I’ve had this brilliant phone for a good couple of weeks and I have to say it’s brilliant. It’s much bigger than many phones, but not chunky – it’s because of it’s huge 4.3 inch LCD screen. The colours on it are brilliant and it is lightening quick. It comes preloaded with Android 2.2 (Froyo – which is an american shortening of frozen yoghurt, which is basically ice cream but not as tasty), all the features that comes with it, and is topped with a sprinkling of the much improved HTC Sense UI.
I have to say the htcsense.com website is a bit rubbish at the moment – the phone locator doesn’t work at all so I’m not relying on that if I lose my phone, and I tried remotely locking it, and that didn’t work either. None of my contacts were synced, and the messaging features didn’t work either. I have to say, it’s a brilliant idea, and if it actually worked would be a brilliant free rival to Apple’s MobileMe service – again if it actually worked and they introduced a bit more services for it.
But still – the phone itself I can hardly fault. As I said, the UI is responsive, there is all the apps you need on the Android Market – although I don’t install that many apps as I simply don’t have a need for 250,000 apps that are on the Apple App Store. Even Android Market’s latest figure of 160,000 is more than plenty apps than I will ever install, let alone need.
Those who know me know that I’m supposedly anti-Apple, but I’m not. I’m anti-their huge prices, although many Apple users justify the price with quality. But I really do think the HTC Desire HD is good value for money. It’s at least on par with the iPhone, and I’d possibly risk at saying it’s better, especially for the price. It’s not a cheap phone by many accounts – around the £470 mark but only a small dent in your wallet compared to the Apple iPhone 4 32GB which costs a whopping £681 (prices quickly pinched from a quick Google Product search).
The only quirk I’ve had with it is that after a few days of running it does slow right down to a crawl, and I’ve not figured out which app is causing it yet, but a restart fixes that no problem. Restarting the Desire HD isn’t even a problem as compared to my HTC Magic, which took a good 5 or 6 minutes to restart, the Desire HD probably takes less than a minute, so I hardly even notice it.
Well worth my money I think – I’m on a £30 per month contract on Vodafone via Phones 4 u who were probably the quickest to get it in stock, and I also got half price line rental for the first 3 months or something making it even cheaper! I highly recommend this phone to anyone looking to get a new smart phone but can’t stomach the high (and in my opinion unjustifiable) contract costs of the iPhone 4.
And before anyone thinks it, no I wasn’t paid to write this review, this is my honest opinion!
