With all the buzz around about this new device in town, I thought of putting up my review. This focuses on the device from a smartphone user perspective and gives you enough information to make the call – to grab it or not.
Hardware
-Display
The phone has a 4 inch display with a 480×800 resolution. The real estate has been perfectly used to give the display a centre stage when you power up the device for the first time (actually every time!). Colours are very vibrant and the photos and videos show a surprising level quality. Internal storage is 1GB and comes with a 16GB micro SD (may vary depending on your provider or seller) upgradable to 32GB.
Rating – 8.5/10
-Touchscreen
Very responsive and accurate. I tried some colouring and editing apps to see the extent to which the touch response goes to towards the corners. Very happy with what I found.
Rating – 8.5/10
-Cameras & LED Flash
One of the biggest USP for this device has got to be the magnificent 8 megapixel back camera with auto focus. There are two LED flashes right next to the camera and provides a good output when there is a need. HTC has its own ‘Flashlight’ application with a high/med/low light intensity (smart!). Here is a sample snap that I clicked on the phone, only applied a filter from the native photo editing application in the phone.
Rating- 8.5/10
-Speaker/Mic
The speaker is at the back panel adjacent to the flash LEDs. Bit disappointed that the device did not have two speakers (L/R). The sound output however suffices the stereo effect to a certain level. I noticed that while playing music at a relatively high volume (90%), the speakers started to blare a bit. Definitely not an option for the young punks who love to stash death metal on their phones and play it in public.
The mic is generic, does what it should. No fancy stuff there.
Rating – 6.5/10
-Connectivity
Connecting to a wifi network or a Bluetooth device is damn easy. Doesn’t require immense settings to configure (unless you want to use its VPN function) and connects/re-connects with the set networks seamlessly.
The speed on wifi is excellent. I have been using different devices over my wifi and this has given me the best result ever. If you use N-Router you will notice a much higher speed compared to the normal DSL/ADSL(2,2+) routers (mine is a Billion BiPAC 7800N).
3G and GPRS speeds depends on the network and with good coverage you’ll never feel slow on surfing or using apps with real-time updates and LBS (Location Based Services).
The icing to the cake is its ability to create a ‘wifi hot spot’. You can share your 3G connection with more than 2 users by manually creating a personal wifi network. This saved my money that I thought of spending on a USB modem. I do agree that there are many many devices that allow you to do that.. but hey, you do not have to ‘tether’ your mobile to make this happen.
My favourite feature in the connectivity zone has to be the ‘push to device’! If your HD TV has wifi connection or connected to the same network as the phone, you have the option of pushing media to your TV over the air. This includes music, videos and photos.
Rating – 10/10
-Ergonomics
All though the device has good shape, size and weight, it does not meet the mark when it comes to ergonomics. When you start using the phone you will realize that it is a bit of a struggle to get to that ‘power on’ button on the top. This is because the button itself is quite thin and suppressed and hence causes the struggle. This will be very prominent to users accustomed with iPhone (3G and >).
Another important feature that the hardware lacks is the ‘one touch silent’ button (again a win in iPhones). If you want to silent your phone you will have to swipe down and get into the home screen and then long press the power button to shift the profile. This becomes very inconvenient for me as I was always was in the habit of reaching the ‘mute’ button on my iPhone even in the dark and that too through my thick jean.
The volume up/down keys do nothing when the screen is locked. I reckon they could have thrown some trigger feature in there. I feel the button has great potential and has not been made use of much.
Rating – 6.5/10
Software/OS (Android 2.3 aka Gingerbread)
-Applications (via Android Market)
For those who say that Android does not have much in the offering, I demand you to go to (https://market.android.com/) and login with your Google account. You can check out the really vast applications they have on the menu list. Personally I got almost 95% of all applications that I had on my iPhone as soon as I got into the Android market.
Rating – 9.5/10
-Efficiency
The speed and functionality of the operating system is just mint! The OS is very responsive and the device manages it very well. At one point of time I was using 99% of CPU by purposefully by running many apps together and the device still worked seamlessly and had zero lag. I should point out the fact that there has been no need of restart on this device till now, leave alone hard-reset. That, to me, is a complete win!
Rating – 9.5/10
-Multitasking
Works like it should, move from one app to the other and you will still have it running in the background. The flip side? Let me say that again “move from one app to the other and you will still have it running in the background”. I still have not found a foolproof method to end apps as I walk out of it. Not that it affects the phone’s speed or functionality in any way but I prefer to have a clean ‘running processes’ screen. For this reason I had to get an app that does exactly what its meant to do – “App Killer”. I usually leave Fring, Skype, Gtalk running in the background all the time.
HTC has its own version of the social apps – Facebook for HTC Sense, Twitter for HTC Sense, which run the background all the time and should be left that way as it does a whole lot of syndication for your contacts. I will talk about this beauty later on…
Rating – 7/10
User Experience
-Supports
HTML5 and Flash (do I see you smiling yet?) brings the internet alive. Even though there are websites that have not yet created their mobile specific versions, you will start find it very easy to surf the internet on it.
-Google account syndication
You will LOVE any phone that runs on Android if you are a Google account holder. This means that with a single sign-on your whole life will just groove into an Android phone. This includes, but is not limited to, Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Documents, Picasa, YouTube, Maps, Blogger sites etc.
I’ll be writing a detailed migration tip for users who would like to move in to Android life from any of their earlier phones. Look up this space for more.
-Multiple Home Screens
You will never feel bored again with the offerings of seven customisable home screens views for your phone. You can configure all the seven desktops with the ‘OH SO WIDE’ variety of widgets that are available and then pinch the home screen –>in<– to get the view of all home screens and select the one you prefer. From 9 to 5 you may keep the weather-email-calendar widget home screen and by 7pm you can keep your social widget home screen, pouring the tweets and status updates from around your social webosphere. Isn’t that so #COOL #fb ?
-Social vs People
Here is a completely different viewing angle of your social world. HTC Sense has made a lot of sense by integrating your social world with your personal contacts. This is done by choice not by default and hence you have liberty of revoking the feature.
This is what happens – imagine you have started using the phone and check your twitter, Facebook, flickr accounts through it. Now someone whom you have had no contact with for a while and is not in your phone book gives you a ring. As soon as you hang up you go ahead and save him/her as a contact. At this point HTC Sense comes up with a recommendation that it has detected your friend by his/her name on your Facebook/Twitter friends list and gives you the option of ‘linking’ the accounts. All of a sudden all the details that your friend has on his/her social profile gets added to the newly created contact.
You can do a complete sync with either one social platform or all of them and the next time you look through your phone book you will see a ‘real time detail’ of your friend with their latest updates and contact info making your life so damn easy.
HTC Sense views this as People, which makes sense cause you are looking at all the information that there is about your friend which they have agreed to share with their social contacts.
-Notifications
All notification updates (call alerts, emails, sms, app updates/download/install, social) now appear in a task bar at the top of the screen which can be pulled down and actioned individually.
-HTC Sense (last but not the least!)
I can’t talk all that… you have to see THIS to know it 
Overall – 8.5/10
(This is only a personal rating and has not been sourced.)
