Of course, the fact that a high-end smartphone can be scored for free on a European carrier should come as no surprise to anyone — but in the case of the Desire Z on Vodafone in the UK, you’ll be looking at a minimum monthly spend of £35 (about $55) on a two-year contract if you don’t want to spend anything upfront, scaling up to £199 ($310) for the phone on a £25 ($39) plan. The specs are the same ones that you’ve come to know and love (or hate) — QWERTY keyboard mounted on a crazy hinge, 5 megapixel camera, 3.7-inch SLCD, and access to HTC’s new cloud-based Sense features — so if that gets the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up, run on down to your local Voda shop now and have at it.
Of course, the fact that a high-end smartphone can be scored for free on a European carrier should come as no surprise to anyone — but in the case of the Desire Z on Vodafone in the UK, you’ll be looking at a minimum monthly spend of £35 (about $55) on a two-year contract if you don’t want to spend anything upfront, scaling up to £199 ($310) for the phone on a £25 ($39) plan. The specs are the same ones that you’ve come to know and love (or hate) — QWERTY keyboard mounted on a crazy hinge, 5 megapixel camera, 3.7-inch SLCD, and access to HTC’s new cloud-based Sense features — so if that gets the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up, run on down to your local Voda shop now and have at it.
HTC’s come a long way since its first ever portrait QWERTY slider phone Blue Angel (O2 xda IIs, Vodafone v1620, Sprint PPC6600, etc.) circa 2004, the legacy of which is carried by the TyTN, Touch Pro, G1, myTouch 3G Slide, and many more sliders albeit in landscape form. The cumulative phone-building expertise leads us to the Desire Z, which is probably better known as the European alter ego of the T-Mobile G2 (which we’ve already reviewed). The difference? As far as hardware goes, the two Androids are practically identical twins; but for software, the AWS-free Desire Z comes tattooed with HTC’s Sense UI, and packs a handful of extra goodies. So will this phone trump its American cousin? Read on to find out.
HTC’s come a long way since its first ever portrait QWERTY slider phone Blue Angel (O2 xda IIs, Vodafone v1620, Sprint PPC6600, etc.) circa 2004, the legacy of which is carried by the TyTN, Touch Pro, G1, myTouch 3G Slide, and many more sliders albeit in landscape form. The cumulative phone-building expertise leads us to the Desire Z, which is probably better known as the European alter ego of the T-Mobile G2 (which we’ve already reviewed). The difference? As far as hardware goes, the two Androids are practically identical twins; but for software, the AWS-free Desire Z comes tattooed with HTC’s Sense UI, and packs a handful of extra goodies. So will this phone trump its American cousin? Read on to find out.
HTC Mecha seems a pretty good name for an Android smartphone – there’s plenty of mech-warrior scope for eye-catching adverts, at least – so it’s a shame Verizon will likely be calling this latest leaked device the DROID Incredible HD. Android Central scored an image of the HTC Mecha with Verizon branding and showing what looks to be a 4G logo on-screen; that would certainly suggest that it’s among the handful of devices the carrier has promised will launch for its fledgling LTE 4G network.
HTC Sense and what looks to be an EVO 4G-scale 4.3-inch display appear to be the order of the day, and early test report leaks are tipping 9Mbps downlink and 5Mbps uplink rates. Verizon’s LTE service is due to go live by the end of the year, but we’re not expecting the DROID Incredible HD until early in 2011.
Having been spotted flirting with the FCC earlier today, the HTC DG H100 Media Link streamer has been confirmed by retailer Clove. Priced at £89.99 ($145), the HTC Media Link hooks up to your TV via the bundled HDMI cable and allows you to stream content via DLNA over WiFi.
Once hooked up, it’s possible to transfer media from your PC or smartphone to the TV, view media from your PC on your device, or even use your device as a controller for the media streaming from the PC to the TV. Some of that functionality will require an HTC device, however, but we’re guessing the more generic DLNA abilities will work cross-platform.
Official availability for the HTC DG H100 Media Link is unknown at this stage, though HTC has previously confirmed that it’s due sometime this quarter. However, retailer HTCDirect is claiming UK stock will arrive on December 10 2010.
