The HTC Desire HD is the big-screen Android flagship you probably remember for its size, not its camera.
Back when 4.3-inch displays were considered outrageous and Android 2.2 Froyo was “latest and greatest,” HTC shipped the Desire HD as its no-compromise slab for people who wanted the biggest screen, fastest chip, and newest software possible. Strip away the nostalgia and the marketing, though, and you’re left with a phone that nails some fundamentals while clearly missing on others.
Hardware: Huge Screen, Heavy Body, Mixed Execution
The Desire HD is built around a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen with WVGA resolution. For its time, that was a massive panel, and it still defined how the device feels: big, wide, and noticeably heavy. At 123 x 68 x 11.8 mm and 164 g, this was never pretending to be compact, but HTC’s relatively thin profile and tight front bezels kept it just on the manageable side.
HTC went with an aluminum unibody, clearly borrowing the feel and proportions from the original Desire and the Windows Mobile-based HD2. The result is a phone that feels dense and durable in hand, with a smudge-resistant finish that offers excellent grip. The front is almost entirely glass; four capacitive Android keys sit below the display, with no trackpad, and the earpiece plus sensors tucked up top.
That solid impression falls apart slightly when you flip the phone over. Plastic battery and SIM/microSD doors interrupt the metal shell, and they don’t fit flush. You get visible gaps around both covers and around the LED flash housing. They’re also hard to open, and opening the side battery door instantly kills the phone because the battery is not locked in place at all.
The layout is otherwise straightforward: volume rocker on the left, power/lock up top, and a cluster of microUSB, mic, and 3.5 mm jack on the bottom edge. There’s no dedicated camera shutter key, despite the phone pushing its 8MP shooter as a major feature.
Display: Big, Bright Enough, Clearly Behind AMOLED and Retina
HTC ditched AMOLED and went LCD for the Desire HD’s 4.3-inch panel. In isolation, it’s fine: capacitive response is excellent, touch is precise, and WVGA resolution still makes text and UI elements readable. Viewing angles are decent, and sunlight legibility is better than a lot of older Android hardware.
The issue is contrast. Blacks are shallow and overall contrast trails both Samsung’s Super AMOLED and Apple’s Retina-class IPS panels of the same era. Put the Desire HD next to a Galaxy S or iPhone 4 and it loses every time on depth, vibrancy, and off-axis performance.
If you’re watching video or reading long-form text alone, it’s a comfortable experience mainly because of the sheer size of the panel. But compared directly to the best displays of its generation, the Desire HD screen is clearly a tier down.
Performance, Sense UI, and HTCSense.com
Under the hood, HTC uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8255 at 1GHz, built on a 45nm process. Paired with Froyo (Android 2.2) and HTC’s latest Sense, it delivers exactly the kind of bump you’d expect over the original Desire and the slightly slower Desire Z. Benchmarks scale pretty much linearly with clock speed, and Froyo’s JIT-boosted Dalvik VM means the UI feels quick for its time.
HTC’s Sense layer debuts a richer, more integrated experience here. You still get seven homescreens, Leap view (pinch to zoom out to all panels), and Scenes for swapping between home layouts (Work, Social, Travel, etc.). Sense piles on widgets for weather, social feeds, quick settings, and more, with many widgets offering multiple layouts and sizes. There are a dozen clock styles alone.
The notification shade gains a recent apps section that doubles as a task switcher, while the traditional long-press Home view remains. Rather than quick toggles for radios in the shade, HTC leans on full-screen widgets for Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and other settings.
On the services side, the Desire HD ties into HTCSense.com. From a browser, you can locate your phone, ring it, lock or wipe it, forward calls and messages, view and send SMS/MMS, and browse recommended apps which later show up in HTC Likes on the phone. The online interface is heavy and sluggish in some desktop browsers, but it’s one of the earliest examples of a manufacturer offering a full remote-services portal for Android.
Fast boot is another Sense trick: rather than always performing a cold start, the phone uses a suspend/hibernate-like state to resume in seconds when you power it back on—unless you’ve pulled the battery. It’s fast, but confusing the first time because the phone doesn’t start booting until you release the power key.
