With the closure of Symbian-Guru.com recently, I believe many people are losing their faith on Nokia. (mostly high end Nokia phone users.) This has surely been true for myself and I have begun my new life with an Android powered phone – HTC Desire – after selling my 5 months old Nokia N900.
What’s HOT on HTC Desire
The 1GHz Snapdragon CPU with 576MB of ram (64MB more than its cousin – Nexus One) is extremely fast. Web surfing experience has never felt so good!
Desire’s 3.7 AMOLED with 480 x 800 pixels plus HTC Sense UI looks extremely nice & eye candy! And the capacitive touch screen is MUCH MORE responsive than Nokia N900’s resistive touch screen. Finally someone is giving a decent challenge to Apple iPhone and HTC’s multi-touch pinch zooming makes it happen.
When it comes to the web, the guys at HTC have thought of it all – Facebook & Flickr integration, Facebook & YouTube app etc. In addition the Flash Lite support means I can still check out those fancy flashy websites on the web. But then again at least I didn’t lose the Full Flash Support in Nokia N900 –
Overall I’m pretty happy with my HTC Desire, it’s fast, very fast and EXTREMELY FAST!
Having said all this, I think Desire has some shortcomings too:
- Android Éclair 2.1 does not supporting application installation on external memory card. 120MB for apps is just not enough! (Hopefully Froyo 2.2 will)
- No task manager and file manager – this is really WEIRD for the typical Smartphone cause you don’t feel like you’re controlling it. But third party apps will do.
- The alarm gets turned off automatically if it’s not in task manager ignore list. (Solution: Don’t install any Task Manager and let Android handle it.)
- The only way to wake up the phone is through the power button. This is extremely annoying and hopefully HTC will fix this in next update.
- A rather useless Optical Track Pad. Does anyone know what it’s for?
- Battery life is mediocre at best.
- Mobile Network connection problem -enabling & disabling it too fast or frequently will hang the device.
- Is it just me? Or does Android have a rather confusing interface. Sometimes long press for options, sometimes menu button to be pressed for options…
- There is no built in TV out and FM transmitter and no secondary camera. Hmm.. even iPhone 4 has it.
- Paid apps are not available in Malaysia.
I am compiling a comparison between HTC Desire and Apple iPhone 4 next couple of days. Hopefully this will help you decide on your favorite Smartphone.