Droid Incredible 2 review

It wasn't that long ago that we were jonesing for a Nexus One on Verizon. What HTC gave us instead was the Droid Incredible, with the same 1GHz Snapdragon CPU and gorgeous 3.7-inch AMOLED display -- not to mention a better camera (8 megapixel vs. five), 8GB of built-in flash storage, an optical trackpad, HTC's Sense UI on top of Eclair, and a dash of funky industrial design. The Incredible was an impressive phone with a lovely camera, marred only by questionable battery life and lack of supply, forcing HTC to build a Super LCD-equipped model to satisfy demand. Judging by the popularity of the Incredible, it came as no surprise that following HTC's announcement at MWC, the Incredible S eventually became Verizon's Droid Incredible 2. With a 4-inch Super LCD display, global CDMA / GSM radio, front-facing camera, updated internals (including 768 MB of RAM), trick capacitive buttons, and a Froyo-flavored serving of Sense, the Incredible 2 seems like a worthy successor to last year's Incredible. Does it live up to our expectations or is it just another fish in the crowded sea of Android? Does it significantly improve upon the original formula or is it merely a refresh? Hit the break for our review.

Hardware

There's no doubt that the Incredible 2 is an extremely handsome, if not sightly austere looking handset. It's much like the interior of a late 20th century BMW -- all class, all business, and all black. Compared to the original, it's slicker and softer, with rounder edges and much better build quality thanks mostly to the ultra-rigid machined and anodized black aluminum screen bezel. Gone are the old model's whimsical red accents, red innards, and red battery. Instead you'll find a translucent black chassis and a black battery under the hood. Even the bevel around the earpiece is finished in black. Yes, this is Darth Vader's phone, the Droid he's been looking for. The back cover features the same grippy soft-touch finish and unique layered motif as the Incredible, but instead of two "steps", there's only one this time around. Like the HTC ThunderBolt, the Incredible 2 includes contacts (missing from the Incredible S) for an optional inductive charging back, and integrates some of its antennae into the battery door. Pop the cover, and there's a Verizon / Vodafone SIM under the 1450mAh battery plus a 16GB microSD card pre-installed.

Despite the bigger screen, the new version is only marginally larger than the original, about the same weight, and actually a smidgen thinner. The layout is almost identical to its forebear -- the headphone jack and power button have swapped places, and the camera flash is now arranged horizontally instead of vertically. On the left side you'll find the volume rocker and micro-USB connector while the right side is devoid of any controls. The top edge hosts the power button, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, plus a secondary mic, while the bottom edge hides the primary mic, along with an indent to pry the battery cover off. A sheet of Gorilla Glass protects the 4-inch display, the 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera next to the Verizon logo on top, and the four capacitive buttons at the bottom. The earpiece and notification light live in the aforementioned aluminum screen bezel above the glass. In back there's an 8 megapixel autofocus camera with dual-LED flash on top, a rather tinny sounding speaker, the embossed HTC logo, and the "with Google" stencil towards the bottom.

The 4-inch WVGA Super LCD display deserves a special mention. It's one of the best LCD-based panels we've come across -- bright without any leaks or spots, with naturally saturated colors, deep ink-like blacks, and superb viewing angles. Other than pixel density, it gives the iPhone 4's IPS screen a run for its money and even warrants a nod or two from the notoriously smug Super AMOLED crowd. We've mentioned the trick capacitive buttons before, which rotate when the handset switches between portrait and landscape for apps that support both display modes. It turns out the buttons are drawn by groups of tiny LEDs which are turned on and off based on orientation.

At first glance, the Incredible 2 specs look somewhat pedestrian in this day and age of dual-core processors, qHD displays, and LTE radios. But don't be fooled by the numbers. That 1GHz CPU is Qualcomm's latest generation MSM8655 Snapdragon SoC with Adreno 205 GPU -- it's fast, power efficient, and backed up by a generous 768 MB of RAM. Like with the Thunderbolt (which shares the same processor), we consistently recorded Quadrant scores ranging from 1500 to 1700 -- pretty remarkable for a single core device running Froyo. You'll find the usual collection of sensors on board (compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, proximity, and ambient light) along with the standard assortment of radios (WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, GPS / AGPS, and even FM) plus Qualcomm's popular MDM9600 Gobi module (also used in Verizon's iPhone 4), which supports CDMA together with quadband GSM and dual-band HSPA (2100 / 900MHz). In our tests, calls sounded great thanks to the dual noise-reducing microphone setup, and reception was problem free.

