of answer button. I know Blackberry also gives you access to all the phone APIs, but I'm not sure that you can create your own UI that can gain preference over the Blackberry incoming call screen. And if you try to customize the incoming call screen by adding any buttons to it, they would be rendered as pictures.
I could possibly design a complete UI for android, since different manufactures have different UI for android based phones. Can I do what I want to do using iPhone, Blackberry or android? Or any other phone for that matter? I am guessing may be for Nokia phones using Qt, but I prefer the 3 platforms I listed.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Aug 29, 2012
I know you are required to have a data plan for a smart phone. But does that only apply to those on 2 year contracts?
I have an old D2 that my wife wants to use. She currently uses a dumb phone. She doesn't want a data plan, doesn't want the smart phone features. She just wants to use it for calling & texting.
Is there any way at all that can happen? Or does any smart phone, even older ones or unlocked ones, need a data plan?
View 9 Replies
View Related
Aug 27, 2010
Does anyone know if there is a app, or phone mod that allows you to access the SD Card on the phone, at the same time as it's being used as a drive.I'm getting tired of transferring things like icons, and wallpaper to my phone, then having to unmount the drive before I can use them. Especially if I'm just trying out new icons.Is it possible to have my desire set to disk drive, and access it at the same time?
View 3 Replies
View Related
Nov 27, 2009
Grape Holes: 9 Things My Dumb-phone DOES that my Smart-Phone DON'T... and vice versa
View 20 Replies
View Related
Jul 30, 2010
I'm by FAR not what you'd call a techie, and I'm totally new to the 'smart phone". I just bought a Motorola Droid. I'm still trying to figure this thing out. The one thing I'm kind of not liking is... With my old LG Dare, I used VZ Navigator for my GPS. That phone was a touch screen, but when I would use the GPS to find where I was going, I could lock the screen, and it would stay lit, and the program would continue to run. But if I bumped the screen with my finger, I wouldn't be thrown out of the program, or into another one.
I'm finding that with my new Droid (which uses Google maps) that when I'm using the GPS on that, I will occasionally bump the screen, and then I have to try to navigate my way back to the GPS. So if anyone knows of an app that allows me to keep my screen fully lit and the program working, BUT still locks the screen, could you please let me know?
View 2 Replies
View Related
May 29, 2010
Will the smart phone ever take the place of the home computer as we know it ie desktop/laptop.
With most service providers now doing unlimited internet and our phones capable of anything ie email, text, facebook, twitter, sell and buy stuff on ebay, watching movies, TV the list goes on and on. Why do we need our home computers ?
I believe the home computer is on its way out, yes we will need the computer in industry, banks, stock control etc ie for business use but for the home market its doomed.
View 15 Replies
View Related
Sep 16, 2013
Looking for possibly undeleting a few pictures I took yesterday on my Galaxy 4S smart phone.
I know the directory where I need to do the undeleting but none of the un-delete programs I have gathered will show anything that makes sense when it comes to the phone.
When i plug in the phone to my computer I get 2 directories..
Phone and Card (card is my 32gb micro sd)
The pictures I would need to try undeleting would be in the following directory: ComputerSCH-I545PhoneDCIMCamera
I cannot find a way to have any undelete program scan that portion to recover files... I have even taken out the micro sd card which did not matter ..
View 5 Replies
View Related
Sep 23, 2011
I currently don't have a slow smartphone but when I had my original Droid it would really slow down until I put a new or updated rom on it. Even if I rebooted it it would still be slow. I now have the Droid Bionic and it's really fast but will it someday get slow? I guess I don't understand the smartphone technology very well, yet. Is there or will there be some sort of software that you can run that will speed it back up?
View 1 Replies
View Related
May 25, 2013
smart dial on my phone only search phone number in phonebook but not searching contact name. It was working before, not sure before or after rooting the phone though.
