Couple of months ago, DoubleDT.Com has posted about HTC Desire (a.k.a. Bravo), at the month of this mobile phone was announced at the Barcelona-based Mobile World Congress 2010 in February. It has been a long wait for gadget-techie in Asia, but HTC Desire will finally hit the market soon.

HTC officially launches the Desire in Singapore on the May 14, 2010 (Friday), which is a simple event at Suntec City. The event started with Mr. Melvin Chua, Country Manager of HTC, giving the audiences a simple welcome speech. Following on, we had Mr. Wayne, product manager of HTC giving the audiences a more in-depth look on the handset.

HTC Desire is a variant of Nexus One, which also made by HTC, but comes with a few important differences. Compare to the Nexus One, the HTC Desire has more features, which also means a higher price. It retails for US$648 after taxes, while the Nexus One only costs US$577 after shipping (if you live in Singapore). For brainstorming, the Nexus One is an Android-based smartphone, which is built and designed by Peter Chou and his team at HTC. Google’s role is just marketing and selling the smartphone. Therefore, when we refer to HTC Google Nexus One, it doesn’t mean that the smartphone is designed by HTC and Google.

The first impression when we got a chance to touch this HTC Desire, it has a very sturdy feeling. It doesn’t feel cheap. Moreover, when you grip it, it has a rubbery feeling that makes you feel safe that it doesn’t slip off your hand.

The dimensions of the HTC Desire are 119 x 60 x 11.9mm, while its weight is 135g. Considering this is HTC’s flagship Android-based mobile phone with all the latest features, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the HTC Desire is quite compact and light.

The HTC Desire features Android’s four buttons (Home, Menu, Back, and Search), which are actually “real” hardware buttons instead of capacitive like on the HTC Nexus One, and also an optical track ad, which can be pressed, replacing the more conventional track ball found on the Google branded mobile phone.

The front of the HTC Desire is taken up mostly by its 800 x 480 (WVGA) 3.7-inch screen. This extends almost to the left and right edges of the handset. Therefore, there’s hardly a bezel to speak of. The HTC Desire is among the first few mobile phones from HTC to bear an AMOLED screen. When it comes to clarity and color reproduction, we didn’t have to worry about implementation immaturity as it held its own compared with other LCD-based screens.

There have been concerns that AMOLED screens can’t be used under direct sunlight. To prove it, we done a test by using the maximum brightness setting, and we found that the text to be readable under the noon sun even though it was somewhat dim. In our humble opinion, don’t expect the brilliant LCD performance offered by handsets such as the BlackBerry Bold.

The HTC Desire (also the Nexus One) is HTC’s first Android-based mobile phone to feature Qualcomm’s Snapdragon CPU (clocked @ 1GHz) and has 578MB of RAM plus 512MB ROM, made sure things chugged along smoothly. DoubleDT.Com didn’t feel any slowdowns at all during our test period, so that’s admirable.

Connectivity features on the HTC Desire are comprehensive, including HSDPA, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Those who travels to the US frequently do need to take note that the dual-band cellular radio (900 / 2100MHz) doesn’t support the 3G frequencies used by the operators there. Therefore, if you need that feature, the HTC Nexus One is a better option as it has tri-band 3G (900 / 1700 / 2100MHz)

A built-in GPS is installed on the Desire, so satellite navigation is possible. In Asia, you will need to install third-party apps for turn-by-turn directions as the free version implemented in the Android Maps app doesn’t work in our part of the world.

The most impressive defining factor of the Desire is HTC Sense, which is custom software from the HTC that changes the way Android looks and works in this smartphone. This is evident the first time you turn on the smartphone as it allows you to key in credential from social-networking services such as Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. Moreover, if you want to see your friends’ activities on these services all in one place, there’s a Friends Stream widget that will aggregate everything in chronological order. This is useful for an overview, but we found ourselves using only third-party Facebook and Twitter apps after a while because they had more features pertaining to their specific services.