Battery life is excellent for an Android smartphone. Starting from a full charge, the Incredible 2 managed 36 hours and 40 minutes of up time before we decided to plug it back in with 7% battery life remaining. That was mostly light use -- reading email (3 accounts), checking Twitter, and occasionally replying or posting -- with all the radios (except Bluetooth) turned on. Still, this included 30 minutes spent with the handset strutting its stuff in front of the camera for our video review, 20 minutes being used as a hotspot, taking / uploading a few full-size pictures, and only 6 hours idling while we slept.

Camera

The camera on the original Incredible was no slouch. It could be coaxed into taking fantastic shots given enough care and attention. The Incredible 2 takes this formula to the next level, with a camera that's capable of producing amazingly realistic pictures without too much effort. It features HTC's next generation 8 megapixel sensor with autofocus optics (also found on the Thunderbolt) plus a dual-LED flash. Color balance and exposure are top notch. Low-light performance is impressive. Noise is kept under control without compromising detail. In fact, we're pretty sure we're dealing with a backside-illuminated sensor here. There's a certain clinical precision to the pictures captured with the Incredible 2 that we've really come to appreciate -- the camera simply gathers a tremendous amount of information, resulting in amazing shots.

The Incredible 2 captures 720p (HD) video at 30fps with decent results. While it performs significantly better than its predecessor, video recording isn't as stellar as photography. The frame rate isn't quite as smooth as with some other devices (the iPhone 4 comes to mind), and sound quality leaves room for improvement. The camera interface offers a plethora of settings: there's touch-to-focus (for both stills and video), flash mode, Photo Booth-like effects, and additional options nestled within the menus (such as timer, exposure, while-balance, resolution, ISO, and face detection). The digital zoom is activated by pressing the volume rocker or by using an on-screen slider. Unfortunately, there's no dedicated 2-stage camera button, no panorama mode, and the 4-inch Super LCD display, while gorgeous, tends to wash out in direct sunlight, making it difficult to properly frame shots.

Software

While the Incredible 2's hardware is supremely refined, things are bittersweet on the software front. It's running Sense, which we've reviewed in detail alongside the Incredible S. We appreciate that it brings a polished, friendly, and consistent user experience across HTC's multitude of devices, and also provides the company with a strong brand identity, but we're just not fans. The problem is that with each revision of Sense we feel more alienated from what we came looking for in the first place, namely Android. Sense is starting to look and feel like its own OS -- Android in a parallel universe -- with almost every aspect of the user interface getting customized, and deviating significantly from the Android way. Certain changes are positive, like the cool time / weather widget, the fast boot feature, and the much improved music player. Others are frustrating, like the the convoluted dialer / call log and the poor keyboard layout (who decided to put the hide button just below the shift key?!) We realize that it's all a matter of taste, and that some people will choose to go down the rabbit hole into Sense wonderland, but we're purists. So HTC, give us a way to disable Sense, and all will be forgiven. Oh, and third-party launchers and keyboards don't count - like most people, we don't have the time or interest to customize our phones beyond installing a few apps.

Sadly, the Incredible 2 ships with Android 2.2.1 (Froyo) which, despite having stayed properly refrigerated for the past 9 months, is getting rather stale. The good news is that the Incredible S is in the process of receiving an Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) update, so Verizon's version can't be far behind. Overall, we don't have much to complain about -- Froyo still provides solid performance, especially when paired with speedy internals. The phone feels snappy and light on its feet all around. It's clear that HTC's spent time fine tuning Sense to make it highly responsive. Still, there's room for improvement in some areas like the web browser which, while loading and rendering pages briskly, falls short of matching the rest of the user interface in terms of smoothness when scrolling and zooming around heavy sites like Engadget.

The most glaring issue we have with the Incredible 2 is the criminal amount of crap ware that Verizon decided to pre-load on the handset -- apps that can't be removed and will forever litter the app tray. Some of them, like Adobe Reader, Kindle, Quickoffice (basic version), Skype, and Slacker are apps you'd likely want to install anyway. Others, such as Blockbuster (a shortcut to the Market), Let's Golf 2, NFL Mobile, and NSF Shift don't have the same widespread appeal, but are passable. But it's with apps like City ID, My Verizon Mobile, V CAST Apps, V CAST Media, V CAST Music, V CAST Tones, V CAST Videos, and VZ Navigator that things become downright ludicrous. Apparently Verizon wants to lump its sexy flagship 3G Android smartphone together with its generic dumb phones by contaminating it with utterly meaningless carrier-branded apps and services. We can only hope that a few heads will roll in Verizon's marketing department after we publish this review, and that common sense prevails with a Gingerbread update that allows us to uninstall the offending apps.