Phone, Messaging, and Social Integration
HTC’s “all-knowing” People app pulls everything into one place: standard contact fields, SMS history, call logs, emails, Facebook status updates, and Facebook/Flickr photo albums are all tabbed under each contact. Contacts can be linked to Facebook for richer profiles, and there’s a Blocked Callers utility for basic call filtering.
Smart dialing in the phone app works well, and accelerometer-based tricks—face-down to mute, face-down during a call to trigger speakerphone, quiet ring on pickup, and pocket mode louder ringing—are all enabled. In-call quality is described as crisp and loud, with solid signal reception.
SMS/MMS is threaded, with contact photos and an iPhone-like layout. The on-screen QWERTY benefits heavily from the 4.3-inch screen: portrait typing is comfortable, while landscape gives you huge keys but eats half the vertical space. The messaging app auto-converts to MMS when you attach images or audio.
Email is split between the stock Gmail client and HTC’s own Mail app. Gmail handles multiple accounts with its typical threaded view and batch operations. HTC Mail merges different providers into a unified inbox with filters (unread, attachments-only, flagged, invitations) and color-coded accounts. POP/IMAP and ActiveSync accounts are supported and common providers auto-configure.
Multimedia: Good Player Stack, Weak Audio Output
HTC’s Albums app finds photos and videos across internal and external storage, grouping them into folder-based sub-albums. It also integrates with Facebook and Flickr, plus DLNA servers on your network through Connected Media. Multi-touch pinch to zoom, double-tap to 100%, and smooth swipe navigation make gallery usage straightforward.
Sharing hooks are extensive: Bluetooth, email, MMS, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and YouTube for video. Basic edits—simple effects and adjustments—are available, but anything heavy still needs a PC or a third-party app.
The video player can be launched from the Gallery’s All videos view or a dedicated shortcut. It supports 720p MP4 playback without trouble and can handle standard-definition DivX/XviD at reasonable bitrates. Some high-res XviD material and 720p XviD clips show audio and playback issues, which is inconsistent with the Desire Z’s better behavior on similar files. Subtitles aren’t supported.
The music player organizes tracks by artist, album, all songs, playlists, and integrates DLNA through Connected Media. Now Playing uses a Cover Flow-style interface. Dolby Mobile and SRS audio enhancements are on board, and once you plug in headphones you can tweak EQ profiles.
Despite that software, measured audio quality is underwhelming. Output into an active external amp is acceptable aside from below-average intermodulation distortion. With headphones connected, stereo crosstalk degrades badly—close to mono-like levels—and intermodulation distortion worsens as well. Overall loudness is modest, leaving the Desire HD clearly behind expectations for a flagship-level device.
There’s also an FM radio with RDS and loudspeaker support. It auto-scans for stations but takes several seconds to start each time.
Camera and Video: Big Specs, Mediocre Results
On paper, the Desire HD camera is flagship-grade for its era: 8MP sensor (3264 x 2448), dual-LED flash, and 720p video recording at 25fps. The camera UI is new for HTC, with most controls on the right side of the viewfinder, a virtual zoom slider on the left, and an option to crop the preview to fill the 16:9 display.
Features include touch focus, face detection, continuous autofocus, and geo-tagging. Continuous AF is important given there’s no dedicated shutter key and no classic half-press behavior. Point the camera and it continuously refocuses as you reframe, then you tap the on-screen shutter when ready.
HTC also adds real-time effects: traditional color filters plus more experimental ones like Warp and Depth of Field, which let you drag a control point around and see the result instantly. Depth of Field will blur everything outside a configurable circular region. Face detection can be enabled in self-portrait mode as well, with options for one or two faces.
Image quality, however, doesn’t match the marketing. The reviewed unit showed a lens defect smudging the left side of frames, but even ignoring that, the phone sits behind the best 8MP shooters of its generation. Detail is decent, but aggressive sharpening introduces artifacts and enhanced noise edges. It’s serviceable for casual shots but doesn’t challenge dedicated camera leaders.
Video is more disappointing. 720p clips are captured in 3GP format with visible compression noise—especially in skies—and interpolation artifacts. Frame rate is unstable and noticeably stuttery. Autofocus locks before recording and doesn’t adjust during capture, though pre-focus performance is fine, even close-up.
