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Review of HTC Desire As Alternative To iPhone
Andrew Smith writes "My search for an alternative to the iPhone has been long and frustrating. On paper, the HTC Desire is the first serious challenger to the iPhone's reign as king of phones. But how does it compare in use? There is much good and much bad. (This review is primarily for UK readers as HTC's new handset, the Incredible, will not be available [in the UK].)"
...however, take a peek at the N900. The screen is way better than a 3GS, Skype & IM integrate seamlessly, and there is no sleazy attempts to keep you from doing anything with your phone. Meamo 5 may be only, say, 75% done, but it's better than only being able to use 50% of the phone!
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
Just RTFA.
>Many functions require a press of the menu button to bring up a list of
>options, whereas on the iPhone there would be a button on the screen.
>This extra step makes the Desire feel a little cumbersome.
The thing is, on the Desire you have a widget for almost everything, so you don't even need to open the application. It's just there. You just need to navigate to the correct home screen.
As I understand it on the iPhone you must load each application, and can only open one at a time. Which is more cumbersome than hitting the menu key occasionally to exit apps.
I also see no mention of the fantastic friends-list. It combines all your contacts from all sources. You can group them. Then you can put a group of contacts on one of your screens. It grabs avatars from gmail/facebook for your contacts, and that's what you can see on the contacts screen. It's useful and way more practical than any 'address book' feature I've seen in other phones.
>Sound quality during calls is noticeably worse than the iPhone. Both
>the earpiece and the speaker produce a feeble, tinny sound with a
>background hiss.
Sound on mine is fine. It's not as good as a good GSM, but then neither is the iPhone. Don't see any hissing. Speakers are tinny, but all mobile speakers are tinny. You'd not play music with it, just as you'd not play music with any mobile speaker.
> Battery life is appalling. With moderate use I have to charge the Desire
> twice each day. The phone loses around a fifth of its charge just sitting
> on the bedside table overnight.
I get a little over a day out of mine, with everything turned on to max and whilst playing with apps for several hours. Apparently you can improve this considerably if you turn the polling down and don't leave hefy apps open all the time, but to be honest I prefer having the bells and whistles..
Review of HTC Desire as alternative to Apple iPhone
My search for an alternative to Apple’s iPhone has been long and frustrating.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve walked out of a highstreet phone shop, disappointed by devices that promised so much but turned out to be flimsy toys with sluggish software and unresponsive touchscreens.
Anyone who has similarly quested an escape from Apple’s grasp will know my pain!
The problem, you see, is that the iPhone is close to perfect. It feels solid, it looks pretty, and its screen responds to the slightest gesture.
But it is hobbled by Apple’s super-tight approval process that, for example, blocked Pulitzer Prize-winning work by satirist Mark Fiore, and kept customers waiting an astonishing 20 days for the popular Opera web browser to be allowed on to the device.
(Fiore’s work was eventually approved after much public outcry, while Opera rocketed to the top of the iPhone app chart with more than one million downloads in 48 hours.)
The latest, and most enticing alternative to the iPhone comes in the form of the Desire by Taiwanese mobile phone specialist HTC.
With HTC’s announcement on Friday that its next handset, the Incredible, will not be launched in the UK — and presumably not on the Continent either — it is likely that the Desire will remain as the iPhone’s main European rival for some considerable time.
Hyped as the world’s first superphone, the Desire is fast, beautiful, and its touchscreen is every bit as tactile and responsive as that on Apple’s handset.
At the heart of the Desire is Google’s Android operating system so it is near-infinitely customisable.
It is also out-of-stock across much of the UK after delivery flights were grounded by the volcanic ash cloud.
On paper, the Desire is the first serious challenger to the iPhone’s reign as king of phones. But how does it compare in use?
Red faces
The failings of the Desire hit you within minutes of first using it.
Its screen is bright and colourful indoors, but almost unusable in sunlight. This severely hampers all aspects of the phone, from sending texts to web browsing, to taking photos.
The touchscreen intermittently remains active during phone calls and it’s too easy to press the on-screen buttons with your ear. I’ve accidentally hung up on people dozens of times.
Sound quality during calls is noticeably worse than the iPhone. Both the earpiece and the speaker produce a feeble, tinny sound with a background hiss.
Used indoors, the Desire’s vivid screen is great for most apps, but when viewing photos or web sites you realise that the screen is severely over-saturated. People’s faces become beetroot red.
Open Android
Web browsing is a joy. Pages render quickly and accurately.
When you zoom in on a web page using the familiar un-pinch gesture, the Desire neatly re-formats text to your screen width for easy reading.
Built-in Google chat is a surprise boon, offering a free and instantaneous alternative to text messaging between friends.