Wrap up

We'll come right out and say it: the Droid Incredible 2 is the best 3G Android smartphone on Verizon today. If you live in a 3G-only area or you can forgo LTE (and the Droid Charge), the choice basically comes down to the Incredible 2 and Verizon's iPhone 4. With this device, HTC is pushing the single core Snapdragon platform to the limit, then packaging it into an attractive and beautifully finished product. It improves upon the already excellent Droid Incredible with a nicer screen, an even better camera, global roaming capability, and most importantly, amazing battery life. It's an incredibly (ahem) well rounded handset -- the perfect storm of quality, refinement, power, and efficiency -- as long as you can live with Sense. And that's the crux of it -- while we think Sense will appeal to many people, we feel that HTC is doing its core audience of passionate, tech-savvy, pure Android aficionados a disservice by not providing a way to disable it (or at least making it easier to install custom ROMs via an unlocked bootloader). This, together with the insane amount of pre-loaded crapware, are the only major issues we have with respect to the software. Of course we'd have liked to see Gingerbread available out of the gate, but this looks like it will be remedied soon. In the end, the Incredible 2 isn't a fish in the sea of Android -- it's a shark seeing Verizon red and ready to devour the competition. Considering how much of a runaway hit the original Incredible was last summer, perhaps HTC should have called this new version the Jaws 2?

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HTC Holiday to be a 4.5-inch behemoth with qHD resolution, 1.2GHz dual-core, and AT&T future

HTC brought in the 4.3-inch craze, but now that that form factor has gone mainstream, it's looking to even larger dimensions. A 4.5-inch HTC Holiday has been dug up by none other than 911sniper, which is said to pack a qHD resolution (960 x 540), a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8660, 1GB of RAM, an 8 megapixel camera, and the very latest version of Android Gingerbread (2.3.4). That comes on the heels of Pocketnow unearthing a supposed image of the AT&T-bound smartphone, showing a predictably uncomplicated design framing a vast display. Let's just hope the Holiday codename doesn't mean we'll have to wait till the holidays to see this overpowered new beast in action.

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HTC Thunderbolt drops to $130 for new Verizon customers at Amazon over the weekend

If the Droid Charge has you thinking that Verizon LTE phones have to cost an arm, a leg, and an extra $100, you'll want to take a look at this. Amazon Wireless is chopping the Thunderbolt, Verizon's original 4G bad boy, down to the extremely palatable price of $130 on contract, valid for new Verizon subscribers who buy the phone between now and midnight Pacific Time on Monday. The 4.3-inch, Android 2.2 smartphone from HTC impressed us greatly with the 4G speeds it was able to pull down in our review, and while those might not remain quite so spectacular once that network starts loading up more customers, a price like the present one makes it an excellent proposition in the short term. The source link is where you'll find it.

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HTC Droid Incredible 2 for Verizon coming this Thursday

Verizon will be updating its Droid lineup with a new HTC Droid Incredible 2, which is based on the Incredible S. Launching this Thursday, the new CDMA handset offers a bigger screen, some more RAM and a front-facing camera compared to its now canceled predecessor.

The HTC Droid Incredible 2 for Verizon boasts a 4” WVGA screen, compared to the 3.7” of the previous model and 768MB of RAM (vs. 512MB), but the same 1GHz single-core CPU.

The Droid Incredible 2 still runs Android 2.2 Froyo. The main camera is 8MP with 720p video recording again, though there is a secondary camera now, a 1.3MP unit. Other new goodies include noise-cancellation microphone and SRS WOW HD sound-enhancing technology. The rest is pretty much the same.

Anyway, Verizon no longer offers the old model. Instead, you can get an HTC Droid Incredible 2 starting 28 April (this Thursday) for $199 on a new 2-year contract with a Nationwide Talk plan (starts at $40/month) and a smartphone data plan ($30/month, unlimited).

You you can leaf through our Incredible S review, the phones are nearly identical (save for the mobile network connectivity). 

