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Do you recommend the Desire Z?

Alonzzo2

Well-Known Member
Nov 23, 2009
106
3
Hi

I currently have the Samsung Galaxy (I7500) and its SHIT.
I have it for a year+ now.
A couple of months ago I wanted to buy the Desire, but I decided its too early for an upgrade (big mistake...)
It's very hard for me to keep waiting for the perfect device since I hate my galaxy so much...
So my question is which phone would you recommend?
IPhone 4 no way offcourse, Samsung Galaxy S no way cause Samsung really screwed things up with the original galaxy (and it has no Flash), which leaves me with HTC Desire HD or Desire Z.
The DHD has an extremely weak battery, and I want my next phone to last a day (moderate user).
So, is the Desire Z worth the money? The things that bother me with the Desire Z are:
1. Weight - It weigh 180 grams!!! thats sick... way too much... (the Desire is about 135, which isn't light, but not heavy either)
2. Battery life - I'm not sure how long does it last under moderate usage.
3. Size - its quite big, and its especially because of the keyboard, which I don't really need / care about.

So, Whats your opinion?
Thanks
 
Short answer: Yes

Long Answer: Hell yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!

I was worried about the weight too and when you first pick it up you notice but after that you'll forget about it. The first time I put it in my pocket I didn't notice. As for the battery life I don't know yet. I only got mine today and I didn't fully charge it and its on 26% with moderate use. As for the size, it isn't that bigger than other phones.
 
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My concern with the Z is it's CPU speed, how many future releases of Android will it support with an 800mhz cpu? Rumors floated that android 3.0 will require a minimum cpu speed of 1Ghz, if Google will come out and guarantee that 800mhz is more than enough to work with andorid version 3.0 then I'll consider getting it instead of waiting for the DHD and Nexus 2.
 
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My concern with the Z is it's CPU speed, how many future releases of Android will it support with an 800mhz cpu? Rumors floated that android 3.0 will require a minimum cpu speed of 1Ghz, if Google will come out and guarantee that 800mhz is more than enough to work with andorid version 3.0 then I'll consider getting it instead of waiting for the DHD and Nexus 2.

Once you get a chance to use one, you'll realize how laughable this is. Don't let that number fool you, in practice the DZ outperforms many 1ghz handsets, including the original desire and the nexus one.

Oh, and Google is not going to implement some inane speed requirement on new Android releases. One blogger speculated that, and it's snowballed into the FUD rumor still circulating. Even the original blogger has even come out and said that he was just talking out of his rear.
 
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I wish people would stop looking at 1GHz like it's the do-all-end-all of phones. Just because it has a snapdragon or hummingbird doesn't make it automatically good. The Nexus compared to the DZ is laughable, and puts the original Desire to absolute shame.

Anyways;

1. The weight is actually nice, it makes the phone not feel like an LG "Life is good with our shit products" phone.

2. Battery life for me isn't stellar but I use my WiFi hotspot for an hour a day, 75% brightness, GPS, account update on 24/7 and wifi 4 hours a day, so I'm not a very good example of what the phone is capable of, but I still make it through a full day getting home with 15-20%.

3. The size is fine. This is not a big phone, it's no bigger than the Milestone, or really any other touchscreen slider. The comparison is the Desire which is a SMALL phone. Look at the Desire HD, the EVO, the Droid X. Those are BIG phones. Once you hold one of those ridiculous phones, the Desire Z feels fine and normal. It's a little thick but you really don't notice it after a day.
 
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I've had my Desire Z for about two weeks now, I'm in Canada on Bell. I had been waiting for forever for a replacement for my HTC 6800, because I can't live without my QWERTY I jumped at the Z when Bell launched it two weeks ago.

I love the phone, its good and solid the 180g makes you feel like you have a "real" phone in your hand. The screen is big and bright, great for my 40 something eye sight! LOL.

Don't let anyone tell you that the 800Mhz is a problem. you can google the specs and compare to the old 1GHz chips and see why. I've put this head to head with my wifes phone that has the 1Ghz snapdragon and it is as fast or faster for anything I've been able to test.

I was showing it to my buddy who is iCrazy and the first words out of his mouth when he had it in his hand was "Wow this is fast" we have some of the same apps and it whacked his iPhone everytime especialy when using the broweser to find stuff on the web.

The down side for me is learning Android 2.2 , coming from WM6.5 I do find it a little simplistic compared to the Windows mobile i've been use to. however given that this operating systme is so young and seeing how far it has come in the last 6 months I'm sure it will out pace WM in no time. I did get a chance to try the new Windows phone 7..and did not like it. Mainly becuase I find the new Windows interface to be kind of kindergarden looking.