The phone is advertised as a hub-in-your-pocket for social networking, yet support for Facebook and Twitter is incomplete and unreliable, at times missing entire blocks of messages.
Thanks to the open nature of the Android operating system, there is a myriad of alternative apps to replace the standard ones.
Antiquated list-style text messaging is easily upgraded to a free iPhone-style app with familiar speech bubble conversations.
There are superb free apps for Twitter, note taking, reading news feeds, and almost anything else you may want to do with a phone. Facebook apps are thin on the ground and quite poor, although a full-featured official Facebook client is persistently rumoured to
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Simple, for power users at least these that travel abroad (and most do at least for a couple of weeks per year), the first thing is how easy it's to change SIMs.
In most (at least European) countries you can get something at least vaguely acceptable (especially for data access) as a prepaid SIM. Data roaming on the other hand is practically never acceptable for usage on smartphone.
For this let's compare the iPhone with the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1.
First difference, the T-Mobile G1 is available as HTC Dream without lock. OTOH, most people in both cases will probably have gotten the simlocked version.
1.) unlocking experience on the iPhone: 2 days wasted trying to get a jail break going. 3rd day included a visit to a seedy 3rd party phone shop that advertised jailbreaking iPhones. Always in danger of undoing it all via iTunes that persistently tries to offer an upgrade for the phone.
2.) checked that the G1 is really simlocked, bought a 20 unlock code online, used it with my SIM of choice the same afternoon in the office.
Actually, both events happened some months ago, but I cannot remember the details of item 2 (as if the G1 was really locked), while item 1 makes me shudder. (Actually it's as bad that the iPhone got a non-smartphone assigned to cover wheneever the iPhone decides to go dead). OTOH, the G1 unlock did happen when the phone was very recent on the market, while the iPhone 3G jailbreak happened when the 3GS has been longer on the market than the G1 mentioned. And I'm still unclear how jailbreakable the 3GS are.
Next important item on a frequent travelers (that's what I admit is not exactly critical to the majority, but it's an important item about who controls the device that I own) is sharing Internet access. Obviously, a smartphone cannot manage to fill completely an UMTS uplink, so there is no drawback in sharing it's connectivity.
1.) the iPhone started to work as a tether after some months, basically after a couple of upgrades and the jailbreak. It offers USB Windows-only (perhaps Mac too?) tethering and standard PAN Bluetooth networking.
2.) the G1 offers TCP forwarding tethering via USB and after rooting, it offers a standard NAT-ing Linux kernel based router via Bluetooth or WLAN. The USB based tethering I was capable to use easily enough on day 1 to establish a full VPN (albeit TCP based) connection from my laptop. In practice the standard PAN Bluetooth networking is nicest for me personally, but everyone has probably his own favorite.
So I do not think that the iPhone rules the "total experience dept", as it's a total fail on two important items (one of general interest, even if they do not know, but they will when they go on their next holiday), so it's not even in the running for a phone here. (Ah, I learned yesterday why my wife got the iPhone 3G last year, "it was the cheapest colorful toy for our daughter that we could get back then easily and quickly", and "yeah that Motorola Droid looks cool")
> and a lot stay open, only closing when you use a third party task killer...
Yeah, a lot of people task ram and resources running third party task killers which server no purpose at all, given the design of Android. All apps on the Android are candidates for closure if memory is required. It's unlikely to happen to an app you're using *now* because it's given a high priority, but if you click `home` or `back` on an app then it might techinically be `running` but not necessarily consuming any resources.
Most people are ignorant of this, hence the confusion. Take a little time to read about how Android works before spouting nonsense.
To be honest, as a Desire user, I think this review is overly harsh.
While I do agree with the screen complaints (the OLED screen is all but unviewable in direct sunlight) and the battery life isn't great (although I find it'll last the day with moderately heavy use (and thats before dicking around with sync settings and other various battery-improving tweaks)), the other complaints I diagree with - for example I much prefer the chat system on the Desire to the bubble-style conversations of the iPhone although obviously other people will prefer things the other way (and they can install Handcent or one of the myriad other progams that will bring that functionality.
He complains that on the iPhone there is a button to bring up the menu for any given app - this is true, but there is no guarentee it is in the same place or clearely labelled on each program - with the Desire you always go to the same place allowing for a more consistent experience. Personally I find that the phone has just the right number of buttons, even if it is a few more than the holy iPhone (home, menu, back, search and then power and volume keys
The standard keyboard is a bit tricky to use in portrait mode due to key size (especially for me - I'm 6'5 and fairly stocky) however what it does offer is *choice* - quite apart from the landscape mode keyboard (which I believe iPhone now allows globally?) there are two other portrait keyboards you can use instead - compact QWERTY (each key has two letters as with some blackberries) and then a Phone keypad. One feature that impressed me is that if you have accidentally added misspellings to the dictionary (which I have done more than once) you can delete words individually rather than just resetting the user dictionary (which is certainly what you used to have to do with the iPhone, but I must admit my info could be out of date here.
