Riding the Intertoobs
If you're a Web addict for whom being offline is worse than being unconscious, the Desire HD is the best smart phone available. The enormoscreen has the real estate to display the finickiest webpage, although we do fantasise about how good it would be if it had the iPhone 4's stunning resolution. The latest 802.11n standard of Wi-Fi is on board, as well as 14.4Mbps HSDPA for epic download speeds over 3G.
The software is also up to the challenge, with a great Web browser that displays pages quickly and accurately. Perhaps best of all, the Desire HD supports Flash Player 10, so every page is served up in perfect condition, without missing pieces. There's been much talk about how Flash will kill your battery and crash your phone, but in our tests it was worth it to be able to see everything from page navigation to BBC iPlayer, just as their creators intended.
We did stumble on one page that reliably crashed the browser, but we blame its JavaScript, rather than Flash -- or maybe the Desire HD just hates Uk health policy research. Overall, we found browsing worked very well, whether we were playing Flash games or watching Vimeo videos in the full version of the site.
Sure, all this power sucks a full battery charge like a camel stocking up for a long walk -- especially with the widgets pulling down data by the bucketload all the time. With heavy use, surfing the Web and watching loads of videos, a fully charged battery didn't last us a day. But there is a power-saver mode, which prompts you to ease off when the battery drops below 15 per cent.
It's another example of how the Desire HD is a portable computer powerhouse rather than just a phone. We had no trouble, however, making or receiving phone calls reliably in our tests. Such a vast phone isn't the most comfortable to hold against your face, and we thought the speaker could be a smidge louder. But if you tend to spend more time updating your status than chatting old-school, the Desire HD does the job.
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