HTC Desire early review: Cheap Nexus One

By Flora Graham on 16 February 2010, 9:38am

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Update: Our full HTC Desire review is now live.

The Google Nexus One rocked our tiny minds with its 94mm (3.7-inch) screen AMOLED screen and zippy Snapdragon processor. We just wish it came cheaper, also supported Flash and had the groovy-looking HTC Sense UI -- what? It does?!

All our Christmases came at once with today's launch of the HTC Desire, formerly leaked as the HTC Bravo. It's HTC's own version of the phone it made for Google, the Nexus One, but with HTC's secret sauce all over it.

HTC has had to ditch the Nexus One's voice-cancellation feature to keep the price down, and you can't type using voice control, but there are some tasty treats to make it up to us. HTC's new optical trackpad, also seen on the HTC Legend, is a slick-looking replacement for the trackball we've come to expect on phones running Google's Android operating system. It has a processor running at 1GHz.

There's also all the goodness of the HTC Sense user interface that we loved on the HTC Hero, which skins Android with a plethora of sexy home-screen widgets, including a new one that brings together a live stream of your tweets and social-networking updates in one place.

The Desire also ditches the fiddly touch-sensitive buttons that we didn't fancy on the Nexus One and replaced them with low-profile physical buttons that offer more satisfying feedback.

Like the Nexus One, the Desire has a 5-megapixel camera with an LED photo light, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and so much power under the hood that you can push your apps to the limit without feeling the burn. It also sports the same version of Android, 2.1, as the Nexus One.

The Desire looks slightly different to its Google-branded sibling, with a subtly altered bottom half and no metal racing stripe around the back of the case. Although the plastic body doesn't inspire us like the Legend's aluminium case, its stunningly big screen will inspire plenty of envy.

Expect to start feeling desire in spring of this year. The price hasn't been confirmed, but HTC tells us that we can expect to pay less for the Desire than we would for the Nexus One.

Update: Orange has announced it will be selling the Desire in April, from free on selected contracts. T-Mobile will have it in March. Here's a video:

Comments 14

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anonymous 16 February, 2010 11:46

Does this still have the snapdragon processor?
anyway, I am not too sure about flash support HTC hero had it but it didn't play videos in the browser, it opened a player...

thedarklaith 16 February, 2010 12:20

I'm not completely convinced buy and am still planning to buy the nexus one, have to wait for the full review though

anonymous 16 February, 2010 12:57

t-mobile uk will have this from 26th March. Excellent

thedarklaith 16 February, 2010 13:27

Wonder if it will be easy to unlock since I travel alot and use different sime for each country... thats one of the good points in the nexus one IMO

Jason Jenkins 16 February, 2010 16:30

@Anonymous the first: It has a 1GHz processor.

anonymous 17 February, 2010 20:06

@ first Anonymous: Yeah, it does :)

thedarklaith 21 February, 2010 12:59

Changed my mind can't wait for this to come out

anonymous 10 March, 2010 19:44

What company will carry the HTC Desire?

anonymous 23 March, 2010 13:47

can you access facebook chat function on it ????

anonymous 29 March, 2010 23:37

Got this phone from T Mobile on the 27th. What a great present for the weekend. Been playing with it ever since. Not had this much fun since my Ipod Touch. Great phone, does exactly what it says on the tin or box and loads more too. Pictures on the web don't do it justice, looks far better in the flesh. Wow, can't believe how lucky I am to have this phone. It.s the best and gets a 5 star rating.

anonymous 1 April, 2010 08:49

Does it have the touch type vibro where you feel the typing and clicking sensation as with the Nokia 6800?

anonymous 7 April, 2010 10:22

it certainly does. I got mine last month and it's siply the most fantastic phone that i have ever used. easy set up and ready to go straight out of the box. No complaints at all.