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T-Mobile G2x review

It's only been a few weeks since the Optimus 2X crossed the desk of our European review bureau as the first known dual-core smartphone in the universe. Now LG's wunderkind has made its way across the pond and landed on US soil to be reborn as the G2x on T-Mobile. While the hardware remains the same elegant Tegra 2-infused slab of glass, metal and plastic, the software has been liberated from the shackles of LG's UI customizations into a serving of vanilla Froyo -- the exact same approach T-Mobile took when it introduced the Desire Z as the G2 without HTC's custom Sense skin last fall. Unlike previous G-series phones, the G2x ditches the physical keyboard for a 4-inch WVGA display with HDMI output and an 8 megapixel camera with 1080p video capture. Beyond the transition from messaging-centric device to multimedia powerhouse, what else is different about the hardware? Is plain Android a vast improvement over the lackluster software that shipped on the Optimus 2X? How does the G2x fare against T-Mobile's current flagship, the Samsung Galaxy S 4G? Find out in our full review after the break.

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HTC Wildfire S to launch on 13 May in the UK, starts at 230 quid

The smallest of HTC’s S trio, the HTC Wildfire S, is now available on pre-order in the UK. It's set to launch on 13 May. You have a choice between getting the Gingerbread droid on a contract or SIM-free from several retailers.

The SIM-free HTC Wildfire S will be shipping some time in May. Play.com seem to be the ones shipping it first, starting 13 May for £230 (€260, $375). Amazon has it on pre-order for the same amount of cash but the shipping date is set to 22 May.

Then there’s Clove UK, which has priced the Wildfire S at £238 and will ship pre-ordered phones in “late May”. Expansys has it too (in black or white) but their pre-order page doesn’t list a price or shipping date yet.

Vodafone UK has had the HTC Wildfire S as “coming soon” for quite a while now (they still do) but there's nothing new (no price, date or plan info). Other UK carriers should pick it up as well.

While you’re pondering if it’s worth the wait for a rehashed HTC Aria, you should consider the HTC Desire S, which is going for £400 (was £410).

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HTC Sensation 4G official: 1.2GHz dual-core, qHD display, and Sense 3.0

We've known about the so-called HTC Pyramid for months, long before the Vodafone leak this morning. Now the long-rumored Android phone is official and coming to T-Mobile under the moniker HTC Sensation 4G. As expected, it matches many of the EVO 3D's specs, including a 4.3-inch (540 x 960) Super LCD screen, dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor, and Android Gingerbread (2.3) with Sense 3.0. But it one ups the 3D handset by bumping the rear lens' resolution to 8 megapixels, throwing in a second LED flash, and speeding up the video frame rate to 30fps at max 1080p resolution. Speed-wise, this HSPA+ device promises download rates as fast as 14.4 Mbps. As for Sense, the Sensation also ushers in various tweaks to the company's UI, including customizable lock screens, 3D transitions, an improved weather app, and HTC Watch, the service introduced with the company's Flyer tablet that lets you download DVD-quality movies.

Before hitting the states this summer, the Sensation will launch in the UK, Germany, and the rest of HTC's "key" European markets in mid-May, with Vodafone scoring a Europe-wide exclusive for "a couple of weeks." We can't wait to put the Sensation through its paces in a full review, but happily we already scored some hands-on time with a near-final unit. Continue below the break for some early thoughts, full specs, and close-up shots of this superphone in action.

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HTC Sensation first video hands-on!

You saw the specs confirmed a little earlier today and you even got to glimpse HTC's new Sensation in the flesh. Now it's time to watch this 4.3-inch Android device strut its stuff on video. We've gotten our mitts on the Euro model and you can check out all the delicious visuals after the break.

As we mentioned in our preview of this handset, the new lock screen is perhaps the biggest (it's certainly the most immediately apparent) change in the Sense UI that comes with the Sensation. HTC describes now describes it as "smart," because it can both serve you with live information, like weather and those all-important stock prices, and also lets you unlock straight into an app by dragging its link into an unlocking circle. Frankly, we used the functionality so much that we almost forgot how to unlock the phone "normally." It's something the Inq Cloud Touch and other lower-end Android devices have previously exhibited, and a feature we really, truly appreciate.

Performance was, as you'd expect from a 1.2GHz dual-core machine, snappy all around, though we still caught some slight lag and insufficient frame rates when the Sensation was dealing with some of those yummy new 3D animations. The higher resolution (960 x 540) screen is a definite upgrade over the 800 x 480 standard that Android devices have been coalescing around and the 4.3-inch size seems like a perfect fit for it. Both the camera app and video playback in the HTC Watch app showed great speed and responsiveness to our input. Those are the things that will really harness the processing power of the Sensation.

