Hardware
The screen size of the Desire HD strikes you straight away - it's a whopping 4.3 inches. While this makes for a pretty big handset - and that will put some people off - it also makes a surprisingly big difference to the way you interact with it.
The most conspicuous benefit comes when browsing the web. Pages are rendered in such a way as to make them navigable without even need in to zoom. Take mobile-device.biz, for example; in portrait mode you get a nice render of the whole site and when it automatically resizes in landscape mode you can read the homepage or individual stories easily.
The other big benefit of a larger screen is interaction. I'm a large bloke with imprecise fingers, and trying to select hyperlinks or type on the soft keyboard on smaller devices is not much fun for me. The Desire HD doesn't have a hard QWERTY keyboard, but this size of screen allows me to type reasonably accurately, even in portrait mode.
The experience has been sufficiently pleasant that I no longer miss the slide-out QWERTY of my Motorola Milestone, but this is only the case because I'm able to type one-handed in portrait mode. On non-QWERTY phones where I've had to switch to landscape to have a fighting chance of typing what I want to, I felt I might as well be switching to a hard keyboard.
HTC generally makes a nice chassis, and this is no exception. The combination of brushed aluminium and grippy textured plastic make for a solid, durable and reassuring feel in the hand. This stands in contrast to the Samsung Galaxy S, which opts for a more flimsy-feeling plastic body.
I don't get people who refer to mobile phone handsets as beautiful or sexy. It's a piece of kit that performs a set of functions and if it didn't do these things you would no more admire its looks than you would those of a screwdriver or a brick. But having said that, the lines and colours of the Desire HD are inoffensive and grown-up. That's all I ask.
The screen itself raised no issues, both when it came to resolution and touchscreen responsiveness. And on the subject of responsiveness, the Snapdragon 8255 coped with most of the things I threw at it with little trouble, although breaking off in the excellent Pool Master Pro sometimes led to some tolerable anomalies.
I've found the camera to be excellent. I not only takes decent resolution photos and video, but the automatic adjustments for light and movement seemed to function pretty well. I ventured forth the other day without my Canon point-and-shooter and was happy with the shots I got from the Desire HD.
I have got one issue with the hardware, however. Both the battery and the SIM-card/microSD slots are accessible via slots that have fiddly plastic covers. This would be merely a nuisance if it weren't for the fact that part of the antenna appears to be housed in the bottom cover, and that cover is easy to break.
In the absence of any specific guidance, the assumption is that you press down on the centre of this cover in order to obtain sufficient grip to slide it down. But this doesn't happen easily, and a mate of mine cracked the cover soon after he's received his new phone, leading to the loss of at least a couple of bars of mobile signal. He's not the only one.
To be fair to HTC they dealt with his complaint efficiently and got another cover in the post free of charge, but this still has to go down as a failing in an otherwise excellent piece of kit. One other slight moan was the battery life, which struggled to make it to the end of the day if I used the phone intensively.
Specs
Dimensions: 4.84 x 2.68 x 0.46 inches
Weight: 164 grams (5.78 ounces) with battery
Display: 4.3 inch 480 x 800 WVGA touchscreen
SoC: Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM 8255 1 GHz
Platform: Android 2.2 with HTC Sense
Storage: 1.5 GB + microSD
Camera: 8MP with dual-LED flash
