A Look At The HTC Desire
HTC made its presence felt with the highly regarded smartphone the Legend. Following up the success of that device, HTC has released its successor known as the Desire. The company hopes that the continuation of an already impressive phone will leave the competition behind. The Desire bears significant resemblance to the Nexus One, but it is not a direct clone, nor is it an inferior piece.
Right off the bat, the Desire separates itself from the Nexus One out of the box with better usability. HTC included its Sense user interface on the HTC Desire, which is rather user friendly. Just a tad larger than the Nexus, the Desire measures 119 x 60 x 11.9mm, which is still not a monster by any definition. Part of the size requirement is due to the huge, 3.7-inch OLED screen. Additionally, it is a capacitive touch screen. A beautiful, AMOLED display maintains a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels that puts it beyond the capabilities of the rest of the Android field.
This high quality display should of course be partnered with a camera capable of utilizing its abilities, and the HTC Desire provides a 5-megapixel camera. Although that is not a change from the Legend, the Desire shows images at an aspect of 5:3. On smartphones nowadays, a video recorder is always coupled to the camera, and Desire’s recorder shoots video at 800 x 480p resolution. This is an improvement over the Legend and the related Nexus One. Frame rate is reduced when recording in low light on the Desire which is most likely to compensate for a dark setting and provide extended exposure time.
As previously mentioned, on top of Android 2.1, HTC has placed its own Sense UI on the Desire. Users can really see what the display is capable of with features such as the whole screen weather effects. Sense also ups the number of homescreens from the usual five found on many Android phones to seven. Live View is another new feature that takes the seven panels and displays them in thumbnail format. Any smartphone worth its salt will offer a vast array of applications and allow for extensive multitasking. Desire accomplishes this better than almost all other models with a whopping 576MB of RAM. This is up to, if not beyond, the standards of most consumers. Desire also brings Friend View to the table. This feature, pretty much the answer to Motoblur, takes updates from Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter and places them in a single timeline.
Made up of the best aspects of its predecessor, the HTC Desire has polished and updated all that is good about the Legend. By using what works and what customer’s like, HTC has taken the next logical step with its Android program. The Desire is a testament to the company’s success.