HTC are tipped to be developing their own App Store, which would offer not only smartphone software but ebook and emagazine content. According to the Financial Times‘ sources, HTC is already recruiting “content editors” for the online store, with a core Taiwan-based team paving the way for around 100 people spread around the world.
HTC, meanwhile, will only say that it is constantly recruiting “marketers, developers, technical writers and many others” and declined to confirm or deny the leak. Meanwhile there’s talk that HTC’s deal with Kobo – which sees the company’s ebook content accessible through HTC Android smartphones – is more complex than initially believed, and will see the company more closely involved with the expanding HTCSense.com service.
Keen readers of the Financial Times will have been greeted this morning by a nice little bit of insider information regarding HTC’s future software plans. We already knew the phone maker was keen to play a more active role in the softer parts of the smartphone experience it offers, but two new sources have come forward with word that HTC is actively hiring new staff in preparation for setting up its very own app store. The HTCSense.com cloud service that recently launched with the Desire HD and Desire Z Android models in Europe looks like the first step toward that goal, with its HTC Hub area already acting as an app discovery assistant — it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to include an extra section in it for HTC’s own application offerings. That’s not to say that this would be an Android exclusive thing, however, as HTC already boasts a selection of ten apps on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform and it would seem quite logical that it’d want an organized repository where it could sort through all its wares.
The HTC Desire Z is the company’s second new Android smartphone of the season, smaller in chassis and screen than the Desire HD we reviewed last week, but toting a flip-out hardware keyboard in an attempt to clean up in the heavy messaging market. Does this European version of the T-Mobile G2 hit the spot? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Hardware
As we said, if you’ve seen the T-Mobile G2 then you’ll be familiar with the Desire Z hardware. The matte grey and silver handset measures 119 x 60.4 x 14.16 mm, making it a little on the thick side thanks to that hardware keyboard, with a 3.7-inch WVGA Super LCD capacitive touchscreen. Underneath are narrow touch-sensitive buttons for home, menu, back and search, along with an optical joystick that can be pressed as a select button.
On the left hand side there’s a microUSB charge/sync port and a volume rocker, while a dedicated camera shortcut button is on the right, a welcome addition to HTC’s Android range. The power/lock button and 3.5mm headphone jack are on the top edge. On the back is a 5-megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, together with an eye-catching brushed metal battery cover that’s released by a small switch. Underneath is a 1,300mAh battery, SIM card slot and, underneath the battery itself, a microSD card slot. We’d prefer to have had the memory slot more readily accessible.
HTC Desire Z unboxing & hands-on:
Push the left side of the screen, and it lifts and slides across to reveal the Desire Z’s hardware keyboard. This has four rows of keys – the numbers share with the top letter row, and are accessed with an Fn button – with dedicated @, search and tab buttons, along with two shift keys and two user-definable shortcut keys. As you’d expect it’s all backlit.
The keys themselves are reasonable but not the best we’ve encountered on a phone; certainly, they’re not as good as on HTC’s own Touch Pro2, an altogether chunkier handset but which made up for its scale by having a particularly usable ‘board. The Desire Z’s keyboard is better than a first-gen DROID, and there’s a reasonable amount of travel given the shallow key-tray on offer, but they’re still on the cramped side which prevents faster typing.
We were initially concerned by how sturdy HTC’s hinges on the Desire Z might be, though they seem to be wobble free for the moment. More worrying is the minimal spring-loading used: hold the phone by the top half, and you can see the lower section droop away under its own weight. Tilt the phone slightly, and it’ll pop open. Now, the likelihood of you ever trying to carry the Desire Z by just the top or bottom half is probably quite low, but it does mean the handset opens quite easily in a pocket and can get caught, as well as making us wonder about long-term performance.
[Update: HTC tells us that the hinge strength was a conscious choice, and that the Desire Z is designed to be free enough for the phone to be opened with a single finger. The company is confident it won't be a long-term durability issue.]
