HTC Desire HD and HTC Wildfire - Hands on

Having fed up with unusable and non innovative Nokia N8, I decided to get rid off it and buy an Android. Nokia N8 has most outdated OS(Symbian), Nokia thought making big buttons on Symbian will make them Touch Screen OS Leader. But finally they accepted their incapabilities and collaborated with Microsoft to build Windows 7 OS phone. 

While searching for an immediate replacement for Nokia N8 with minim cost, i came across HTC Wildfire. I brought that at the price of Rs13500/-. 

HTC Wildfire

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Pros -

• Affordable Android phone with 5mp Camera and Flash.
• Good speakers quality. 
• Option to set picture as 'Lock Screen Wallpaper' or Home Screen Wallpaper (missing in Desire HD).
• Track ball for precise cursor movement and text selection. 
• Light weight and good battery.
• 600 Mhz process was enough.

Cons -

• Very low screen resolution resulting of text pixelation. 240 x 320 pixels, 3.2 inches.
• Many times in the chat applications the send buttons were hidden behind the keypad due to small screens
• The video recording is very bad and tiny size. CIF@15fps video recording (352 x 288 pixels) . This is below average standards of any regular phone. 

 

HTC Sense UI

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Lot has been talked about the Sense UI. These are Android modifications done by handset manufacturers to maintain their uniqueness. The things that are currently lacking in android are the integrations of social feeds with contacts. Also any contextual information of email, sms, call log is not shown against the stock contact apps. The HTC Sense UI makes this possible with its Friends Feed widget, home screen navigations and skins. There are couple of HTC widgets like clock and weather. 

Well, there is a HTCsense.com account you can create and they say you can sync contacts and photos etc. You can even track your phone from their site. I tried with no luck. Their site is quite buggy and after writing to their support they accepted that htcsense.com is not working. What a shame on HTC. 

 

HTC Desire HD

Finally i sold HTC Wildfire and brought HTC Desire HD at a price of Rs27,000/- . 

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Pros- 

• Very large screen of 480 x 800 pixels, 4.3 inches
• Internal memory of 1.5 GB; 768 MB RAM is good for multitasking 
• microSD, up to 32GB, 8GB included
  
• 1 GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon
  
• 8 MP, 3264x2448 pixels, autofocus, dual-LED flash, Video recording at  720p
  
• The apps were very responsive. The email scrolling was smooth. I had Samsung Galaxy S. IT was a pice of shit with all bugs and it use to hang. But HTC was very good. 

Cons -

• Pathetic speaker quality and volume. I mean, you cannot hear any ringtone or any music. The sound of speaker is like cheap 3rd rate company product. I was shocked to see this. I had to set a polyphonic old tring-tring ringtone. 
• The screen is not quite visible in daylight. 
• Being large screen, the battery drains in a day. May be 10hrs max. 
• Because of high resolution screen, the system fonts look tiny and unreadable. The default apps like email, sms, dialer have no option to increase fonts. This is a biggest disadvantage which made me to install 3rd party apps for every stock client. I am writing a separate post on Android Apps. 

Having limitations with HTC Sense UI, I have totally changed all stock apps to new Android Market apps. Now on my HTC Desire HD, there is nothing about HTC Sense UI left. Read my next post. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted via email from Sameer Chavan's Design Blog