View 4 Replies
View Related
Mar 11, 2010
We know Google Android phone is best phone where we can use different application without paying anything and here again I come with 4 quality application review for you.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Nov 24, 2010
Can anyone recommend any books or resources for learning smart phone architecture (specifically iphone or droid)? I am looking to learn and get into smart phone development, having been doing desktop development for a few years now.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Nov 26, 2012
I'm trying to share my 3g network from my straight talk LG Optimus zip my old sprint phone samsung galaxTr IPy s phone I have foxfi and pdanet on both phones can't find anything that works
View 1 Replies
View Related
Feb 8, 2010
So, today as I was rushing to get on the train after school I needed to make a phone call that would determine what train I would take. Of course, since it was time sensitive my droid decided not to make our receive calls. I would dial the number and hear nothing but silence even tho the call had connected. The party on the other end was getting the call but we could not hear each other.only silence. I had to reboot twice at which point I had a number of voice mails from the person i was calling trying to see what was happening. My phone is not rooted and I just have some basic popular apps. Is this just an occasional smart phone glitch or have others had this happen?
View 11 Replies
View Related
Feb 17, 2013
how to fix this error... i also create a new scatter file of my phone.. but nothing works..
Error is
EBOOT ERROR : (16008)
[Android Partition size changed!
[HINT] Partial images download error
View 1 Replies
View Related
Apr 22, 2010
I will be getting my new Desire while at work tomorrow, how long is it best to charge it for the first time. I don't want to only charge it for 4 hours there when it is best to do it for 12! Also can you use it during this first charge? Just asking as I want the best battery life and didn't know if HTC had already done the battery' first charge for you.
View 4 Replies
View Related
Jan 14, 2010
Is there a way to keep the phone from changing time as you cross time zones?
View 4 Replies
View Related
Aug 17, 2010
I am trying to get a local time from a server UTC time. I get the UTC time form the server -- and i want to make it right for each individual Android phone whether it be in California or China. This is the code I am using now -- however it snot working.The time I get from the server is "2010-08-17 19:41:13.0" And the code I use to get the difference(in seconds) is the following: public static long getSecondsDifference(Timestamp timeStamp) { final Calendar calendar = Calendar. get Instance (Locale.getDefault()); int refrenceOffset = TimeZone. get Default (). getOffset(timeStamp.getTime()); final long referenceSeconds = (timeStamp. get Time() + refrenceOffset) / 1000; final long currentTimeSeconds = (calendar. getTimeIn Millis()) / 1000; final long differenceMinutes = (currentTimeSeconds - referenceSeconds) / 60; return differenceMinutes; The timestamp is from the java.sql.timestamp package.Right now the time where I am is 11:50AM -- and the method returns that the given server time is -53 minutes ago( so obviously doing something wrong
View 1 Replies
View Related
Aug 11, 2010
This was not posted yet in the GS section... Samsung Mobile Unveils Some Nice Galaxy S Accessories.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Apr 2, 2010
They are at the final battle. It looks like we might have a fight on our hands since the Palm Pre just got the free hot-spot options from Verizon. March Smart Phone Madness Finals: Motorola Droid vs. Palm Pre Plus
The main points that I like to enjoy is: Droid beat out the phone that beat the iPhone, and the Droid got further in the brackets than any other Android OS phone Some of the progress is due to hardware, some due to following (over the Nexus'), but a lot due to the v2.01 (and now 2.1) version of the Android OS. Also, this poll is open ALL weekend - it does not close until April 5th, so we have tons of time...but then again, so does the Palm Pre. Let's have at 'em!
View 12 Replies
View Related
May 16, 2010
Got my desire a week ago, loving it, but have a problem with the device keeps turning off every few hours, then it have problems to recover, i.e, doesnt turn on, it mainley happens during use. any similar experience anyone?
View 33 Replies
View Related
Nov 17, 2010
I discovered the battery status information from the settings menu yesterday and was wondering if someone could clarify Up Time and Awake Time for me? Currently my uptime is 131 hours, and awake time something like 29. Am I right in thinking that these are the numbers since I got the phone (or put the battery in, I guess). This would seem to indicate that when I turn the phone off at night I'm not really turning it off - is that the case? I'd like to know the time that the phone has been on since last charge as then I'd get a good idea of how long I'm getting from a charge - I can't see this anywhere, can anyone recommend and app/widget for it?
View 2 Replies
View Related
