Everyone called the HTC Desire a Nexus One clone. The contradiction is that for a lot of people, the so‑called clone is actually the more practical phone.
Hardware: Nexus DNA with Small but Real Tweaks
If you’ve seen the Google Nexus One, you’ve basically seen the HTC Desire. Both run a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, ship with Android 2.1 Eclair, and use a 3.7-inch capacitive AMOLED display at WVGA resolution.
HTC packs the Desire into a 119 x 60 x 11.9 mm, 135 g body with a subtle chin, curved edges, and a dark two-tone finish. It’s not as visually distinctive as the HTC Hero, and style-wise HTC clearly left the flair to the Legend, but the build is solid and hand feel is excellent.
Where HTC does diverge from Google is in the controls. The Nexus One’s capacitive keys are replaced with proper hardware buttons (Back, Menu, Home, Search), and the trackball becomes an optical trackpad that also clicks. The buttons are small but have a firm, clear press and avoid the unreliable touch keys that annoyed Nexus users. The trade-off is the tiny trackpad, which doesn’t feel as nice as the old trackball and ends up being mostly optional.
Around the frame you get the usual suspects: a 3.5mm jack and power/lock on top, microUSB and mic at the bottom, and a long volume rocker on the left. The right side is completely bare. Under the soft-touch rear cover sit the 1400 mAh battery, SIM slot, and microSD slot – but you have to remove the battery to swap cards, so no hot-swap.
The 3.7-inch AMOLED is the star indoors: deep blacks, vivid colors, and sharp text at WVGA. Screen responsiveness is excellent thanks to the capacitive panel. Outside, it’s a different story – heavy reflections and relatively weak backlighting make sunlight legibility a definite weak point, especially compared to what Samsung’s Super AMOLED later does on the Galaxy S.
Sense UI on 1GHz: Eclair Done HTC’s Way
HTC doesn’t ship stock Android here. The Desire gets Sense UI on top of Android 2.1, effectively acting as a higher-powered, higher-res sibling to the Legend and an evolution of what started on the Hero.
Sense expands the homescreen from Android’s default three panes to seven, with a thumbnail “helicopter” overview triggered by pressing Home. Navigation is straightforward: three virtual keys at the bottom handle app drawer, phone, and “Add to Home.” The old drag-up menu arrow is gone in favor of simple taps.
Scenes are HTC’s answer to profiles: pre-made sets like Work, Social, Travel, Play, and Clean Slate change wallpapers and widget layouts in one shot. You can’t edit the built-in scenes directly, but you can customize and save your own variants as new scenes. Switching takes a couple of seconds, and while some setups (like Travel without obvious GPS/maps tools) feel oddly chosen, the concept gives more flexibility than the usual single homescreen layout.
Widgets are where Sense leans hard. HTC merges its own widgets and stock Android ones into a unified picker, and many of them ship in multiple styles and sizes – including a dozen different clock looks. Some widgets, like Twitter, even come in functionally different variants (timeline view vs. quick post). Others, like People, Friend Stream, Messages, and Mail, provide deeper interaction than stock, pulling in Facebook and Flickr updates directly into contacts and homescreens.
Performance-wise, the 1GHz Snapdragon and software optimizations keep Sense running quickly. Home navigation, widget scrolling, and general UI work stay smooth, even with lots of data on the microSD card. The only noticeable slowdowns happen when widgets are constantly refreshing online content, which is expected. Benchmarks place the Desire above the Legend and in competitive territory with other early Snapdragon phones like the Xperia X10.
Phone, Messaging, and Apps: Strong Basics, Tight Storage
The Desire’s phonebook is one of HTC’s strengths. Each contact gets multiple tabs: core info, per-contact SMS, per-contact email, Facebook updates, Flickr/Facebook photo albums, and call history. The main People app adds tabs for groups, favorites, a call log, and “online directories” to aggregate profile data. It’s a clear upgrade over stock Android’s simpler list.
Voice quality is good with strong in-ear volume, even without the Nexus One’s secondary noise-canceling mic. Reception is stable, Smart Dialing is integrated into the dialer, and useful sensors are used intelligently: the proximity sensor turns the display off during calls, and flipping the phone face down mutes the ringer.
On the messaging side, SMS and MMS live in threaded conversations with iPhone-style bottom-aligned latest messages. The on-screen QWERTY keyboard works well in both portrait and landscape – key size and sensitivity are fine for day-to-day typing. Drafts now live in a separate Drafts section instead of staying inline with threads, which makes resuming a half-written message less convenient than older HTC Android builds.