Inside, the Desire Z has an 800MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 processor paired with 512MB of RAM and a 1.5GB ROM. It obviously lacks a few CPU cycles when compared to the 1GHz processors we’ve been used to seeing recently, but it’s from the silicon company’s latest-gen Snapdragon range and includes the Adreno 205 GPU for improved graphical crunching. We ran Quadrant, an Android benchmarking tool, and the Desire Z scored 1533; that’s less than the G2 manages, but still higher than the 1GHz Nexus One or DROID X on Froyo. Meanwhile there’s quadband GSM/EDGE and dualband (900/2100) UMTS/WCDMA, along with WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, GPS, a digital compass, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor.
Software
As with the HTC Desire HD, the Desire Z runs Android 2.2 Froyo with the latest version of HTC’s Sense interface on top, and support for things like Flash Player 10.1. The software experience for both is the same – we’d recommend reading our Desire HD review for all the details – including integration with the new HTCSense.com online portal. A free service, Sense online allows you to remotely track the Desire Z, access its SMS/MMS messages, lock the phone or make it ring, or even completely wipe it.
Having set up Sense for the Desire HD, we had hopes it might carry across all our linked contacts when we used the same account on the Desire Z. Unfortunately this didn’t prove to be the case; we still had to do the work manually. Froyo supports multiple Gmail and Exchange accounts loaded simultaneously, with push-email for both together with calendar and contacts sync, as well as POP and IMAP, and as ever HTC’s custom apps work well. We were glad of the optical trackpad, too, which makes navigating through text far more straightforward; it’s something we definitely wish HTC had managed to squeeze into the Desire HD as well.
HTC’s on-screen keyboard continues to be one of the best text-entry systems around, and ironically we were faster at some points using it over the physical ‘board. Unfortunately the OSK’s clever auto-correction and auto-punctuation system has mostly been ignored with the physical keys: you can double-press the spacebar to insert a period, but there’s no automatic change from “im” to “I’m”, for instance.
What might frustrate would-be Desire Z owners is the absence of a pure-Android version of the handset. The T-Mobile G2 runs bare Froyo, without any modifications like Sense, which likely means it will get future OS updates quicker than the Desire Z does. Now, we like Sense – and the new online component is great – but we also like to have the choice whether to use it or not.
Multimedia
While the Desire HD proved very capable with multimedia playback, the smaller screen on the Desire Z is somewhat less eye-catching. It’s a decent SLCD panel, with reasonable viewing angles, but we still prefer the zinging colors from AMOLED screens like on Samsung’s Galaxy S family of devices. The video app supports 3GP, 3G2, MP4 and WMV clips, which falls short of what Samsung is offering, but playback is generally solid and sound through headphones is good. Audio, meanwhile, supports AAC, AMR, OGG, M4A, MID, MP3, WAV and WMA formats, and there’s an FM radio which requires a wired headset to use as the antenna.
In addition there’s DLNA streaming using the preloaded Connected Media app: you can choose from the music, photos and video stored on your handset to squirt over WiFi to a networked media player. Unfortunately HTC doesn’t offer an HDMI output on the Desire Z.
Camera
While it lacks megapixels on the Desire HD, the 5-megapixel camera on the Desire Z is still capable of 720p HD video recording. Stills are grainy and look unusually overcast, even when taking in decent daytime lighting; in low-light, the flash suffers from the usual LED malaise of having a particularly narrow sweet-spot outside of which subjects are either overblown or hopelessly under-lit. There’s no front-facing camera, either, which means no video calls or easy self-snaps.
Video is better, looking crisper than the HTC HD7 managed with its 5-megapixel optics and lacking the Windows Phone 7 device’s hunting autofocus. There’s only minor blur, though with no HDMI output you’re left using HTC’s DLNA app or uploading content to YouTube via the usual Android channels if you want to share footage on a bigger screen. In short, HTC still hasn’t addressed criticisms of its camera quality, and the company continues to lag behind rivals like Samsung.
