HTC Desire

The original HTC Desire was announced last year during the Mobile World Congress and can be considered as a close cousin to Google’s Nexus One, a smartphone also produced by the Taiwanese company. This device measures 4.7 x 2.4 x 0.5 inches and it tips the scales at 4.76 ounces, which makes it not too big but also not too small.

It has been fitted with a 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen display that has a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels (WVGA) which makes it perfectly suitable for viewing photos and videos, browsing the Internet, reading text and so on. The display itself manages to be very responsive and features the very handy pinch-to-zoom functionality, along with a proximity sensor and a built-in accelerometer.

HTC Desire (Source: mobilesroom.com)

One of the aspects that make it different when compared to the aforementioned Nexus One would have to be the inclusion of physical buttons for the home, menu, back and search functions. On the left spine of the HTC Desire you can have access to the volume rocker, while on top rest the 3.5 mm headphone jack and the power button. Looking at the bottom of the smartphone we find the microUSB port while at the back resides the camera which comes with a flash.

The main difference between these two phones would have to be that the Desire is running on HTC’s Sense user interface, whereas the Nexus One comes with the standard Android skin. The phone is shipped with Android 2.1 but an upgrade to 2.3 Gingerbread is available in certain parts of the world.

Since we are talking about an Android phone, it is no surprise that this model offers support for multiple e-mail accounts as well as social networking sites. As for voice features, the Desire comes with a speakerphone, smart dialing, speed dial, conference calling, voice commands, as well as text and multimedia messaging. You also get more advanced features like Bluetooth, built-in Wi-Fi, GPS and 3G connectivity.

HTC Desire (Source: mos.futurenet.com)

The five megapixel camera located at the back of the HTC Desire is an autofocus unit and is accompanied by a flash. You get a lot of settings to choose from, including contrast, brightness, sharpness and saturation. The bad news is that the quality of the pictures is not that great, especially indoors, due to the reason that the photos have the tendency to turn out a little bit cloudy while the colors look somewhat dull. Video recording is done at a maximum resolution of 1,024 x 720 pixels and these recordings turn out to be rather murky.

The HTC Desire comes with a 1,400 mAh lithium-ion battery that should last for 10.6 days in standby or up to 5 hours of talk time.