HTC Desire HD -Growing desire

Growing desire

The most obvious difference between the Desire HD and its little brother theHTC desire is the screen. It's been ramped up from a healthy 3.7 inches to a monstrous 4.3 inches. It has the same WVGA resolution, 480x800 pixels, but the larger screen doesn't look blurry or low-res. It doesn't have the eye-burning saturation of the Smsung GALAXY S, or the pin-sharp resolution of the i Phone 4 but it still looks very good indeed.

The touchscreen is also fast and responsive. If we had to nitpick, we'd say that it isn't quite as buttery smooth as the iPhone or theHTC hd 4. Since the Desire HD's hardware and processor are almost identical to the HD7's, we're tempted to blame Android for the fact that sometimes scrolling and swiping are fractionally more juddery than the best of the competition. Nevertheless, it's still very smooth and easy to use.

The machined aluminium case feels wonderfully solid. We'd still rather not drop it on concrete, but it feels more likely to survive than most large smart phones, especially since the aluminium case wraps around the edge of the screen. But the trade-off is weight -- combined with the huge screen, the Desire HD weighs in at 164g.

Inevitably, the Desire HD feels massive in your hand. You could still pop it in a pocket, but you couldn't sit down comfortably. Whether such an enormous screen is worth the weight is up to you -- we love it, but we like our smart phones bodaciously big-boned. If you want something smaller, the HTC LEGEND may be more your size.

Despite its vast surface area, HTC has made a few surgical snips to the Desire HD compared to the original Desire. Gone are the optical trackpad and the four physical buttons along the bottom of the screen, replaced with the touch-sensitive kind. We prefer the physical buttons, but in our tests, the touch-sensitive ones on the Desire HD worked very well.

The missing trackpad could be more of a problem, since Android doesn't have an easy way to move the cursor around tiny text, which is a pain on the Samsung galaxy s. But HTC has sorted it by taking a leaf from the i Phone s UI manual. Hold down your finger on the text and you'll see a magnified area that helps you place the cursor exactly where you want it. The copy and paste function is similarly well done.