Email coverage is thorough. You get the standard Gmail client with conversation view, batch operations, spam reporting, and Android-style Gmail integration, plus HTC’s own Mail app with Exchange ActiveSync, POP/IMAP support, alternative sorting views, and filters for conversations, unread, attachments-only, and VIP groups.
The trade-off is storage. The Desire ships with 512MB of ROM, but nearly 80% is consumed by the OS and preinstalled components, leaving around 120MB free for third-party apps. With Android 2.1 lacking official apps-to-SD and no large internal user storage like the Galaxy S later adds, you hit that 120MB ceiling faster than you’d expect. Most Market apps are small (sub-2MB), but installing lots of them will eventually force you to manage space.
HTC doesn’t offer an official solution here, and while rooting plus hacks can push apps to the memory card, that’s not something every user will pursue or succeed with. For a phone positioned at the high end, the constrained app storage is one of the clearest structural compromises.
Multimedia: Great Audio, Middling Camera, Video Limits
In multimedia, the Desire mostly feels like an upgraded Legend with the same approach scaled up to higher horsepower.
The Gallery (Albums) app auto-collects photos and videos from all storage locations into folder-based sub-galleries, plus hooks into Facebook and Flickr albums. It supports multi-touch pinch zoom and smooth flicking between images, with performance that’s close to what the iPhone offered at the time, even with 5MP photos.
There is an annoyance: every time you reopen the gallery or return from viewing a single image, it reindexes content. With a packed microSD card this re-scan adds noticeable delay. You can batch delete multiple images but can’t batch copy/move them between folders without a separate file manager.
Video playback is basic. The native player is embedded inside the gallery, supports MP4 and 3GP, and handled up to 640×360 @ 30fps MP4 clips smoothly in testing. Out of the box there is no DivX or XviD support. Third-party apps like yxflash can decode many DivX/XviD files, but anything above VGA resolution strains the hardware, and the app itself isn’t free beyond a trial.
HTC has talked about a future firmware update to add native DivX support and 720p video recording, but that wasn’t present in the tested software. As it stands, codec support is limited compared to what rivals like Samsung later bring.
The music player offers the usual library breakdown (Artists, Albums, All Songs, Playlists, Genres, Composers, Purchased). The now playing UI looks clean but doesn’t bring extras like EQ presets or contextual search to YouTube or Google. There’s also an FM radio with RDS and loudspeaker output, plus a bundled one-piece headset and a 3.5mm jack if you want to use your own.
Audio quality, however, is excellent. Lab measurements show the Desire matching the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 extremely closely in frequency response, suggesting similar audio hardware or tuning. HTC appears to drive headphone volume a bit higher while keeping distortion and noise low, giving the Desire one of the best all-round audio showings among its contemporaries.
The 5MP camera with LED flash and autofocus lands the Desire in the same basic class as other high-end Android phones of its generation. The interface, inherited from Android 2.1 and expanded by HTC, exposes settings for ISO, aspect ratio, exposure compensation, color effects, and more. It’s more flexible than older stock Android cameras but still behind feature-heavy camera phones from the same era that offer face or smile detection.
Usability is mixed. Most options are tucked into a slide-out tray on the left of the viewfinder, with only flash and exposure shortcuts exposed on-screen. There’s no dedicated shutter button; you either tap on the display (with touch focus) or click the optical trackpad. The trackpad is single-stage: one press both focuses and captures, with no half-press control.
After replacing an initially poor pre-release unit with a retail device, still image quality ranges from decent to good. Detail and contrast are much improved, and overall results are clearly better than those from the Legend. Noise remains relatively high but acceptable, while a pinkish spot in the center of the frame – similar to the HTC HD2 – can appear on lightly colored scenes.
Video capture is WVGA (800×480) at around 15 fps. Resolution is competitive for that generation of Android hardware, but the low frame rate, limited resolved detail, washed-out colors, and visible compression artifacts drag the experience down. Autofocus is only done before recording starts, with no continuous focusing during capture. Dropping resolution doesn’t meaningfully improve the frame rate or image quality.
For users who care more about photos than video, the Desire is passable. For anyone expecting smooth, high-quality clips or the promised 720p, the current state is clearly underwhelming unless HTC delivers a substantial firmware boost.
Connectivity, Browser, GPS, and Market
On connectivity, the Desire ticks almost every box Android users expect. You get quad-band GSM/EDGE, dual-band 900/2100 MHz 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA, Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR with A2DP, and microUSB 2.0.
