|
HTC have officially announced the HTC Desire – the handset previously known as the HTC Bravo – at Mobile World Congress 2010 this week. The smartphone is, in essence, HTC’s own-brand version of the Google Nexus One, tailored to a European market. As with the Nexus One there’s a 3.7-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and Android 2.1; you also get the same, 1GHz Snapgragon processor. The key differences are the inclusion of the latest version of HTC Sense, the omission of active noise cancellation, and the use of an optical joystick rather than a physical trackball.
  
As on the HTC Legend, the company’s newest Sense build does duty with improved social network integration and the new Friend Stream unified update app. HTC have also done some work on their browser, adding the intelligent text-reflow support missing from the regular Android app, as well as Flash Lite 4, pinch-zoom and the ability to long-press and select webpage text then instantly perform a Google search, Google Translate or look it up in the dictionary.
The Desire also gets the tight corporate support partially absent on the Nexus One, with Exchange email, calendar, contacts and task functionality, and HTC have added in new Mail tabs – to show unread or flagged messages, or those with an appointment request – together with tweaking their threaded message support. Meanwhile there’s also a new Calendar widget which now offers list view as well as month view.
What you don’t get is voice text entry, which is currently a Google-exclusive feature, nor support for US 3G bands. The Desire has quadband GSM/EDGE and dualband (900/2100) UMTS/HSPA, along with WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS/AGPS.
HTC reckon that, because they’ve left out active noise cancellation, they can sell the Desire at a cheaper price than the Nexus One. Pricing is yet to be confirmed, but the Desire should arrive in European and Asian markets “on just about every carrier” starting April 2010, as well as exclusively on Telstra in Australia. No word on any version suited to North American 3G bands – HTC say they have “no plans” for a straight US version, though they’re not counting out specially tailored carrier variants – but we wouldn’t be surprised to see Nexus One ROMs hacked to include HTC Sense proliferate around the time of the Desire’s launch.
|