Physically, the Sensation somehow manages to feel more compact than its predecessor atop the European jumbo phone throne, the Desire HD. The two phones both have 4.3-inch screens, but the 16:9 screen ratio of the Sensation makes it narrower, while HTC's ingenuity has managed to make the new device marginally thinner too. All in all, a definite upgrade in ergonomics. Aluminum construction is present here as well, however the entire aluminum chunk -- which spans the middle portion of the back, separating two plastic parts (each of which has its own color, giving you a tri-color rear) -- is in the removable cover. This is unlike most of HTC's aluminum "unibody" phones, which make the aluminum piece part of the phone's framework. Hey, at least you get much easier access to what's under the back cover. Delve into the gallery below for more!

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HTC Desire S review

This time last year, HTC had two Android smartphones for the mainstream: the 3.7-inch Desire, outfitted with the latest and greatest, and the 3.2-inch Legend, which was humbler in specs but offered the novelty of an aluminum unibody construction. After seeing that strategy pay off handsomely, the company's come back in 2011 with a similar proposition. The 4-inch Incredible S is now the higher-end device, while the 3.7-inch Desire S is the smaller, aluminum-shelled handset. What's curious this time, however, is that the Desire S has exactly the same 1GHz Snapdragon inside it, the same graphics, same WVGA resolution, and the same 768MB of RAM as the Incredible S. Throw in the fact it comes with Gingerbread preloaded and a few new tweaks to the Sense UI and you've got to wonder if this might not be the more, um, desirable of HTC's new Android duo. Only one way to find out, right? Full review after the break.

Hardware

HTC is rightly proud of its aluminum unibody construction method. It goes beyond what other manufacturers do -- such as Nokia with the aluminum-clad N8 -- by using just one piece of the lightweight metal, which is wrapped around the phone's internal components and acts as both its case and frame. On the Desire S, there are a couple of plastic-covered rear compartments, one to accommodate the 5 megapixel camera, LED flash, and loudspeaker, and the other to permit access to the 1450mAh battery and SIM and MicroSD card slots. The latter chunk of soft-touch plastic also acts as the Desire S' antenna. You might expect the move to a metallic construction to incur some penalties in terms of weight and bulk, but the Desire S is five grams lighter than the original Desire at 130g (4.59oz), 4mm shorter at a height of 115mm (4.7 inches), and just slightly thinner and narrower than its predecessor. Another appreciable upgrade over the original Desire is that the display now sits closer to the glass at the front of the phone, eliminating what was a noticeable distance between the two on the older device.

In day-to-day use, we found the Desire S stupendously easy to operate, thanks to its well curved back and subtly protruding bottom end. It's the old chin design that the Hero and Legend sported so proudly, but done much more delicately. The 3.7-inch screen size makes it easy for most thumbs to reach both the top left corner and the Search capacitive button on the lower right without resorting to the use of a second hand. That's a marked improvement in ergonomics over the original Desire and even betters the Incredible S. The verdict on the Desire S' physical characteristics, therefore, is an uncomplicated two thumbs up, however there's one small software foible that we must relate. The capacitive Android keys -- sorry, Desire fans, no hard buttons or optical trackpad here -- don't always light up when they should. That becomes a pretty major problem when using the phone in the dark, as without a visual or tactile indicator of what you're about to press, the only information you can get from those keys is the haptic feedback after you've pressed one. In our experience, the determinant for whether the backlight would come on seemed to be sheer randomness, and we've heard of others having the same issue so can't put it down to just having a defective unit. Still, that strikes us as an eminently correctable flaw, even if it's a frustrating one while it persists.

Internals

Delving inside the blue-hued aluminum body, you'll find Qualcomm's extremely popular MSM8255 system-on-chip, which you may also know as the second-generation Snapdragon. In our Incredible S review, we took a look at its performance relative to the older 1GHz part and found it to be approximately 15 percent faster. In general use, the chip proves itself perfectly capable of handling Android's demands, making HTC's Sense UI look light and airy. 768MB is a generous chunk of RAM to include as well, as it's 256MB more than competitors like Sony Ericsson are bundling with this particular Snapdragon part.

The loudspeaker doesn't actually go up all that high, but it has a pleasing, almost surprising, clarity to its output. Bass, however, is as absent on the Desire S as on any other smartphone's speaker. Carrying out the now auxiliary function of making phone calls is also no problem for the Desire S -- it neither sets itself apart in terms of call quality / reception, nor trails the pack.

