HTC Desire: Desirable?
I'm a bit odd, I love motorways. I know, weird aren't I? But being on them normally means I'm escaping London for a few days and I'm driving (which I also love).
Right now I'm on the M6 heading to Scotland, but I'm sat in the back. So a perfect opportunity to write about my play with a HTC Desire last night in the local Wetherspoons (yes yes, I know. An HTC). I thought it would be interesting comparing it with my now ancient iPhone 3G.
Here are my initial impressions:
1. Look and Feel. Nice bright screen and I like the feel of the phone - it feels substantial and well-enough built in the hand. I quite liked the control button/pad/ball/nipple (whatever the hell it actually is), however the row of physical buttons at the bottom of the screen took a bit of working out. This one is evens.
2. Operating System. Now I presume it was running an HTC derivative of Android 2.1 rather than a pure version of Froyo 2.2 (right now only Google's Nexus One will run this). Straight away I felt it lacked the consistency of iOS visually. Now I am a geek that loves getting my hands dirty with tech, but it just felt a bit too 'linux terminal' for my liking. Perhaps that's a bit unfair. Perhaps I'm a fanboi but I've always felt iOS is just so immediately intuitive. Christ, my dad can even use the App Store. For just ease of use iOS gets it. Although Android is clearly maturing.
3. Google integration looked great. But then, with a bit of fiddling and setting up, so is my iPhone 3G. I've got push Mail, synced Calendar and if I was brave enough I could sync my Contacts. Gmail's threaded conversations looked better on the HTC though. There was also a Facebook and official Twitter app (I prefer the Tweetie derived Twitter for iPhone though). So pretty even between the two until I came to type. I didn't like the vibrate response on the Desire or the response. It wasn't 'bad', just not as good as the iPhone.
4. Multitasking. Yep it can do it. My iPhone 3G can't. And never will. In fact seemingly everything would run in the background whether I wanted it to or not. God knows what effect it will have on battery life although my friend told me they would shut themselves down after a while (What if its a radio app and I dont want it to?) I could have closed them properly myself though... This one goes to the Desire.
So would I trade my iPhone in for the Desire on a first impression? If based simply on that short play I'd say....
Maybe.
It's clear Android is getting better and better, but it just lacks the polish I talked about earlier. There are obviously other considerations. The Desire is more 'open'. I can just plug it in by USB and store files on it. However I can't easily sync my existing iTunes music library to it. I definitely cannot use my iOS apps that I've previously paid for.
We'll be keeping a beady eye on Android phones. Perhaps soon we might even get one. I wonder how easy it will be to write a post like this on it from the back of a Diesel Astra?