USB tethering is built in. Plug the Desire into a PC, choose tethering when prompted, and the phone shares its data connection. HTC also gives an explicit option to block mobile data entirely if you don’t have a plan, which is a simple but important safeguard.
The browser is one of the phone’s strengths. The Android 2.1 browser supports pinch zoom, double-tap zoom, and text reflow, so long articles are actually readable without endless horizontal scrolling. The UI stays mostly out of the way: the address bar is anchored at the top, but you can call it up via the menu without scrolling back; additional options and tab management are tucked behind the menu key.
Bookmarks are presented as thumbnails along with “Most visited” and History lists. On top of that, the Desire ships with Flash support in the browser. Simple Flash games run acceptably, but Flash video is hit-or-miss: YouTube hands off to the dedicated YouTube app (which works fine), while some embedded video sites like Vimeo and Netcafe fail to play.
HTML5 support is present, including the video tag, but in the context of the hardware’s timeframe that’s more of a “future-proofing” checkbox than an everyday win.
For documents, the Desire includes Quickoffice for viewing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files (including Office 2007 formats) and a PDF viewer. Editing in Quickoffice requires a paid upgrade. Quickoffice hooks into Gmail, so you can view attachments easily, though you can’t save them to internal memory; you can attach locally saved files when composing mail.
On navigation, the Desire has an internal GPS receiver that gains a satellite lock in just over two minutes without A‑GPS enabled. Google Maps is preinstalled with standard features like route planning, current location tracking, multi-touch zoom, and Street View. With the digital compass active, Street View allows pseudo “virtual tours” as you pan the phone around.
Google Maps Navigation, the full voice-guided solution, is limited to the US in this software build, and HTC doesn’t preload any alternative offline navigation. Users outside supported regions need to grab a third-party navigation app from the Android Market.
Speaking of the Market, the Desire’s access to the full high-resolution Android Market catalog is intact. Around this period the Market offers roughly 30,000 apps and games with a higher percentage of free titles than rival platforms. The structure is straightforward: featured apps, categories for Applications and Games (with subcategories like Communication, Entertainment), and a Downloads section for installed items and updates. Each listing has a rating, developer description, screenshots, and user comments to help vet quality.
The main limiting factor for app usage, again, isn’t availability but the 120MB cap on internal app storage. You can easily fill it with a combination of heavier games, navigation apps, and tools, even though many utilities are small.
Pricing and Positioning Against Nexus One and Rivals
HTC’s relationship with Google complicates the Desire’s positioning. It is, effectively, a Nexus One with Sense UI and minor hardware tweaks, sold under HTC’s own brand and distributed widely instead of through Google’s limited online store.
From a user perspective, that’s not a bad thing. The Nexus One’s constrained availability means the Desire fills the gap as the globally available version of that formula. Street pricing around 440 euro places it very close to the Nexus One itself, with expectations that the two would converge further over time.
Comparing Desire to Nexus One strictly on differences, the Desire brings: hardware keys instead of capacitive ones, an optical trackpad instead of a trackball, Sense UI instead of mostly stock Android, and Flash browser support. In return, you lose the Nexus One’s dedicated shutter button and noise-cancelling secondary mic, and gain the Sense layer plus HTC’s software extras.
Beyond the Google twin, the Desire’s main Android competition is the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S and Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. The Galaxy S steps in with a 4.0-inch Super AMOLED display, 1GHz CPU, richer codec support, and high-resolution video recording – all of which highlight where the Desire’s screen visibility, video features, and multimedia codec support fall short.
The Xperia X10, running older Android 1.6 Donut at the time and carrying a higher price, answers with an 8MP camera and Snapdragon power, but lags on software version and UI fluidity compared to the Desire’s Sense-on-Eclair combo.
In HTC’s own lineup, the Desire sits above the Hero and Legend by combining their Sense DNA with more RAM, faster CPU, and higher-resolution AMOLED. It’s the company’s flagship Android device of that generation and arguably the most rounded expression of HTC’s Sense philosophy on early Snapdragon hardware.
Whether that makes the Desire the right choice depends on which trade-offs you care about. If you want a 1GHz Android 2.1 phone with a strong UI layer, global availability, excellent audio quality, and good day-to-day performance, the Desire fits. If you’re after best-in-class camera video, expansive app storage, or the brightest outdoor display, there are clear compromises.
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