Perhaps the biggest fault one could find with the original Desire was its short battery life. It gave you a great screen to look at and a ton of capabilities to exploit, but nowhere near enough endurance. Thankfully, the newer Snapdragon hardware is much more efficient with its energy use and makes the 1450mAh cell inside the Desire S look like a standout. It had no trouble matching the similarly specced Incredible S for runtime and you can rest assured that you'll get a busy day's worth of battery from it. With lighter use, there's no reason why you won't be able to go a couple of days between recharges.

Display

The Desire S makes use of the same Super LCD tech as the Incredible S, leaving us to only echo what we said of its bigger sibling. You get vibrant, well saturated images, which also benefit from excellent viewing angles. The only weakness is readability in direct sunlight. One thing we omitted to mention in the Incredible S review was that the screen is protected by Gorilla Glass, a feature that has naturally been included on the Desire S as well. We've made no secret of our admiration for the Gorilla tech, which you may check out in the demo video below. We'd do one for this particular handset as well, but doubt HTC would appreciate us trying to destroy its tenderly crafted device.

Camera

Aside from their divergent dimensions and construction materials, the biggest difference between the Desire S and Incredible S is in their camera sensors. It's not always true that more megapixels equal better image quality, but in this case, the 8 megapixel imager on the Incredible S is markedly ahead of the Desire S' 5 megapixel unit. You won't notice this advantage while perusing images on the phone itself or even when sharing them over the web at resolutions of 1 megapixel or below (e.g. 1280 x 720), but if you care about quality at the full 2592 x 1552 size, you'll be left a little disappointed. HTC very actively compensates for camera noise by blurring areas of similar color while simultaneously sharpening edges where it finds them. For the most part, this software solution to an underwhelming sensor works very well, but photography purists will be cringing, and so will anyone else who might be interested in taking broader shots and cropping them down to the areas of interest. Chromatic noise also makes an unwelcome appearance but does so relatively rarely and is hardly noticeable in lower-res pictures. The Desire S' camera can be considered great at 1 megapixel resolutions and merely okay at the full 5.

This handset also comes with the latest trendy add-on, a front-facing camera, but just like the vast majority of them, it's a fixed focus VGA imager with decidedly poor image quality. Noise, of every color and creed, dominates proceedings, though if you're in some weirdly dire need to use it, you can obtain half-decent results from the front camera in well lit situations. HTC's picture-taking software is quick and snappy, and comes with a set of fancy / gimmicky filters you can apply both when you're shooting and afterwards. There are also options for cropping and rotating photos, both of which we appreciated having. Video is recorded in .3gp format and stretches up to 720p. The phone handled the processing task with ease, though the usual rolling shutter effect was readily apparent and we found the Desire S seemed a bit more sensitive to subtle movements and vibrations than other phones. Image quality in the captured video wasn't anything to write home about either, regrettably. Check out a sample video below.

Software

Both Android and the Sense UI adorning it will be familiar to you already, but there are a couple of fresh additions that merit discussion. Firstly, the aforementioned absence of an optical trackpad isn't a bother for the Desire S, which now lets you place your cursor precisely within text using a magnifying glass overlay and offers a couple of draggable pointers for defining text selections. It's the exact same set of functions as you'll find on the Incredible S, but relative to the Desire, it marks a significant upgrade in usability. Unless you were totally in love with that trackpad, of course.

Where the Desire S differs from the Incredible S is, firstly, in the underlying Android OS, which tastes of Gingerbread (2.3.3), Google's latest mobile flavor. There aren't actually a lot of noticeable differences between the two devices on that account, but HTC has also taken the opportunity to tweak Sense on the Desire S as well, with a set of changes you'll notice more readily. One of them is that the jumbo clock / weather widget now has an alternative clock / social feed option, whereby you get the latest update from your Facebook or Twitter friends as a little blurb under the time. More valuable, however, is HTC's integration of a Quick Settings menu alongside the usual Notifications in the drop-down Android menu. This gives you close to instant access to options you'll likely want to use quite often, such as toggling the WiFi, GPS, or mobile hotspot functions on and off. We'd be even happier to see this menu take over the position of the Personalize item next to the phone dialer at the bottom of the home screen, but having it at all is a move forward.

HTC also preloads the Kobo ebook reader on the Desire S, which it outfits with a neat selection of classic books to get you going. We've never been massive fans of reading on our smartphones, but as e-reader software goes, this one's perfectly dandy. Rotating between landscape and portrait mode is accompanied by a red underline of some of the text so that you don't lose your place while the content reformats itself. Overall, it left us with the impression that's it a well thought-out, useful little slice of software.

