Software, services and conclusion
The software experience on the Desire HD is defined by HTC's own skin over Android - HTC Sense. To HTC's credit, it seems to have genuinely tried to improve the UI rather than just gratuitously impose its personality on the phone or force services onto the user.
There are some nice little touches such as a widget and a background that not only offer a snapshot of the local weather, but also graphically depict not just sun and clouds, but rain (including an amusing windscreen wiper animation), wind and time of day. These are the kinds of cute extras people often associate with Apple, and are important for that reason if no other.
The contact management extras are pretty good too. As with any Android phones, it's very easy to transfer your Google contacts over to the phone. But you can also migrate contact from Facebook and Twitter and the software will automatically, and accurately, give you the option to link what it thinks are duplicate contacts. Again, a nice touch.
Talking about contact, something I really liked was the way in which the Desire HD looks for contacts when you're dialling a phone number. The soft alphanumeric keyboard automatically looks for contacts as you punch in numbers. So if you wanted to call me you could just input my number or input 7-2-6 to get the first three letters of my first name, or 2-4-2 would work just as well. Clever.
There are a bunch of HTC-specific apps and widgets, and all widgets performed well on the phone, including my favourite - TweetDeck - which is an excellent Android Twitter client. But all this larking about with widgets led me to an important discovery: it's very easy to have so much stuff going on in the background that you end up spanking your mobile data without even realising.
It turns out that a lot of apps use 3G even when you're connected to Wi-Fi, you see, and this came to a head when my boss implored me to do something about it before the mobile data charges for my phone - which start accumulating after 500MB each month - bankrupted HEXUS. I'm pleased to report there are a few apps that are tailor-made for managing your mobile data use and I'm going to share my findings with you.
A popular app, which also provides a one-touch widget, is Advanced Task Killer. This simply shuts down all the non-essential apps you currently have open - something that's worth doing a few times a day as you lose track of what you've got running in the background.
The best way I've found of keeping track of my data use is NetCounter, but the killer app for me is APN on-off Widget, which is a one-touch widget that simply turns your mobile data on and off. Now I simply keep my mobile data turned off unless I'm out and about, and my mobile data use is now a fraction of what it was. Hurrah!
Again, while I really like what HTC has done with sense, there were one or two minor niggles. One is text messaging - remember that? A lot of the time, when I get sent a text message, I get neither an LED alert nor even an on-screen indication. It's often only when I happen to open up the IM app that I see unread messages.
HTC also introduced htcsense.com which is a really cool cloud service. In essence it's a way of interacting with your phone remotely via a browser. The key facilities it offers are the ability to locate or lock-down a lost handset, and remote back-up of contacts and text messages. This is going to sound incredibly ungrateful considering htcsense.com is both cool and free, but once I got over the novelty of it, I found myself wishing it did more. But I'm sure it will in future.
One other small moan is that the phone won't let you uninstall some of the pre-loaded apps such as the Twitter client Peep. As I said I'm a big fan of TweetDeck, both on the desktop and on Android, and getting duplicate notifications was a bit of an irritation.
But as you've probably gathered, the negatives pale compared to the positive for me on this thoroughly impressive bit of kit. It's easily the most accomplished and rewarding smartphone I've had the pleasure to spend some quality time with, and while that doesn't include the iPhone, the HTC Desire HD makes me even less tempted to give the Jesus Phone a go.
The good:
- Great screen
- Solid build
- HTC Sense is a definite improvement on vanilla Android
The bad:
- Fragile SIM card cover
- Flawed IM app
- Can't uninstall some HTC apps
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