The battery life is very good too, I can get through 8-10 hours of pretty heavy use with wi-fi constantly on, and use of GPS, & mobile network. The first few days I don't think I turned the phone off all day and still had 5-10% battery left. Now I'm getting through the day with 50% power left at the end of the day, as I'm not playing with it constantly.

Cheers

PriceA
 
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OK so i got my desire z 2 days ago, here's my impression:
Screen - quite good. better than i expected.
Weight - doesn't bother me as much as i thought it would. the phone feels nice when holding it.
Keyboard - simply wonderful
Speed - its pretty fast, but not as fast as the iphone - the UI lags a bit sometimes. the iphone 4 simply doesnt lag.
Browser - very fast.
Camera - big disappointment. though its 5 megapixels, the pics are grainy, and the 720p video recording isn't smooth. since my old phone was the samsung galaxy, the desire z camera is still an improvement:)
Battery - i connected the phone to the charger, at 15%, after 12 hours of usage:
2.5 hours of screen on! most of it due to playing games and using the data connection
10 minutes of wifi tethering
15 minutes of talking
I think overall the battery is ok, im still not sure cause i play it all the time:)

overall im very satisfied with the phone, it could use some improvements (UI lags, camera) but its a great phone. i wonder how much faster it will be if i'll install a different rom without the sense and all the utils that were preinstalled... not to mention overclocking:)
 
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Nothing will ever be as smooth or as fluid as the iPhone - simple fact, an Android phone is always doing more. iOS is so simple in it's Launcher-esque way that it uses absolutely minimal resources when just on the homescreen, whereas combined with account syncing, widgets, updating, the multitasking, etc, even an Android device sitting still on a homescreen has a million other things going on (even if you opened nothing) whereas the iPhone has like..radio files / display files, but not a ton of background updates going on.

However, 2.2 with Sense 2.0 really shouldn't stutter unless you're bogging it with Flash, or opening several apps at once and closing them out quickly, or immediately after boot up. I notice immediately after booting up I have to give the phone 10-15 seconds to connect to my network completely, start refreshing and pulling up my widgets, enabling wifi / whatever and just really get going, but once it's there, it's solid.
 
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I have the Desire Z for almost two weeks now. I simply love it. Out of the box, it can do so many things. I simply love the many widgets I have at my disposal. When I first heard about the 7 home screens, I thought it was overkill. Like owning a house, the more room you have, the more stuff you fill it with.

For the most part, the interface is very smooth. Once in a while, you may see it being a little jerky. In any case, it doesn't really delay you in getting to the screen or page you want to get to. It happens rarely, and doesn't inconvenience you at all.

It is a fairly heavy phone compared to its competitors. It doesn't really bother me. The weight is just noticeable when you pick it up.

The browser is just awesome. I do a lot of surfing and this phone allows me to go on all the sites that I want. The Flash support is great allowing me to look at videos and other effects from web sites. If you want your browser to run a little faster, you can disable it. I set it up, so that I have to select it before the Flash object plays. Only thing I want that this browser does not have is better bookmark management.

You have many built-in social media widgets to choose from. I spent many days playing around with them. I only wish the Facebook widget is better. There are other widgets that allow you to view Facebook updates, but has its own limitations.

The keyboard is taking some adjustment on my part. I've been using the N97 keyboard for several months and it's just going to take some time to get use to. I do like the fact that more commonly used punctuation do not need the <FN> key to access.

The battery needed charging part way through the day. It may be that I am still in that phase where I am still exploring the smartphone. I'm still playing around with the home screen configs and trying different widgets. The Desire Z is just cool to use that even when my computer is on, I want to use the phone instead to read and send messages and surf the web. I was like this with my last smartphone when I first got it. Over time I expect the battery to last longer as the novelty wore off like my old phone.

Google Maps and Navigation is great. I really like the traffic view. It took me a while, but I realised that when driving, you are supposed to use the Navigation feature instead of the Maps feature. The Maps feature does not keep the back light on, but the Navigation feature does. The feature I like most is the traffic feature. You get a good view of congested areas in the direction you are travelling.

Overall, I think this is a really cool phone. I does pretty much everything I need it to do and it does it very well. The only thing I really would like to see improved is the Facebook widget. The widget feels a little incomplete like the developer didn't finish it and then rushed it out the door.
 
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I've had 10 android phones and this is by FAR my most favorite (I had the G1, HTC Magic, HTC Hero Asia and NAM, Dream, Milestone, Nexus, X10, and Galaxy S).

I also have had the all 4 iPhone models (plus a ton of other phones to compare to) and I can say this a keeper.

Keyboard
The keyboard is really good. I read a few reviews that gave the keyboard an OK but not excellent grade which made me question whether to purchase the Z. After using it for a day or so I found the keyboard to be excellent (almost as good as my Bold 9700).