Sense also gets an overdue upgrade to the way it manages applications -- with the icon grid now scrolling up and down in a paginated fashion and being accompanied by subcategories for your downloaded and most frequently used apps -- but our overwhelming feeling remains that we've seen this all before. In spite of its small iterative steps forward, Sense is now a user interface that's beginning to show its age, with oversized widgets that fail to make the best of the space available to them and that egregious omnipresent menu bar at the bottom that takes up far more space than a couple of links to your apps and phone ought to. Most other Android skins have now taken to using that as an app launcher dock, but HTC insists on giving you instant access to things like personalization options (which, in themselves, are hardly all that varied) instead of giving you the only option you truly want -- to clear that junk away from the screen. The onscreen keyboard HTC uses is also not the best in its class. We found ourselves reverting to landscape mode to type comfortably, which is a little galling on a 3.7-inch device when the 3.5-inch iPhone has shown that portrait touchscreen keyboards need not be a chore to use. All in all, we're left wanting to see some more of that fancy new 3D-ified Sense UI that HTC showed off on the recently announced EVO 3D. It's a shame the Desire S couldn't partake in that new goodness.

Wrap-up

The best way we can think of to summarize the Desire S is by comparing it to its nearest and dearest. Set alongside the original Desire, it's head, shoulders and elbows above its elder, thanks to a massive improvement in battery life, a far more rugged construction, better ergonomics and the natural evolution of better specs and software. Up against the Incredible S, things are a little less clear-cut, as the bigger brother packs a significantly better camera sensor and a larger screen. Still, the Desire S is priced a few floors below the Incredible S' penthouse ambitions, which makes it our choice of the two. Ultimately, the Desire S is a very well executed refinement on a formula HTC knows well, which deprives it both of any glaring faults and of any standout features. It's not novel, it's not surprising, it's just very, very good.

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HTC Launches Desire S in India

HTC has launched the Desire S Android smartphone in India. It is the updated version of the original HTC Desire, which is still on sale for Rs. 21,999. The Desire S, on the other hand, is priced at Rs. 25,490. Compared to the Desire, the Desire S has an updated version of the Snapdragon SoC with a faster GPU, more RAM and Android 2.3 Gingerbread. HTC has done away with the optical trackpad on the Desire S but it has a front video call camera. 

Read the full specs below:

• GSM 850/900/1800/1900, HSDPA 900/2100
• 3.7-inch, 480 x 800, S-LCD
• Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255, 1GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, 768MB RAM
• 5 megapixel camera with auto-focus and LED flash, 720p video recording
• VGA video call camera
• Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth v2.1, A-GPS
• 1.1GB internal memory, microSD card slot
• 1450mAh Li-Ion battery
• Android 2.3 Gingerbread

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HTC Desire Z Review

The first Android phone had a QWERTY keypad and was manufactured by HTC. After that there haven t been a lot of droids with QWERTY keypads and HTC in particular never visited that territory. Not until now, that is. The successor to the original droid, the T-Mobile G1 was followed by the G2, which is several leagues ahead of its predecessor.  Of course, that phone is restricted to T-Mobile so HTC came up with the Desire Z - the phone that we are reviewing today - where they loaded it with their own Sense UI and are selling it unlocked in other markets. The phone has been selling in the Indian market for some time now but it took HTC a while to send us a review sample. Nevertheless, we have the phone with us now and we have been spending some quality time with it. So read on if you want the full review. 

 
Design and Build

The Desire Z has a slightly subdued design compared to the Desire. You can tell it is designed to suit a businessman more than, say, a college goer. Nevertheless, it is still a handsome phone. The silver brushed aluminum finish goes well with the grey rubberized plastic. Metal is used sparingly on the Desire Z, possibly to keep the weight less; the sliding mechanism already adds a lot to that. 

 

On the front you have the large earpiece on the top with the ambient light sensor and the proximity sense hidden towards its left. Below is the 3.7-inch display covered with a Gorilla Glass. Below the display is a thin row of touch sensitive keys along with an optical trackpad. We preferred the physical controls below the Desire's display; it is much more difficult to press unintentionally. The trackpad has a ring that glows when you have a notification. 

 

On the left side are the volume control buttons and the micro USB port. On the right is the camera shutter button, and the button for releasing the battery cover. 

 

On the top is the 3.5mm headphone jack and a power button. 

