HTC Desire S review

Does it still have the same appeal?

30 March 2011 20:17 GMT / By Stuart Miles

  The HTC Desire was the phone of 2010. It got in early, was considerably better than the competition and by the end of the year was still very much holding its own against the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S and the Apple iPhone 4. Fast forward a year and the marketplace and the choice offered to consumers is very different. The Desire now has plenty of competition, from within HTC and other manufacturers. Within HTC it has got the larger screened HTC Desire HD and the HTC Incredible S to contend with.
Elsewhere you’ve got the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, the Samsung Galaxy S II, and the LG Optimus 2X, Optimus Black, and Optimus 3D. The days of the Desire being “the” flagship phone are over. So in steps the HTC Desire S, a refresh of the Desire bringing with it new toys and new features, but is it enough? Should you still want it over the range of choices now available to you?
The biggest physical difference with the HTC Desire S over the HTC Desire is a new design. Measuring 115 x 59.8 x 11.63mm and weighting 130g it’s a touch smaller and lighter than the original Desire, which for the record had dimensions of 119 x 60 x 11.9mm and a weight of 135g.
Side-by-side and there is little in it - they are both smart looking phones. You can see the design process has moved on, albeit only slightly, and you get the feeling that from a design perspective the Desire S is what HTC wanted the Desire to look like, but had to use the HTC Legend to hone the new manufacturing process.

The screens are virtually identical. The Desire S sports a 3.7-inch Super LCD display, instead of a 3.7-inch AMOLED one, but the resolution remains the same at 800 x 480. The screen now fills most of the face with the frame getting narrower. On the front that means losing the physical home, menu, back and search buttons and replacing them with touch sensitive buttons that are run into the main glass display. Gone too is the optical trackpad - we never really used it anyway.
In is a bigger speaker above the screen, the introduction of a front-facing fixed focus camera and a more pronounced chin over the previous model - it gives you something to grab when you dive into your pocket, as well as saving the screen from rubbing on the table when you place it face down. Also in is a new manufacturing process and design. Rather than the two piece construction of the original Desire whereby you had a metal exo-skeleton design with a plastic back cover, the Desire S, like the HTC Legend, is manufactured from a single piece of metal that has been hollowed out, allowing the electrical components to be slipped in.


That, like the Legend, leaves two black plastic plates on the back, one for camera and speaker at the top and a second for the battery, microSD and SIM card slots at the bottom. They are less pronounced than on the Legend as the phone is black rather than silver, but they are still easily spotted. HTC has used the same trick here as they use on the Legend and the HTC 7 Mozart allowing you easy access to the areas you’ll need.
The new design means the Micro-USB charging socket is found at the side of the device alongside the volume controls, rather than the base of the phone where it is normally situated. It’s not a major factor to be bothered with, but it’s worth pointing out as we found it clumsy when we had the phone charging and needed to make a call.
The design also houses a 3.5mm headphone socket, a power on/off switch and a 5-megapixel camera. The design is good, strong and solid. We liked the HTC Legend and the HTC Desire and this really is the amalgamation of the two models from last year: a logical progression if you like.
As we’ve said the phone’s design is dominated by that 3.7-inch Super LCD display running at 800 x 480 and that’s your main point of access to the Android operating system inside. The screen is, as with all HTC smartphones we’ve played with in recent months, responsive, giving us no problems when using it. Colour reproduction is reasonable, although whites are reproduced as more of a greyish colour compared to the Apple iPhone 4. In isolation, it is not something you should be worried about, but it isn’t the best display around.

While the competition are embracing dual-core chips and stacks of memory, with bigger storage options, HTC has resisted that temptation here. You get a 1GHz MSM8255 Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 768MB RAM. There is just over 1GB of internal storage for the device and of course the ability to bump this up with more via a microSD card.
Connectivity comes in the guise HSDPA (up to 14.4Mbps download speeds) and 5.76Mbps upload speeds. You get GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth for voice, music and data. There’s also GPS for mapping alone with a G-sensor and digital compass.
Camera wise there are two: the one you’ll mainly be using is the rear camera that looks to be the same as HTC are putting in other devices like the Desire HD. It comes with autofocus and an LED flash. As for the quality of the images, they are bright and colourful, but soft and noisy when you look up close. The camera struggles with finer detail, not uncommon with this type of device.
source:  http://www.pocket-lint.com/review/5340/htc-desire-s-smartphone-review