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HTC HD2 review

Posted by Gareth Beavis on Mon 9 Nov 2009

Windows Mobile with a touch of HTC Sense

HTC has stuck-firm with WinMo, now it's created the HD2 featuring a plethora of world’s firsts - it’s the first mobile with a whopping 4.3-inch screen, the first WinMo phone with a capacitive screen and more importantly - the first phone to make Windows Mobile work.

Take a closer look with our HTC HD2 hands-on review and video 


The HD2 is also the first time HTC has used the Sense UI outside of the Android range, bringing with the likes of integrated Facebook status to your contacts and a Twitter client directly on the home screen.
 

In practice Sense on a WinMo phone is actually more of a mashup between HTC’s standard TouchFLO interface, seen on the likes of the HTC Diamond, and Sense, with elements like full screen weather updates and the tabbed homescreen browsing allowing a huge amount of information from the swipe of a finger.
 

And that finger swipe is a real pleasure - it’s easily as good as the iPhone, with every brush of the screen registering correctly.
 

We mentioned before that this phone makes Windows Mobile look like a good OS, and that’s not to say it’s terrible usually - there’s a lot of power behind it, but a poor user interface usually hides that behind a kaleidoscope of frustration.
 

Not so here - with HTC’s messaging widgets, email and texting is super easy to set up and even easier to read - simply flick through a pile of messages to see what’s been going on.
 

Media has also been improved for the HD2, and shows the power of the Snapdragon processor under the hood of the phone.  Flicking through album covers to change songs is a dream, and when you turn the phone on its side, the system automatically moves in to Coverflow mode, and skimming through the pictures is thoroughly devoid of slow down.
 

Video is less appealing, which is a shame given the huge screen. It’s not bad to watch (and there’s always the irritating mobile version of Windows Media Player if you want it all in one place) but finding your way to your favourite movie is a convoluted process. You either have to scroll through all photos and videos you’ve taken before you get to it, or have to go through two separate album menus to get to the videos on your phone memory / memory card.
 

Video looks good enough in playback though, and the sensitivity of the screen means that scrolling backwards and forwards to find a certain point is very easy indeed.
 

Internet on the HD2 is also very good, although the functionality is divided over two built-in browsers. For Flash video, you’ll have to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer - for pinch and zoom web browsing, you’re going to have to go with the default Opera browser.
 

But both offer a slick experience thanks to the uber processor and sensitive touchscreen, and saving relevant pages is nice and easy too.
 

As you can imagine, one of the strengths of Windows Mobile is its messaging prowess, and it shows that off well in the HD2. You can sync up to 10 email addresses into the phone, either from Exchange or IMAP and POP3, and all of them work on a push basis (providing, in the case of something like Google Mail) you have them correctly synced to the phone).
 

Typing messages is not such a fun experience though, as the Windows Mobile confusion shines through once more. The ‘Send’ key is located scarily close to the comma button, so on more than one occasion we ended up sending a message halfway through writing.
 

And while we’re talking about things that don’t really work that well, the camera could do with a bit of an upgrade too. While there are a huge amount of setting to play with, pictures still come out lacking detail and colour on most occasions, and the dual LED flash is brighter than the surface of the sun.
 

This means detail is not just washed out, but obliterated like a nuclear blast on many pictures. In fact this feature is only useful to scare your friends with how bright it gets.


Link: HTC
 

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