What is the general consensus on the HTC Desite - Good or Bad

[TheTrueSpin]

It is very hard to get an idea of how liked a phone is on any forum as the only people that tend to post are the people with problems. This forum is literally littered with hundreds of problems which, for a potential buyer, are quite scary.

The most scary problems are the dust under screen discussion and the issues surrounding speaker volume. However, a recent thread entitled "who has had no problems with their HTC Desire" seemed to prompt quite a few positive responses.

So, what is the general consensus on this phone... does it have more problems than other phones or is it about the same? I think the OS rocks but I am not certain about the build quality of this product.

 

[CarsnGadgets]

the build quality seems very good apart from the fact that you may, if your very unlucky get some dust in the screen. Just be careful with the phone.

the speaker isnt the best, but i've heard far worse, and it does a perfectly fine job as far as i've seen.

Its good points far exceed its bad points and I really like the handset so far.
when we get android 2.2 soon it will be even better, faster and capable.

I had an iPhone 3g for 2 years before the Desire and dont regret changing at all.

like you said, forums are places that tend to attract people moaning about problems, not the thousands of happy customers.

 

[mr.hachi]

I love it, I'm sat here still playing with it after having it for nearly 3 weeks and still find something new everyday to do with it.

Speaker is fine for notifications, if you want to watch videos or play music the headphones that come with it are rather good (and actually fit in you ear and don't fall out like most)

It's a lot smaller than I actually thought it was going to be. The screen looks amazing and will make anyone go wow when they look at it and especially if you have the HTC livewallpaper on with all the colourful bubbles.

The only thing that annoyed me was the HTC email client which seemed to have a bug and wouldn't release the space in the memory so I had to do a factory reset and now use k-9 email, which IMO isn't really as good as a straight forward client, but you can customise it more.

I tried many browsers from the market but ended up going back to the built in one which works just fine and is very fast.

 

[trick202]

I've only had mine for a few days, but so far it seems OK. I still have an iPhone 3gs, but I am committed to giving Android another chance after the Hero mess.

I will be happier when I have a Zagg screenie on it, as I'm hoping this will make the screen a little less nervous. I'm also hoping that 2.2 will speed things up a bit (the OS is nowhere near as fluid or intuitive as the iPhone OS). The build quality is really great to be honest.
I'm reserving judgement on the battery at the moment as I'm still breaking her in

My advice? Go for it. If you hate it, they're still in enough demand for you to get your money back if you sell it. I'm happy so far though.

 

[celticone]

Gets 3 thumbs up from me.

I can't compare it to an iPhone or other smartphones as I came from an LG non smart phone but have had limited use of blackberry and apple before, but am loving the Desire.

No problem with battery life, goes on airplane mode every night and battery last 2 days, but not going crazy on it yet. This weekend it will be getting hammered so will have a better idea.

Applied the Martin Fields screen protector (doddle no bubbles) so less concerned now with getting drunk and scratching it, build is great but the screen just looks so nice that you worry about scratches (hopefully not anymore)

 

[nx1977]

There are and have been other similar threads with almost all of us declaring our love for this great phone.

 

[lekky]

Good or bad? You missed Awesome.

Best phone available in the UK right now.

 

[purplepixie26]

I am loving the phone, had it 3 weeks and im still finding new things, constantly changing bits around - and thats the great thing, its so easy to personalise the phone and get what you want out of it. Normally "new phone" love is gone within the first week for me but its still going strong and I like showing the phone off too. Even the iphone lovers I know are liking it.

 

[Niir]

its so good and user friendly ive recomended my technophobe mum to get one =D

 

[billy1561]

It's a superb piece of technology. Far and away the best phone i have had in ten years. The only real gripe i have had is the ringer volume is not really loud enough and as i work in a noisy environment i miss loads of calls.
Not had any problems with dust and i do work in a very dusty place! But it is kept in a pouch for 99% of the time.
Everyone who has asked me about it has been impressed so yes it's a good phone.
Oh and the battery lasts about 2 days with light use and a full day with heavy use.

 

[Ghâshûl]

I love it!

 

[Degudodger]

I have had mine now for a little over three weeks and love it , just wish the battery would last longer!

 

[nicksdarkroom]

I love mine to bits, yes I've had some issues but generally having moved from an ipod touch and blackberry combination to do everything in one handset its amazing and like a few people here have said after having it for a number of weeks now I'm still finding new stuff every day. I got mind pay as you go which was hideously expensive but so worth it. So my advice is get your hand in your pocket and buy one!

 

[paulcooper]

Would like to have had a rubber bung to place in the headphone socket, it's so clogged up with fluff and dust it's unreal, it's in my jeans pocket all day from 07:00am right through to 02:00am - yes i have the times right!

other than that for what it does I cannot complain about it at all.

