Join the green and gold android crowd.

Lord knows, it’s been a while since I’ve been hungering that much for a single device. Maybe it’s getting worse.

Following my own personal smartphone holocaust however, and after venturing through some rather strange places on the ecommercing web, I walked into Saturn am Alexanderplatz and ordered the HTC Desire HD. That got me waiting for many weeks of course, since this badboy has been sold out completely and utterly since day one if one is to judge by some tweets we saw out there.

Anyway. First impressions in this case last.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way.

I thought I just just briefly mentioned the things I don’t like on this fella, to then pass on to indulging you with the good things. First for android itself, I am missing two very very little things. You can’t name the device as of version 2.2 Froyo, so in a WLAN you will have to look for a thing that calls himself a12341717#a12 etc. No prob if you got only one android in your home, but with two or more, well…good luck guessing. Also, you can’t do screenshots. There are several applications in the marketplace, but you’d need to root first.

HTC’s overlay, called HTC Sense, is a very good one for that, but some of the promised features can’t be used, eg. it should be possible to log on to the website and locate your cell phone in your apartment or elsewhere, but the site just won’t let you do that. So, until further notice, no hatemail to your phone’s thief.

The handset itself has got the one flaw that is really worth mentioning, as in “this shouldn’t be this way”. The parts of the device apart from the giant screen itself are of a rather lesser quality build. This means that you can push the bottom and side covers in when holding the Desire HD, and you can even hear little crunching noises. It may even break off when trying to insert a new micro SD or SIM card.

We will just have to wait and see what lifetime we can expect, but right now I’ll have to state that I really loved the build and finishing of my first iPhone 2G compared to this. Well, at least the exterior.
With a monster like this, you’d think that you would keep it in your hand all the time and play around with it. And this sorta thing drains your battery. So the first step in order was to buy another two chargers and place them anywhere I would happen to dwell. But a bigger battery would have been very cute there.

Kingdom come

With those issues out of the way, I could write 300 posts just about how smart, cool, and beautiful the system and the whole device is. All things I didn’t like or that were kinda dealbreakers with the iPhone are gone now with #android. Sorry, twitter and all. Anyway, your don’t need iTunes or any other dumbed down bloatware. You mount your phone with a finger tip and put on your media, docs and other files, also without decoding it. To sum it up, it is smartphonewise just as ubuntu is an experience OS-wise: I start it up the first time with a certain idea of how it should look like, the look and feel etc., and either it delivers right from the start or you can tune it with a few tips/mouseclicks. This I like, this I wantwant. Even though the locked up, dumbed down, making you pay for everything experience on an iPhone is said to have the advantage that each piece relates beautifully to every other part of the system, that is exactly what Froyo with HTC Sense does. There may be some apps on the marketplace that try to add some usabilily you already have, but my overal impression is just that everything just falls into place and feels right. To sum the whole experience up, I would say “android is about being nice to you.”

(o_O)

_

On the shoulders of giants

Look up the specs of this badboy on HTCs official site, here (although, beware – the test praises the build and the battery life, the two major shortcomings of the Desire HD, and we don’t know what exactly they be smoking when doing a test at their “lab”), and here.

Browse a few apps on the official site, or on the imperative appbrain. Check the market stats here.