Physically, the camera module is also exposed. The lens ring protrudes slightly, making it a natural resting point for your index finger in calls and a high-wear surface on tables. The phone ships without a pouch, and reviewers observed the dark-painted metal around the lens scratching just from normal use on a desk.
Connectivity, Browsing, Navigation, and Apps
On the radio side, the Desire HD checks almost every box for its time: quad-band GSM/EDGE, dual-band 3G with HSPA (14.4 Mbps down, 5.76 Mbps up), Wi‑Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, and built-in GPS. DLNA is supported both as a client and a server for photos, video, and music.
USB connectivity offers several modes: Charge only, Disk drive (mass storage for microSD), HTC Sync, USB tethering (modem), and Internet pass-through, which uses your PC’s connection on the phone. There’s also a Portable Hotspot feature based on Android 2.2’s Wi‑Fi tethering but expanded to support 1–8 clients and more control over allowed devices and security (WEP/WPA/WPA2) plus idle timeout.
The Froyo browser benefits massively from the 4.3-inch panel. UI chrome is minimal—just an address bar and refresh; everything hides as you pan and zoom. Double-tap zoom and text reflow make desktop sites readable without constant horizontal scrolling. Multiple tabs are managed as 3D cards, and a pinch-out gesture jumps straight to the tab overview.
Flash 10.1 support means YouTube, embedded video players, and many Flash-based games on sites like Kongregate are actually usable. Combined with HTML5 support, the Desire HD browser offers one of the most capable web experiences of its generation.
Navigation is handled by both Google Maps and HTC Locations. Google Maps brings the usual features—route planning, POI search, Street View and, in supported regions, full voice-guided navigation. However, it requires an active data connection to calculate routes.
HTC Locations, built in collaboration with TomTom for map data and Route66 for software, allows you to download country maps for offline use and calculate routes without a network connection. Voice guidance is a paid extra, but even with just on-screen instructions, offline routing is a major advantage for travel. Locations supports 2D and 3D views, pinch zoom, compass mode, POIs, 3D buildings, and integrates Footprints for saved locations.
Organizer tools are extensive: a capable calendar with multiple views and reminders, Quickoffice with edit support for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (with more formatting control than some contemporary platforms), a PDF viewer, calculator with scientific mode, alarms, desk clock, world clock, stocks, voice recorder, and an LED flashlight app.
Media and reading are covered by SoundHound for music recognition, a Kobo-powered Reader app with several preloaded classics and note/highlight support, and the ability to buy more books. Limitations are obvious by modern standards—no easy sideloading of your own ePub or classic texts, limited customization, and bright white backgrounds—but it was still a full reading environment out of the box.
The Android Market on Froyo offers 100,000+ apps, browser-based categories, and search. HTC layers HTC Likes on top, surfacing featured and popular Market apps with HTC-curated reviews and a social layer for comments and recommendations. HTC Hub, meanwhile, is a customization store for widgets, wallpapers, scenes, skins, and sound sets.
Battery Life and Real-World Trade-Offs
Powering all of this is a 1230 mAh removable battery, rated for up to 420 hours of 3G standby and about 5.5 hours of 3G talk time. On a phone with a 4.3-inch LCD, 1GHz Snapdragon, HSPA, and Wi‑Fi hotspot capability, that’s an obvious stress point. HTC’s shift to a 45nm SoC helps a bit versus older designs, but not enough to offset the screen’s draw in heavy use.
Realistically, the Desire HD is tailored to users who value big-screen browsing, social integration, navigation, and Sense features over camera excellence, battery endurance, and audio fidelity. It’s a spec-heavy, multimedia-friendly device with a few clear blind spots.
The design shows both HTC’s strengths—aluminum bodywork, deep UI integration, powerful connectivity—and its weaknesses: subpar camera tuning, inconsistent multimedia performance, and some questionable hardware choices around covers and lens protection.
If you approach the Desire HD as a big, fast, well-connected Android slab first and a camera or audio device second, it makes sense even in hindsight. As a balanced all-rounder, it never quite gets there.
Check back soon as this story develops.