I bought my HTC Desire last June 6, 2010 and after having it for exactly 20 days now; I think I'm ready to let you know what I think of it. Yes it's kind of pricey (as most HTC phones are) but I love this Android phone. View THIS PAGE for a full view of its specifications.
Looks
The good: At first glance, the Desire looks very businesslike and it's almost too formal for an artistic type of girl like me but a closer look at its casing and when the light hits it right, you'll see there's a variance of metallic brown and plum on its borders. The hint of color adds just the right amount of elegance to this sleek phone. It's a bit large than most smart phones but I do love the gorgeous 3.7" screen. It's not bulky and it's amazingly light. The rubber-like back casing gives the right amount of grip.
The bad: There's no external access for the microSD card slot so you have to remove the casing cover and the battery to get it. It's a pain to remove the cover.
Startup
The phone takes about 7 seconds to startup and that's pretty good compared with my old phone which takes forever to load and find a network signal once it's powered on. I also love the security feature on the desire. I chose to use the pattern prompt instead of the usual pin code.
Home screens
There are a total of 7 home screens on the Desire. Each one can be customized with gadgets and widgets to your heart’s content. The HTC Desire is also equipped with the latest Sense UI from HTC. The other thing that I also love with the Desire is the Weather widget and Live Wallpaper. The Live Wallpapers contain different sets of animations that can sometimes be indicative of whatever time of the day it is. For example, I use the grass Live theme. When it's morning the sky color of my screen is a beautiful sunny blue, at dusk it becomes almost purple (indicative of sunset) at night it becomes covered with little twinkling dots and at dawn it becomes a color yellow orange, telling me that it's time for sunrise. The weather widget on the other hand, as long as you keep it synced, it gives you a pretty accurate weather reading depending on your location. It also provides a cool animation like splatters of rain and a wiper when it's raining or if there's a thunderstorm, there's actually a lightning animation on the screen.
There's also a very efficient search function on the home screen. Just enter a keyword and the resulting search gives you everything it found from sms messages to apps and even to relevant internet listings. The Sense UI also has one eye candy feature in the form of the "Leap" function. Just do a pinching motion on the screen and you'll be able to see the screen with all your home screens in thumbnail widgets. The multi-touch and the leap functions work on the browsers, the multimedia galleries and even the PDFs. There's no drag in the animation and there's no glitch in the screen.
Messaging
It took a while for me to get used to the QWERTY keys and the touch screen. I was used to using a keypad or a stylus you see. It took sometime before I could get the hang of texting using the flat part of my finger. The messages per contact are presented in a threaded format, where you can see the messages you've received and the messages you've sent to a particular contact. This is handy especially because you can see where the conversation left off. You can protect several messages to prevent accidental deletion. You also have the option to attach a picture, a vcard, a video and even a calendar entry to a message.
Phonebook
The phonebook syncs all your contacts in Google and Facebook the first time you use the phone and at first this drove me crazy because I now had more than 1000 contacts in my phonebook. The good thing the contacts are organized into groups and if you don't really want to see your Google or FB contacts, you can just uncheck them from the group listing. There's also an option to put customized ringtones to a contact. You can also put a contact picture as long as the contact entry is on the phone memory. I would have liked this option turned on for contacts even if it's from the SIM card. The link function searches similar entries on your Google and FB accounts and puts them into one contact. Again you can enable or disable this function per entry.
Browsing the internet
You can load full web pages and be able to pinch and zoom as needed. The sites load pretty fast and zooming in doesn’t slow down browsing either. There’s also a built-in copy and paste function when you long press a highlighted string of words. The Desire also doesn’t have any problems loading flash-based sites and videos. If you find a favorite site, you can always add this to your bookmarks. The bookmarks can be placed as a widget on the home screen for easy access.
Call Quality
Phone call quality is quite good and there's still an option to use the other features of your phone even if you're in a call. The only faulty feature is the speaker phone option because no matter how loud you adjust the volume setting, it is still not loud enough. In a quiet room though, this is fairly adequate.
Camera
The Desire sports a 5.0 megapixel camera which is good especially on bright sunny day. On dim lighting it doesn't fare well, the pictures were too noisy. The flash isn't too overpowering. Even in a dark room, the flash doesn't overexpose the picture. So that's a pretty neat feature too. There are also a variety of camera effects available like sepia, black and white and colorize functions. The video is also good but not amazing but still decent. The use of a plug-in for the camera to obtain Lomo effects like the Camera 360 is highly recommended for added fun and versatility.
Applications
There are thousands that can be browsed on the Android market and most of them are for free. You can install directly from your phone or from the PC upon syncing. The only drawback is, the apps are stored on default on the phone's memory and pretty soon you'll find this filled up. If only there's a prompt to save on the SD card and then I would be in Apps heaven. I've read a workaround that some people "root" their HTC Desire in order to get this option but there are rumors that on the next update for the FROYO, this option will be available, so I'm just going to wait for that.
Initially I have written a post on the top apps that I have on my phone right now. You can view the post HERE.
I love it
By far, this is a well-worth investment. There’s a reason why this is one of the best Android phones in the market and not only is it jam-packed with features that make it one very cool Smartphone, I feel that I’ve only tapped the surface of its potential. If you’ve got a bit of savings and is wanting to buy a new phone, I’d highly recommend this one.
Disclaimer: Oh and since I didn't have the screen capture program for my phone yet, the pictures used here came from a Google Image Search.
