HTC Desire S
HTC has produced a whole raft of great smartphones over the years with its more recent Android models picking up our recommended awards like they were free memory sticks at a tech trade show. Its latest offering is the HTC Desire S that doesn't pack in a headline grabbing dual-core processor, fancy camera, or ginormous screen but is a beautifully made, classy smartphone that should be high on your wish list.
As ever with HTC devices, the Desire S makes an unassuming entrance in its plain white box but as soon as you clap eyes on the device itself you know you're in for a treat. Largely wrapped in an aluminium frame, and with a sizeable slab of glass adorning the front, it just exudes class. Not that this is anything new for HTC, with its Desire, Desire HD, Desire Z, Legend and 7 Mozart, to name but a few, having proved the Taiwanese company knows how to make beautifully crafted handsets. Like the Desire HD, there are a few gaps here and there where you can see through to the circuitry below, which is a bit unnerving but we doubt this should cause problems in normal use.
Said aluminium is finished in an anodised black while two soft-touch black plastic sections on the back allow the internal aerials to do their job. Set into the top section of plastic is the camera, its flash, and the speaker while the bottom section slides off to provide access to the battery, SIM slot, and microSD card.
Due to the way this housing works, you can't hot swap SIM or microSD cards, so you will have to power down the device every time - a small grievance but a grievance nonetheless. The phone comes with a decent 1.1GB chunk of internal storage for storing apps on while the 768MB of RAM will help to ensure you seldom run out memory.
It's not just the overall design that pleases with the Desire S, it's the little touches as well. The bevelled edges that surround the earpiece and front facing camera have a touch of class while the silver strips that are the power and volume buttons feel solidly planted yet have a wonderfully light but defined action. On the left edge you'll also find a microUSB socket for hooking the phone up to a computer or charging via an adapter, while on the top edge is the now obligatory headphone jack.
Just below the earpiece cut out, and set into the glass surface, is a small LED that glows red when charging and flashes green when you've got a new message of some sort.
Below the screen, and also incorporated into the same sheet of glass as the display are the four standard Android buttons. Sadly they don't have the funky rotating feature of the HTC Incredible S, whereby they flip round to match whichever way you're holding the phone, but they're tidy and responsive. One slight inconvenience is that, because they're not physical buttons, you can't press one of them to activate the screen, leaving you having to always stretch to the power button to unlock the phone.
There are a couple of further slip ups as well. The lack of a dedicated button for the camera is the big let down as it means you're left to prod away at the screen when taking shots, which isn't always the easiest action to perform while maintaining a firm grip on the device. Also missing is a miniHDMI socket for piping video straight out to your TV. Frankly, the latter is not something we would miss as we don't really see the point of it but it's something some rivals, such as the Motorola Milestone Xt720, do offer.
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Whoopee
18th July 2011, By philehidiot
As far as I can tell, the only flaws in the build of this phone are the battery life and the lack of a macro mode on the camera - why??
The rest of it is software with the occasional very odd bugs which keep cropping up, the occasional resets and Android's lack of a decent multitasking system.
I've put the battery as a con - it will last a day with pretty heavy use and will easily get there with quite a few widgets and so on. Put simply you can use this phone with all the fancy stuff on (i.e. as it was meant to be used) and still get through a day. If you want more out of it, you can put a battery saving program on it and turn stuff off.
For those debating about the move from physical keyboard to touch screen - this is my first touchscreen keyboard and whilst I never, ever type the word I intend to, the HTC keyboard is fantastic at guessing the word and as a result I can type faster than with a good physical keyboard.
This phone is also built very solidly although dispite this I bought a case as my phones live a very hard life and to cover the holes when using in the rain. I would still be confident that it would survive without the case however and this does feel like a device you could lob at a wall without significant injury given the Gorilla Glass.
The screen resolution is about average but given the size it's nice and sharp.
Coming from a much less powerful android phone, the amount of programs this can run without any slow down is fantastic. There's a lot of RAM there and you'll rarely find yourself wondering why it's lagging.
I still lament the lack of a macro mode as I often use a phone camera to take a picture of text (menu, phone number, etc) and it came as a real surprise that this was lacking from an autofocus camera. The camera is adequate with some neat real time effects and is pretty responsive. A physical shutter button would be nice
Personally, I think this is the best compromise between the performance of the dual core monsters with their large screens and battery life. It's an evolution of a damn good phone, not a new model, so the flaws have been ironed out. The bugs will be dealt with in time and I can only hope a palm pre-esque multitasking system makes itself known as this would complete the Android OS.
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