The best mobile phone in the market? (Part 2 of 3)

Part 2 of 3

(Part 1 | Part 3)

Interface:

This is the second most important parameter. Wait, it could be the most important one... Hell, they're both extremely important: display and interface.. um.. the display is a part of the interface, anyway.

If you've owned a few handsets before, I'm sure you know how frustrating it is if you have to wait for the phone to catch up with your speed while typing messages, or traversing the menu. How many key presses/touches does it take to operate something? If it's too many, you'll be peeved, I guarantee.

The interface is truly a lovable thing on the Desire. Even your slightest touches are registered; it's like the phone knows what you're thinking. Multi-touch is supported. Yes, it means you can pinch the screen to zoom in and out of photos/websites etc. The smartphone runs on Google's open source Android 2.1 'Eclair' operating system, which is great, for two reasons: availability of thousands of apps to enhance your phone with, and an extremely dedicated community of developers.

The interface is based on something called the HTC Sense, which on this model allows 7 homescreens for ultimate customization. There are innovations like the Friendster widget that integrates Facebook, Twitter and Flickr into a single window, but I'm sure you can read about all that elsewhere. In this blog entry, I'll tell you about things that most smartphone manufacturers miss out on that HTC thankfully hasn't.

While all smartphones claim to be capable of  moving mountains and bringing world peace, they often fail at simple things like dialing and receiving calls, accessing and searching the phonebook, etc. These things are a breeze with the Desire. Although I did find a couple of bugs:

- SMS delivery notification icons don't change from undelivered to delivered

- There's a special option to change a contact's name is displayed in your list, from what they've used on facebook or google, or what you've saved it as on your phone. But intermittently this doesn't work.

- The LED indicator on the top right of the phone blinks when there's a notification like SMS or email, but it blinks only for a few minutes. So if you're away from your phone for a long time, you wont see the notification light.

Apart from these, there are absolutely no flaws. When you are on a call, the proximity sensor on the top left of the screen detects your ear next to it and the touchscreen is automatically turned off to prevent your cheek from messing around with it. This is one problem solved, that I had with my previous touchscreen phone.

There are other things about the interface that shine too, best read a professional review for the entire list.

Messaging:

Yes, you can type messages with one hand.. with your left hand, if need be. Never imagined I'd be able to do this on a touch screen phone. Thank you, you freakishly accurate word prediction-correction system. You don't need to tap on the letters, just any letter in its general vicinity and the phone mind-reads and inserts the correct word for you. Of course, if this isn't awesome enough for you, you can install Swype or Voice recognition. Now, this voice recognition is tweaked for American accents, so it might not do well with others'.

In the messaging app, you have conversation style messages inspired by gmail, which is a refreshing new thing on a phone. Earlier I've had to zip back and forth between the Inbox and Sent Items box to review a conversation.

Browsing:

It wont replace your laptop, but it gets close. I use this thing all the time. You can open several pages at once, although there's a limit to the number of open pages at any one time: it's 4. 

The most interesting feature that throws dirt in the eyes of the other browsers is text reflow.. You pinch and zoom, and the text adjusts into your screen. No matter what the zoom level is. It's fast. It's perfect. It means you don't need to pan left and right to read an article, just scroll down as you would in a normal desktop browser. If you want to view the larger images on the page, you will have to pan, as images are not resized (it's just fine the way it is). 

Youtube can be played on the fly, you can download stuff of course, and there's a lot to be said about the flash support. All page elements are loaded, be it videos or animations. The CEO of HTC does not hate flash.

Music:

My biggest gripe about the built-in music app is that I cannot choose to play individual folders. If you have your MP3 tags in order, you can play tracks from an album, an artist, a genre, and you can make your own playlists. If you lock your phone while playing music, as you would no doubt want to, you can access the music controls from the lock-screen without unlocking. You can control the volume too while locked, just use the volume rocker. If you want to change the track or play/pause without touching the phone, you can do it using the controls on the earphones that are supplied. 

You can do any number of things on the phone while the music is playing, and it will never skip or pause for a microsecond. That's a 1 GHz processor running it, baby, and were talking here of the same class of processors that were in the highest-end Pentium IIIs if you remember those.

When you get a call, the music pauses and when you hang up the music is automatically resumed.. I'm just mentioning these small things because these are what manufacturers normally miss that end up becoming major annoyances.

The speaker is exceptionally loud and clear, and no doubt you will find it one of the best in the market.

Contacts:

First, you have the option of storing your contacts on the phone, sim or google. Yes, google. Choose that one. They'll automatically be synced with your google contacts, and you have a backup there just in case. If you have multiple entries for the same person no problem, you can link them up in the Desire. If you have a person as a friend on facebook, you can link that too, and the phone pulls in the necessary details to fill in your contact card such as birthday and profile pic. This pic is then shown on your screen when that person calls. One small issue here: the pic shown is slightly pixelated, because it's low res. Not something to lose sleep over.

From within the contact card you can see the details (obviously), view SMSes and emails for that contact, view updates and events, view their photos from facebook or flickr, and view detailed call history with that person.

And yes.. You do not need to go into the contacts app to dial a number. You can open up the keypad, and type in the first letters/digits and the contact shows up. eg. tap 3,2 and you get Dad as a suggestion.

This feature was present on my old SE phone, but there are still models out there that don't have this. I wouldn't buy any phone that doesn't, now that I'm used to it. It saves a hell lot of time.

Camera:

It's a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash. Takes decent photographs, and fast. There's no delay like the old Nokias where you've clicked a photo in a second, and are waiting for 5 for it to be saved to disk. Here the instant you click it, it saves.

I'll have you know I'm a photography enthusiast, so I am quite familiar with cameras and equipment. And I'm not really a fan of mobile photography. Mobile cams can never ever really achieve the kind of quality produced by high end lenses and large sensors.

However, the HTC Desire has one thing that my own $500 photography rig does not: touch focus. You touch on an object on the preview to shift focus onto that. The rest of the pic will be out of focus, and you get a nicely controlled DOF (depth-of-field).

It also has face detection. I have noticed that pictures with flash almost always have a red-eye problem. You can, of course, remove that on a PC, and one really shouldn't expect any more from a mobile camera in my opinion. Smooth zoom is present, and there are several settings that can be tweaked like brightness, contrast, color saturation, and sharpness. You can choose your metering mode (how the cam chooses exposure). There are a few effects that you can apply beginning with grayscale and sepia. You can also easily geotag your photos with your location.

Video capture feature is present, but I haven't taken a single video yet so I won't go into that. HD recording is not supported.


Reception & Call Clarity:

The Desire is a mobile phone after all, and one might be mildly interested in knowing whether it performs that duty well.. Oh yes, it does. Beautifully. Now you may not see as many bars in the signal icon as there are in your Nokia E series, but even with one bar remaining, there was no drop in call quality.

Bear in mind, the usage of bars for signal reception is not standardized and different phones may show different number of bars for the same network strength. I have not done a detailed test by measuring the decibels of network strength, but from what I have felt uptil now the reception is excellent.

The earphone is crystal clear, and the other person heard my voice with perfect clarity too.

Go to Part 3 (Conclusion, Links, and Competing phones) >>>