HTC may be embarrassing the Big Five once again as it leads the smartphone charge in the Google front as it did with Windows.  After giving T-Mobile the world’s first Android handset on the G1 rebadge, it gave Google its first taste in the mobile phone business with the HTC Passion rebadged as the Nexus One.

With its own line of Android smartphones, it has the most Androids among smartphone makers.  The HTC Passion also known as the HTC Bravo just got morphed into the new HTC Desire – a fitting name for a handset that’s as desirable as any flagship handset.  This time, it’s basically the Nexus One with the same 1GHz Snapdragon engine running the same Android 2.1 Éclair OS but goes a step further with its Sense UI.

And pundits are quick to point out how much better it is to use than the Nexus One because of Sense.  O2, Orange and T-Mobile carry the handset free starting at ₤25/month on an 18-month plan. Not bad for a very desirable smartphone.

Htc Desire

For people in Europe who couldn’t’ wait and imported the Nexus One from Amazon, they can stop their remorse and start looking for hackers who can put Sense to their Nexus toys. We meant the Sense UI, of course.  Too bad for the former colonies of Britain on the other side of the Atlantic, the Desire doesn’t have the 3G frequencies to operate over there.  So they can do the same and try to put Sense to their Nexus toys which might be easier than importing the Desire and getting it to work in their networks.

Upscale Smartphone Features

The HTC Desire is 3G phone on the dual band UMTS (900/2100) and a quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) on 2G. Data connectivity comes with class 10 EDGE/GPRS on 2g and HSDPA/HSUPA on 3G.   It has WiFi 802.11 for hotspot surfing, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR for wireless high speed data syncing and transfers with other Bluetooth devices and microUSB 2.0 for wired option. There’s SatNav functionality supported by a built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS and a Digital Compass.

You get the same elegantly styled Nexus form on a body measuring 119 x 60 x 11.9mm and weighing 135g – that’s 0.4mm slimmer and 5g heavier than the Nexus.  It has the same stunning 3.7-inch Wide-VGA (480 x 800) with 18 million colors, AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with multitouch input, gravity accelerometer, proximity and ambient light sensor.

The HTC Desire captures images with the same 5.0 megapixel autofocus shooter with LED flash and geo tagging.  Its video capture prowess stands out with a near high definition D1 (720 x 480) resolution at 30 fps. Entertainment on the road gets the same capable media players for popular audio and video codecs, a stereo FM radio with RDS, 3.5mm headphone jack and Bluetooth A2DP support.

Phone memory gets 512 MB flash ROM and 576 MB RAM with microSD external memory expandability for up to 332 GB.  There’s a 1400 mAh Li-Ion battery that yields up to 6.6 hours of talk time on 2G and up to 340 hours in standby on a single charge.

Its Android app store is relatively new but is growing steadily and now has more than 18,000 downloadable apps you can access.  It gets preloaded with Quick Office document viewers, an HTML browser with Adobe Flash 10.1 and social networking apps centered on the HTC feature called Friend Stream that allows update tracking across Facebook, Flickr and Twitter as well as allowing message broadcasting to all your SNS sites.

About the Author: You can visit Best Mobile Contracts for more information on the HTC Desire and other new phones. They have many reviews and compare deals for the HTC Desire. You can also find more information on many more HTC phones.