I do not see any of the complaintes about the sound quality of the phone - the earpiece is typical smartphone (which is to say good enough but easily beaten by the old dedicated phone handsets) and the speaker is pretty loud. Of course you'd never want to listen to music with it, but its good enough for spoken word stuff (audiobooks and stand-up comedy in my case).
I don't agree with his complaints about the trackpad either, although to be fair I've not tried to use it with wet fingers so I can't comment on that, however I have seen no unusual behaviour with it either (and to be honest I don't use the track pad much anyway, It's served more use as a camera shutter button than it as as a navigation device - while its nice to have the choice I find the touchscreen is just much easier.
To be fair there are some things that do annoy me with the phone, but its all minor things - for example in the media player I would like that in the media player it was possible to navigate back up the tree, but thats not always an option (for example if you pick a track from 'first principles' (ie fire up app, select artist then album then track) you can do it, but if you just tap on the media player widget it takes you to the currently selected track but if you want to change you have to navigate from those first principles again (with the exception of pickig a different track from the same album.) but its a pretty minor complaint, and the other things that annoy me are all little things as well.
One thing that is an issue currently is that a lot of pay-for apps are as yet unupdated for Android 2.1 and are just not there in the app store, which is really irritating to be in a position to download say a 'free' (whether ad-supported or somehow limited) version, want to buy the complete version and its just not there. Lack of Google Earth is particularly annoying.
You claim that the iPhone (in your opinion) is worse than Android, and yet give no reasons why you feel that way.
Off the top of my head (I have both):
You may not care, but many people do. And these aren't just obscure geek-issues.
The interface on the Android is VERY similar to the iPhone. The only thing the Android base experience is missing is a bit of polish on the interface widgets, and if you get an HTC phone they've replaced those as well. There's certainly no difference in the way they "hide" the filesystem, or any other major paradigm differences from the iPhone. The difference is, if you're a geek and WANT to mess with those, you're able to.
There are also several 3rd party launcher replacements available on the app store that let you swap out the home screen if you want a different experience. Try doing THAT on an iPhone. Or replacing the dialer, or the photo picker. Apple is fine if you want to do things exactly the way they've accounted for. Thing is, that's not necessary to get a consistent out-of-the-box experience. The same is true of any Android phone right when you open it, but there you aren't prevented from replacing things if you want to.
Finally, you said the Android has a slow time getting traction. Everything I've seen indicates that they're picking up market share (and developer activity in their app space) faster than the iPhone. Yeah, they're a bit new to the party, and the first couple versions of the OS were more like a beta than a full release. The recent pace and quality is starting to pay off, though.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I live in Japan. There are lots of reasons for the popularity or lack of popularity in the iPhone (depending on whose side you want to argue). The first is that the iPhone is only sold by Softbank. Softbank is the the low end of the market -- it has cheap(ish) rates, but the coverage is poor. For example I can't make a telephone call in my apartment on Softbank. The very people who Apple would want to entice with the iPhone (image concious people) are the ones who would avoid Softbank. So sales numbers are not as high as they might be.
On the other hand, Softbank has a relatively understandable "unlimited" 3G packet plan. You pay X per month plus Y per month (for no reason what-so-ever) then you pay Z per packet until a certain limit (reached in about 10 minutes on an iPhone) and then it's free. Works out to about $50 per month (for 3G only). The two other big players, Docomo and AU, are incomprehensible... Seriously. I thought about switching but I can not for the life of me figure out how much it will cost me per month.
As far as I know, AU doesn't offer any smart phones at all. Now, it's a blurred line here because normal phones are pretty "smart". For instance, it is rare to find a phone that you can't buy games and applications for. You can read books, write memos, use a calender, maps, etc... So I will call "smart" something that operated similarly to the iPhone (i.e., primarily touch interface, etc)
Docomo has 2 smart phones as far as I know. They have an android phone and one other (which I forget). They don't really hype them either. I tried to get info on the android phone but the sales people weren't all that helpful. Basically, apple has the smart phone market by default right now.
The biggest stumbling blocks to adoption are the fact that the smart phones have no TV built into them and no pay card system. Many phones in Japan are able to interact with the bus and trains. You download money into the phone and flash your phone over a reader. You can also buy things at the convenience store or get coupons and the like. It is a very popular feature.
To make a long story a bit shorter, the iPhone is far for a failure here. But it is unlikely to take a large share of the market for a variety of reasons which people from other counties probably won't understand. People here like them fine, but there is a lot more to consider here than in the states.