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.
With the G2 floating around, it’s easy for Americans to forget that a North American flavor of the HTC Desire Z does, in fact, exist — you just need to run north of the border to get it. Bell Mobility has been selling the phone for the past few days, seemingly in its pure HTC Sense-ified form — for better or for worse — meaning you get all the features of the company’s new HTCSense.com offering, map caching, and the like. Pricing clocks in at CAD $129.95 (about $130) on a three-year deal, quickly scaling up to CAD $499.95 ($500) contract-free with options (albeit economically illogical ones) at the one- and two-year levels. Will someone please do us a solid and start importing these stateside en masse? Preferably unlocked?
With the G2 floating around, it’s easy for Americans to forget that a North American flavor of the HTC Desire Z does, in fact, exist — you just need to run north of the border to get it. Bell Mobility has been selling the phone for the past few days, seemingly in its pure HTC Sense-ified form — for better or for worse — meaning you get all the features of the company’s new HTCSense.com offering, map caching, and the like. Pricing clocks in at CAD $129.95 (about $130) on a three-year deal, quickly scaling up to CAD $499.95 ($500) contract-free with options (albeit economically illogical ones) at the one- and two-year levels. Will someone please do us a solid and start importing these stateside en masse? Preferably unlocked?
We’ve been hearing the hushed whispers of an HTC Mecha handset for a few months. Now we’ve got solid evidence of its existence thanks to the HTC’s own HTC Sense web site that lists the Mecha along side the Desire HD and Desire Z when signing up for an account. Unfortunately, the image used for the Mecha (found after the break) appears to be the old Hero handset unless HTC is planning to resurrect that particular industrial design (which we doubt). Now get out of here and hit the source link to try it for yourselves.
Did you know that the word “jumbo” originated from the name of an African elephant famed for being the largest of his kind? HTC will be well familiar with that tag having already rattled off the HD2, EVO 4G, and HD7 in a smartphone-dwarfing 4.3-inch form factor. And while that may not be the largest screen you can have your Android confectionery on today, it’s arguably the upper limit of what we might consider a pocketable device. The HTC Desire HD follows, and seeks to improve upon, its laudable predecessors with an aluminum unibody construction, WVGA (800 x 480) display, 8 megapixel camera with dual LED flash plus 720p video, and a modern 1GHz CPU. That hardware is put at the service of Android’s latest Froyo offering, complemented with an updated Sense that includes a web interface for controlling and discovering your phone remotely. It’s a rich spec sheet, that much is unquestionable, but you’re not just here for tenuous wildlife-related metaphors, you want to know if the whole is equal to, or perhaps even more than, the sum of its parts. Join us after the break for a deeper look at the Desire HD.
Let’s say you’re a mobile phone maker. Now, what’s the first thing you do after raking in $360 million in a quarter? We’re guessing that “launching a new backup / remote wipe portal” wasn’t the first thing that came to mind, but that’s precisely what HTC has done. HTCSense.com was officially introduced alongside the Desire HD and Desire Z in London last month, promising to one day allow registered owners to use the web in order to locate a lost handset, remotely wipe a lost handset and maintain a backup of your contacts, texts, customizations, etc. in the cloud. Looks like “one day” is “today,” with the portal finally opening its doors to registrants. Unfortunately, the only two phones supported at the moment are the two it was introduced alongside of (neither of which are publicly available), so it looks like you’ll spend most of your time at the source link ingesting what it can offer you in the future. But hey, who said a little schooling was a bad thing?
Update: Pocketnow has a walkthrough of the new services (via a ROM hack on the HD2), with a video embedded after the break. We know it’s tough to wait, but at least this glimpse will make it a bit easier, yeah?
We’re not sure exactly what Verizon is up to with these high-end Android phones that aren’t Droids and feature Bing over Google, but it looks like the Fascinate is about to get a friend: BGR just got these snaps of the HTC ADR6325, which appears to be the Merge we’ve heard so much about, and the same dual-mode set we saw at the FCC. Nothing’s confirmed specs-wise except a five megapixel camera, microSD slot, and SIM slot for global roaming, but we’re still pretty sure this thing will basically be the CDMA version of the Desire Z / T-Mobile G2 and feature a Qualcomm MSM7630 processor with 4GB of onboard storage. And then there’s that Bing logo on the homescreen — we don’t know how thoroughly it’s integrated into Sense, but here’s hoping it’s better than what Samsung accomplished with TouchWiz on the Fascinate — hardware this promising shouldn’t be saddled with carrier-wrecked firmware.
We think there might be a miscommunication or a disagreement in semantics here, because HTC CEO Peter Chou has mentioned in an interview with FierceWireless that its ubiquitous Sense UX won’t “initially” appear on its first crop of Windows Phone 7 devices, but that “over time [they] will innovate on top of that to provide some HTC experience.” That seems like odd phrasing considering that we’ve already seen HTC devices in the wild running bits and pieces of Sense on WP7, so we tend to believe Chou might have a more thorough, comprehensive experience in mind — something that Microsoft is pushing back on (for now, anyway) by demanding that UI innovation be sandboxed in some pretty significant ways.
In the same conversation, Chou mentioned that they’ll be releasing an LTE phone in 2011, though he didn’t give any details on design, platform, or carrier. MetroPCS, AT&T, and Verizon will all have fragments of their 4G networks live in 2011, and at least two of those three seem likely candidates to take delivery of some early LTE hardware from the big boys like HTC. For what it’s worth, HTC already delivered the first WiMAX phone in the States — the EVO 4G, of course — so it comes as little surprise that they’d be looking to make a splash with LTE as well.
Feeling like you’re insufficiently saturated with Desire HD info? HTC’s got your back, as usual, with one of its expansive video overviews, setting the specs and features you already know about to a background of soothing music and cutesy visuals. Nothing wrong with that, we say, and it makes for a great sales pitch if you’re trying to convince your significant other of the life-changing benefits of purchasing said handset. Skip past the break, set your eyeballs to 720p mode, and enjoy the show.