HTC Desire Z 720p video sample:
Phone & Battery
The Desire Z impressed when it comes to phone performance, proving particularly tenacious with a signal in places a Nexus One gave up. Audio quality was decent, and we had no problems pairing various mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets (and using AVCHD buttons on the latter, to control audio playback). Meanwhile the speakerphone was loud, though certainly not the loudest we’d heard.
Battery life was the real surprise, however; with push-email turned on, both WiFi and 3G active, and some browsing, messaging and calls, we managed to make it almost through two days of use before the Desire Z died. Using the GPS and 3G for navigation while mobile did drain things a lot faster, however, but with moderate use this could be one of the first Android handsets not to demand a nightly recharge and yet also having sufficient power to run whatever apps you like.
Wrap-Up
The market for Android smartphones continues to get more crowded, and the bar for what makes a great handset keeps getting higher. That’s great for the consumer, but it does make the Desire Z’s job harder. Hardware keyboards are still rarer among Android devices than their all-touch counterparts, which gives the Desire Z something of a pass along the way, but we’re not 100-percent convinced by the usability of this particular HTC ‘board. It’s good, especially after some practice, but then HTC’s on-screen keyboards are good too and, thanks to the correction features, accurate as well.
Our temptation, then, would be to opt for the HTC Desire HD with its better-quality camera, Sense online support, huge display and great on-screen keyboard. The compromises in bulk and usability involved in getting the Desire Z’s physical QWERTY will likely be too great for most users. If you’re addicted to a hardware ‘board then we’d pick the HTC Desire Z over its DROID 2/MILESTONE 2 counterpart, but there are stronger all-round Android phones on the market today.
The second of HTC’s new flagship Android smartphones has arrived, and just as we put the HTC Desire HD review to bed, the HTC Desire Z has arrived on the test bench. Unlike the HD, the Desire Z makes do with a more mainstream 3.7-inch WVGA touchscreen, but counters any screen shortfall with a flip-out QWERTY keyboard. Full unboxing video and hands-on demo after the cut.
Video after the cut
Where the Desire HD has a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, the Desire Z has Qualcomm’s 800MHz chip; as we’ve seen in the T-Mobile G2, however, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a significant shortfall in performance. Connectivity includes WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, microUSB and quadband GSM/dualband HSPA, plus there’s GPS, an FM radio, and a 3.5mm headphone socket. RAM is 512MB – two-thirds of what the Desire HD offers – and there’s a 1.5GB ROM, along with a microSD card slot hidden underneath the battery.
As for software, the HTC Desire Z runs Android 2.2 Froyo with the latest build of Sense on top: that means the same offline mapping, boosted social network integration and links with HTCSense.com for remote management and access. The keyboard, meanwhile, is a four-row affair with backlit buttons that sit nicely on the clicky side of things, though HTC has combined the top letter and number rows whereas we prefer them to be separated out.
HTC Desire Z unboxing & demo:
So far the Desire Z has been solid, taking out HTC Sense online credentials (as set up on the Desire HD) alongside the regular Gmail and other accounts; however we have had to re-link Sense and Gmail contacts, despite having done that all before on the previous phone. It’s a thicker device in the hand, though obviously shorter and narrower; we have no issues with the outer casing, which feels sturdy, but the hinge might be another matter. There’s very little tension holding it closed: pick the Desire Z up by the top section, and the weight of the lower-half will pull the hinge open.
It’s too early to say whether this is a serious issue or otherwise, and indeed whether the rest of the polished Android experience leaves it a non-issue. We’ll be putting the HTC Desire Z through its paces over the next few days, so expect the full SlashGear review next week!
Of course, the fact that a high-end smartphone can be scored for free on a European carrier should come as no surprise to anyone — but in the case of the Desire Z on Vodafone in the UK, you’ll be looking at a minimum monthly spend of £35 (about $55) on a two-year contract if you don’t want to spend anything upfront, scaling up to £199 ($310) for the phone on a £25 ($39) plan. The specs are the same ones that you’ve come to know and love (or hate) — QWERTY keyboard mounted on a crazy hinge, 5 megapixel camera, 3.7-inch SLCD, and access to HTC’s new cloud-based Sense features — so if that gets the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up, run on down to your local Voda shop now and have at it.