HTC Sense is a user experience focused on putting people at the centre by making devices work in a more simple and natural way. This experience revolves around three fundamental principles that were developed by observing and listening to how people live and communicate. These core tenets of Make It Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected continue to be the key to the new HTC Sense experience.

Like HTC’s other Android-based mobile phones, you get a custom keyboard that includes an alphanumeric keypad option. DoubleDT.Com found this to work better than the default Android keyboard both in accuracy of word prediction and layout design. Our only gripe was that in the QWERTY version, there’s no one-tap option to turn off prediction. This makes it cumbersome when keying in colloquialisms or acronyms, especially if you don’t want them to be automatically added into the custom dictionary.

The 5MP built-in camera is found on the Desire with an attached LED flash for dark situations. It comes with lots of settings in the software for those who like to tweak their shots before taking an image. Snaps shot with the HTC Desire gave good details, although color accuracy wasn’t perfect. Shots taken indoors looked slightly dull compared with the real-subjects. One annoyance we noticed was that the camera tended to lower shutter speed in low-light situations when the LED flash was turned off, please notice that you must not shake the device when it takes a snap, this would sometimes result in blurred shots. We would rather that the software chose to underexpose the shot than allow hand shake to ruin it.

The battery life will naturally be a concern. We turned on everything to test this out, including auto-sync of two email accounts, Facebook, Twitter, weather updates and stock quotes. The result was a flat battery from a full charge in approx. 20 hours. It was a pretty intensive trial that also included the usual phone calls, web browsing and messaging.

We have to admit that the sound quality from the smartphone was good, providing clear voice for both user and the other party. Those who frequent noisy locations may want to opt for the HTC Nexus One instead as that smartphone comes with an added noise-cancellation feature.

As a phone, the HTC Desire does a far better job than the iPhone. The HTC Desire is definitely the best overall Android-based device on the market even you don’t need a hardware keyboard. Android needs a little bit of time to get used to, but it’s worth in the long run. If you want the latest and greatest Android smartphone, then, the Desire ticks all the boxes. Its advantage over the Nexus One is HTC Sense that gives the user many convenient features.

HTC Desire’s specifications:

• GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, HSDPA 900/2100 MHz, GPRS class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots) 32 - 48 kpbs, EDGE class 10 (236.8 kbps), HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 2.0 Mbps
• CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 1GHz
• Platform: Android OS v2.1 (Eclair) with HTC Sense
• Dimensions: 119 x 60 x 11.9 mm
• Weight: 135g
• Camera: 5MP auto-focus, 2592×1944 pixels, video WVGA(800×480 pixels) @15fps, LED flash, Face Detection capability, Geotagging
• Display: 3.7-inches 16M-color AMOLED capacitive touchscreen & 480×800 pixels resolution, Multi-touch input method, Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rate, Proximity sensor for auto turn-off, Optical trackpad, HTC Sense UI
• Memory: 578MB RAM, 512MB ROM, microSD card slot (up to 32GB), a 4GB memory card included
• Connectivity: Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, standard microUSB (5-pin microUSB 2.0)
• Sound: Alert types (Vibration, MP3), Speakerphone (3.5 mm audio jack
• Messaging: SMS (threaded view), e-mail, MMS, IM, Push e-mail
• Browser: HTML
• Radio: Stereo FM radio with RDS
• Other Features: A-GPS Support, Digital compass, Dedicated search key, Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Google Talk, Picasa integration, MP3/AAC+/WAV/WMA9 player, MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV9 player, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Voice memo, HTC Widgets (downloadable), Friend Stream
• Operating Times: (stand-by) up to 340h [2G] / up to 360h [3G]; (talk-time) up to 400 mins [2G] / up to 390 mins [3G]
• Battery: standard battery, Li-Ion 1400 mAh
• Colors: Black, Silver, Brown

For comparison, read also:

• Nokia N8
• Sony Ericsson Xperia X10
• LG GM750
• Acer Stream
• Samsung Wave (S8500)

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