The HTC Desire has been out in the UK for ages now, and Canada for a couple of weeks, but the U.S. is getting their first taste of the smartphone from U.S. Cellular starting tomorrow. Since the Nexus One is no longer on the market, there’s bound to be some interest in the Desire, and that being said, we got our hands on a Telus version to play around with.
Anyone familiar with the Nexus One and HTC’s custom user interface, Sense, will probably be able to mentally mash-up what the Desire amounts to. A 1 GHz processor, 3.7″ WVGA touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera with Flash, 7.2 Mbps HSPA-flavoured 3G, Wi-Fi b/g, GPS, 576 MB of RAM, and Android 2.1 round out the device’s spec line, and though there’s nothing that really hasn’t been done before there, the Super LCD display is worth a comparison to Samsung’s Super OLED and Apple’s Retina displays. I didn’t have either handy for a direct comparison, but stick around for our full-blown review next week, and we’ll get some stills and video putting SLCD to the test.
As for my impressions of the HTC Desire so far, I’ve become instantly enamoured with the phone. Maybe I’ve just been overly deprived of Googly goodness in my BlackBerry box, but everything is snappy, the screen is crisp, the build quality is tight and solid. I’ve been using Scenes a lot to offer custom-tailored home screen layouts depending on what I’m doing. I’m especially happy with my Location scene that has a Google Maps live background, widgets for Gowalla, Foursquare, and Latitude, and links for Navigation to some of my frequent stops. The pictures so far have been exceptionally good, though I haven’t had a chance to put the camera through some more difficult situations yet.
Anyhoo, here are some stills and video from our unboxing of the HTC Desire. If you’ve got any particular questions, don’t be shy to leave a comment, and I’ll look into it for the final review.
