Hands on with the Desire HD and Desire Z

Historically HTC has adopted new names when it launches new phones. However it is clear that the company now wants to leverage the success of the Desire by using the name for both of its new high end phones.

In London Wednesday the company launched the Desire HD and Desire Z, two different phones with similar names that are destined to end up with two different telcos in Australia.

Desire HD
The Desire HD, which will launch exclusively on Vodafone, is a multimedia focused powerhouse. It has a large 4.3in Capacitive touch LCD screen capable of 480 x 800 (WVGA) resolution, which is noticeably larger than that of the original Desire. It also has an 8mp camera with dual LED flash, which is capable of capturing 720p video. It supports streaming video to DLNA compatible devices, and HTC showed off a HDMI based breakout box for streaming to televisions that don't have DLNA support.

It comes out of the box with the latest version of Android (2.2 aka Froyo), which is a welcome relief in a world where some companies still launch phones with 1.6 and 2.1 with fuzzy promises of upgrades to 2.2 at some point in the future.

During our brief hands on time with the Desire HD there are some quite obvious differences between the Desire HD and the Desire. The first is the screen. While the Desire HD has a noticeably bigger screen, which does look quite good, it just doesn't have the punch of the AMOLED screen used for earlier revisions of the Desire. Unfortunately this comes down to a supply issue, which means that LCD is going to become more rather than less common on smartphones generally.

The Desire HD: noticeably bigger screen, which does look quite good, it just doesn't have the punch of the AMOLED screen used for earlier revisions of the Desire

The interface is quite responsive thanks to the 1GHz processor used. It uses an updated version of Sense, designed to hook into the new HTCsense.com website. We couldn't get much of an idea of battery-life, but as a rough indication one of the demo units that we saw was on about 2/3 battery after being run fairly heavily for half a day.

Desire Z
We also took a look at the Desire Z. This phone will launch exclusively with another telco in Australia, although when asked HTC Asia Pacific vice president Jack Tong would not be drawn on which this would be, instead telling us that the announcement would happen closer to launch.

The most striking thing about the Desire Z is the keyboard. HTC has adopted a hinge that lifts the entire screen into a position where the keyboard is raised and flush with the screen. This eliminates the often annoying habit of the top row of buttons being obscured by the screen on these sorts of phones with hardware keyboards.

The Desire Z is smaller than the Desire HD, with a 3.7in Super LCD 480 x 800 screen. Its multimedia features are less than the HD, with a 5 megapixel camera and 800MHz processor. Like its big brother it comes with Android 2.2 installed, and uses the updated sense interface.

Keyboard users will appreciate HTC's clever hinge design on the Desire Z

John Gillooly travelled to London courtesy of HTC