Sense UI
The Sense UI on the Z is very polished and miles ahead on what was on my Hero. I love the text zoom when finger panning (like on the iphone) which make selecting or correcting text errors very easy. The widgets are great and every thing seems as slick as my iPhone 4 but with much more functionality. HTC did an amazing job here.

CPU/RAM/Overall "Snappiness"
Don't get confused and think a first gen 1GHz snapdragon and second gen 800MHz are the same thing. The architecture is different and it shows. I have no lag anywhere. I was going to over clock but I have yet to have a need to do this. Even the iPhone 4 is a slightly down clocked CPU based on the 1GHz Galaxy S architecture and no one complains about the iPhone 4 as laggy.

Speaker and Sound
Here is where I am tad disappointed. Compared to the Galaxy S, and Milestone (and iPhone 4) the speaker quality is ok but not as good. I also found the in call volume to be a little quiet but nothing near as bad as the X10 call volume (that was brutal).

Camera
Camera is pretty decent. Much better than my Nexus and X10 but not as good as the iPhone 4 or the N8 (the N8 camera simply destroys).

Battery Life
I can't comment on it yet as I have only had the phone for a few days and I am still cycling the battery. I am getting about a day out of it and expect a bit more once it is calibrated.

Build Quality
I am glad they went with a mix of rubber/plastic and metal. A complete metal phone is very difficult to hold on to (aka iPhone 4 and N8). The phone feels solid in the hand, is not that heavy, and is a perfect width.
The hinge is fine-mine is NOT loose at all. It never comes open by accident and I have to press it to snap open. It seems sturdy.

Overall, I give this phone a 9/10. If it had a slightly better speaker and was a tiny bit lighter (and had a physical home button like the Galaxy S) I would give it a 10.

Would I buy it again? You bet I would!
 
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@Blue1k, great summary, here's an addition of a few things of my own:
Speaker: bad. i can handle it, but it's the worst i've had up until now. its not the quality - its the volume.
Earpiece: actually its decent. the problem is that the speaker is located at the right side of the grill, so when people hold the phone in the left hand they think its not loud enough. change the location of the phone near your ear and u'll notice the difference.
Camera : decent, but the 720p isn't good. that's why im not on 720p but 800*480.
Browser : fantastic! it's extremely fast, excellent browser!
 
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do any of you guys use task killer?

@alonzzo2 - what do you mean by volume? is it too loud? or not loud enough?

I don't use a task killer - when i had the galaxy i7500 i read A LOT about android and task managers/killers and decided not to use it. besides, i think that if the android developers thought that we need a task manager they would have supply us with one (that's my assumption).

Regarding the speaker volume - it's not loud enough.
 
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do any of you guys use task killer?

I do not use a task killer. At first, I was a little confused with how Android works. There does not appear to be any way to explicitly stop a program. I have Opera Mini on both Symbian and Android. The Opera on Symbian has a menu item to exit, but the Android version does not. I surmise that programs in Android are designed to not close, but are probably suspended if they do not need to run in the background. If you need to use it again later, if the program is suspended, it doesn't have to spend time loading again.

So far, I do not see the need to actually kill a task. I checked the battery usage stats and it appears that the screen uses most of the power. Apps seem to use very little power and most may not actually be running in the background.
 
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I am glad I bought the Desire Z but I am tempted by the HD. I'm waiting till the NAM version gets released by Telus in the spring. Until then the Z is my main device.

Telus is not getting the desire HD that was a rumor idiot websites put out after www.htcsense.com showed Desire hd when you select Canada. The face is ANY COUNTRY YOU CHOOSE SHOWS DESIRE Z, AND HD because these are the only devices with new htc sense.

I repeat the HD is NOT Coming to Telus.
 
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Telus is not getting the desire HD that was a rumor idiot websites put out after www.htcsense.com showed Desire hd when you select Canada. The face is ANY COUNTRY YOU CHOOSE SHOWS DESIRE Z, AND HD because these are the only devices with new htc sense.

I repeat the HD is NOT Coming to Telus.

How do you know for sure? No one knew that Telus was going to pick up the Desire but they did months after it was originally released. A few Telus reps I have spoken to would like to have this phone badly and hope they can pick it up in the future to compete with Bell. No promises but again that does not mean they are never getting this device.
 
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How do you know for sure? No one knew that Telus was going to pick up the Desire but they did months after it was originally released. A few Telus reps I have spoken to would like to have this phone badly and hope they can pick it up in the future to compete with Bell. No promises but again that does not mean they are never getting this device.

Okay how do you know its coming? People keep saying OH im gonna wait for the Desire hd to come to telus. We have no proof not even an inventory screenshot. And i doubt its coming.
 
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