First 2 weeks with the HTC Desire

So, 2 weeks with my new Android-powered HTC Desire. What's the verdict? Well, if you follow me on Twitter you'll already know that I'm quite taken with it, to put it mildly!

For the iPhone lovers reading this, yes I know I rant and rave about it and constantly go on about how its so much better than the iPhone. To be honest, my hands-on experience with iPhones is limited to the occasional play in an Apple store or phone shop (neither of which I spend much time in if I can help it!) and odd occasions when I've borrowed one off a work colleague to try something out briefly. So I can't honestly compare the two side by side, at least not from personal experience. Plenty of other people have already done that and reached their own conclusions. I can however tell you about my experience of Android as an operating system, the HTC Desire as an Android-powered handset (and one of the newest and best at that), and the Sense UI (HTC's tweaked version of the Android interface and core apps.

I honestly can't fault anything - handset, OS, UI or apps. It surpasses my highest hopes and expectations by a long way, which is surprising considering the amount of time (6 months or more) I spent reading, researching, asking questions and generally procrastinating about what phone to go for. I was tempted by the Nexus One but decided in the end that the Desire had the edge. But this isn't a comparison between the N1 and Desire any more than its a comparison between the iPhone and Android (and besides, I've never used an N1 anyway).

The handset itself is really nice. I particularly like the soft-touch back which helps with gripping the phone. The overall build quality, finish and attention to detail is great. The only minor gripe I would have is that when taking the back off / putting it back on again to access the battery, SIM and SD card (which I've only done once mind you) I was a bit worried about breaking it, particularly the plastic clips that attach it to the body of the phone. This is a common thing with many handsets - even when everything else is beautifully designed and engineered, accessing the battery is still a bit of a primitive affair using a thumbnail and brute force!

The optical trackball is a nice touch although I've only needed to use it a couple of times. The 4 physical buttons along the bottom front edge are extremely useful (Home, Menu, Back, Search) and really make navigating around very easy.

I was particularly impressed with how quick and easy the phone was to set up when I initially took it out the box and switched it on. All I had to do was enter my Google, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr account details (all optional of course apart from the Google account, but it just so happens that I use all 4) and that was it! Everything just worked - no messing around with settings or anything. There was a quick start guide in the box, which I didn't need apart from just checking the order in which to plug things in and switch it on the first time in case there was anything I needed to take note of (there wasn't). The full user manual is on the SD card in PDF format but I've not needed it - everything is as about as intuitive and straightforward as it could possibly get.

The interface is extremely slick, and looks amazing on the 480x800 AMOLED screen (this is one thing all the iPhone users who have seen it have immediately commented on!). HTC have added some very useful features to the Android core apps, including built-integration between your contacts (phone/Google), Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. HTC's 'FriendStream' app/widget is a useful if no-frills way of keeping track of friends activity via the various social networks (although I tend to flit between using that and standalone apps for each service). The integration between these services in the People app (contacts) is very nice indeed, with the ability to 'link' contacts across your social networks and address book, which in turn automatically pulls in their profile picture and status updates. And of course, your address book is automatically synced with Google Contacts. (You can sync multiple Google accounts including Apps accounts, but I've not bothered syncing my work contacts as I already have the ones I need in the main Google contact list anyway.)

Having 7 home screens to add apps, widgets and shortcuts to at first seemed like overkill - how would I be able ot fill them all up? But believe me, its easy. For a start there a number of very useful widgets such as HTC's FriendStream (which shows status updates from Facebook, Twitter and Flickr), Bookmarks (a list - or thumbnails - of your internet bookmarks), music players, calendars, clocks, weather etc etc etc.

And of course, apps. The Android Market is accessible directly from the phone and contains something like 30,000 apps and growing rapidly (over 9,000 apps were added last month alone!). Most apps are free but there are paid apps as well (most of which have a free version too), although very few cost more than £1 or £2. (You get a refund too if you uninstall, which is nice!)

Admittedly, there are more apps for iPhone at the moment - this is to be expected given the fact that its been around for longer than Android. However, most predictions see the Android Market catching up within the next year. A slight drawback of not having the all-seeing eye controlling exactly what apps are allowed, means that anyone can write and submit an app to the Market. This means that there is a lot of crap. And Google do need to put some work into making the market more easily searchable (ie. filtering by certain criteria etc.) but even as it stands, it's pretty easy to find what you want. And most things are very well catered for. Most of the big iPhone apps have an Android equivalent, either created by the same people or an equivalent alternative. I have yet to come across anything I need to do on my phone that isn't catered for by a decent app.

Multi-tasking is a big plus. I frequently jump around from one app to another with the Desire's 1Ghz processor and 576Mb of RAM it's seamless and super-fast. Not that I'd recommend listening to Spotify while playing a first-person racing game mind you - I've tried and while the game was fine, the music did start to stutter a bit.

The camera (5MP with auto-focus, face recognition, touch-screen-to-focus, digital zoom, and flash) is pretty good - much better than any other phone cameras I've used - the quality is perfectly adequate for viewing on a computer screen without it looking like its come from a phone. You can upload directly to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, or send via email or bluetooth direct from the photos app - which links directly into the camera, so you can have a photo on the web within 30 seconds of taking it. It also does HD video although I've not tried it yet, but the reviews all say its good.

That's enough for now I think. I was going to save this and come back to it later, but I think if I do that I might not get round to it, so I'll just post this as is, accepting that I've not covered half of what there is to talk about.