 

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HTC Droid Incredible 2 struts its stuff in leaked press shots? (Updated)

If you had any doubts about HTC's Incredible S making it to our shores, they're probably dissipating as we speak -- not only has the phone obtained Verizon's shiny red checkmark, it's now got the robotic eye of Sauron staring at us with ferocious intensity. PocketNow obtained these pictures of the likely Droid Incredible 2 without naming so much as an anonymous source, and we wouldn't be surprised if it's Verizon's way of reminding us that the handset is rapidly on its way to market. You'll find two more pictures at our source link.

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HTC Pyramid to launch on April 12th under the name of HTC Sensation?

When HTC extended an invitation our way to come "see what's next" on April 12th in London, plenty of you were already guessing that its long-rumored 1.2GHz Pyramid device would seize that opportunity to make its debut. Now Pocket-lint has apparently confirmed those inklings, with word from an insider affirming the new Android smartphone's launch for that day and also adding that its retail name will be the HTC Sensation. HTC has already filed a claim to trademark that tandem of words, which lends an extra dash of credence to this revelation. Frankly, so long as all the mighty, EVO 3D-emulating specs we've been hearing about this device turn out to be true, we don't care if HTC calls it the Watermelon. Actual availability in stores is said to be expected "in the coming months," leaving a bit more waiting to be done whatever happens on April 12th. Ah well, they do say good things come to those who wait.

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Sprint EVO View 4G tablet to launch with Honeycomb, Flyer can't be far behind

If you want a 7-inch, 1024 x 600 tablet with 1.5GHz and dual cameras, you want an HTC Flyer. If, however, you want that with WiMAX data and a talk show name, you'll want Sprint's special flavor, the EVO View 4G. At CTIA we were told that it was, of course, Android, but now Sprint's confirming that it'll come right out the door with Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb. That's the tablet taste that makes everybody come a runnin', and that this sucker will have it at launch (sometime "this summer") might just be good news for those pining for the WiFi-only Flyer, which as of last report would not be getting its own sweet taste until sometime after launch.

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HTC HD7 smartphone up for grabs in Australia via Telstra

Manufacturers like Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, LG and more have been carving out unique gizmos to ward off redundant competition. Keeping up with the fierce competition, HTC has partnered with Telstra to allure users across Australia with its HD7 smartphone.

Users can watch their most liked videos, images and movies on the 4.3-inch display screen which is capable of delivering 480 x 800 pixel resolution. Powered by the Windows Phone 7 operating system, the newest entrant helps owners capture memorable moments using the incorporated 5 megapixel camera with auto-focus and LED flash.

“We are pleased to announce the HTC HD7 will be available exclusively on the Telstra Next G Network in March,” quoted Ben Hodgson, Country Manager, HTC Australia and New Zealand. “HTC has shown strong leadership in developing Windows based devices in the past, illustrating our ability to be first-to-market. The HTC HD7 continues along this tradition with its focus on providing the ultimate multimedia experience coupled with a nice simple user interface and access to a broad range of useful applications.”

Besides Xbox Live, the handset comes along with Music and Videos Hub to help mobile buffs enjoy custom playlists, radio and podcasts. Users who always travel from one to another can listen to their favorite music collection with ease as the unit sports the HTC Surround Sound technology.

The HTC Sense with HTC Hub delights many with location aware HTC Sense tile with weather as well as stocks, weather, flashlight, calculator, notes, sound enhancer, photo enhancer and convertor. The attentive phone feature sports interesting functions such as pocket mode, quiet ring on pickup, flip to mute and flip for speaker.

The HTC HD7 smartphone can now be purchased via Telstra Stores and partners for $768 (approx Rs. 35,206) which can be repaid in 24 months with a Consumer Telstra Next G Cap plan or a Telstra Business Mobile Plus Plan.

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The HTC Flyer features a 7 inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, there is also a1.5GHz Qualcomm processor and it will come with Android 2.4 Gingerbread when it goes on sale.

There are also two separate camera’s on the Flyer a five megapixel version on the back and a 1.3 megapixel camera on the front, plus a 4,000mAh battery, 3G and WiFi connectivity.

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According to Droid Life, who received a copy of an email that was sent to one of their readers, HTC have been telling customers that the Thunderbolt will be getting Android 2.3 Gingerbread some time in quarter 2.

We are excited to announce that the Thunderbolt will receive the Gingerbread (Android 2.3) update in Q2 2011. Stay tuned for details as we get closer to the update availability.

There is no exact date as yet on when the Thunderbolt will get Android 2.3, but from the email it should be some time in either April or May of this year.

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HTC HD7S hands-on

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