 

[oatikodi]

Without doubt the best 'phone' I've had (except that I'm using it as a internet connected computer- browsing, sharing photos, using gesture search, syncing to google mail, photos, docs, games, news, music, podcasts, video... and occasionally making phone calls).

It could be better (battery, speaker, and it does get surprisingly hot after a while). However, it's fantastic for what I need. Now I need a larger screen, which is visible out doors in sunlight!

 

[RobbM]

It can do almost limitless amounts of stuff, things that a pc cant do as quickly or as smoothly. It must be the best phone on the market imo. Get one, you wont regret it! Think of what you usually do on a day to day basis on your pc, the phone can do it, albeit on a smaller screen. Sure the battery could be a bit better, but i hardly think its useless, just use some common sense and its fine. IE if you expect to be using it more than usual, carry an emergency / car charger.

 

[austrooper]

I have had mine for about a week. All I can say is that I get the feeling Google and HTC sat around figuring out all of the iphones shortcummings, then created a phone and then blew the iphone out of the water. After using this phone my iphone feels like a kids toy, even the one button down the bottom now when I look at it annoys me.



Cheers

 

[azz]

This phone is truly amazing. I came from a Nokia symbian phone and was a big fanboy but this phone blew me away, my mates have iPhone and are dead jealous. If u want my advice... GET IT!

 

[trick202]

I've had mine for almost a week now. I am starting to enjoy it, but although I have added everything I need, the implementation/execution is lacking in most areas. It does everything I need it to, and more - just not very well in most cases.

For me though, part of the fun is seeing the various elements of the OS improve. I like the camera and video camera. The screen is nice (although you have to turn it right down as part of the battery conservation sketch, and it is terrible outside). Gmail label support is great, but no copy and paste from messages? That's a joke, and the Android crowd took enough pleasure in slating apple for it when they didn't have c&p. The music player is poor, and google listen should integrate into it for podcasting.

The hardware is great, really great - but the OS is still way behind. Kinetics are poor, and even apps created by google don't have any sort of synergy or 'brand' feel.

Overall - I'm quite happy. I certainly wouldn't say it's earth-shattering, or that it blows anything else out of the water. You won't be disappointed if you get one - just be prepared to tinker.

 

[wellibob]

Copy text/paste on messages is on Handcent, default mail app is a bit boring, Handcent is wonderful, once you get past the shit loads of options !

 

[trick202]

I was talking about the gmail app. There's no C&P in there. It's a major flaw for an email app.

 

[delinear]

Definitely an excellent phone. All phones will have pros and cons, and this is no exception (yes the speaker isn't great, it's fine for calls, I use headphones for everything else so I'm more than happy to compromise here, YMMV - no issues with dust so far, build quality seems great apart from the battery cover which I always feel like I might break when removing, so I try not to!) but certainly for me the pros far outweigh the cons. Froyo will make this even more of a no-brainer (as not being able to install apps to the SD card is one of the few cons at the moment).

A guy in the office was raving to me on friday about jailbreaking his iPhone and everything he pointed out that was great about it (file system control, individual controls to enable/disable WiFi/BT/GPS/Mobile, etc) I realised was something the Desire pretty much does straight out of the box, or with a free app download, with no need to invalidate my warranty, which made me feel even happier with my purchase.

 

[mikebell]

The Desire is a great phone, but I have to say that its software is not 100% reliable. For example, *twice* now, my phone has got its alert/alarm sounds all scrambled, which has required reconfiguration. I'd say it's quite an achievement for the phone that when I downloaded an album onto the memory card, my alarm the next morning started playing one of the tracks from that album instead of its regular tune. I'm a programmer myself and that would actually be quite a trick to pull off intentionally! Good job it wasn't that Ian Dury track that begins with the shouted vocals "A**e Holes, B*******, F***ing C***s and Pr***s!".

Slight niggle: It's easy to get at the "privacy" settings, but the options there are woefully inadequate. For example, did it occur to nobody at HTC that when you demonstrate the lovely browser in this phone to someone, a tap of the search button shows a list of your previous searches - with no apparent way of clearing it? Why can't it be cleared and why is this not a Privacy matter?

Another caveat on the privacy front is that this phone is heavily wedded to Google in the way that it operates. By default, if you have a Google account, every web search that you make will be recorded by Google. Not anonymously, but recorded specifically against your account. If someone gets hold of your account details they can login to the Google website and get a lovely list of all the things you searched for. Did you know that? No, I thought not. Log into your account and turn that baby off to get rid of that "feature" if that kind of thing bothers you. Why is this turned on by default and why is it not a Privacy matter?

 

[trick202]

I'm sure they only did it by accident - in the same way they recorded the WiFi details from the streetview car

"don't be evil" should be replaced with "it wasn't us"

 

[geemacd]

by far and away the best phone I have ever owned !!!!