HTC Unveils 'HD2' Multi-touch Windows Phone

Author	Gordon Kelly
Published	6th Oct 2009

HTC Unveils 'HD2' Multi-touch Windows Phone

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Love it or hate it (our first impressions sadly place us closer to the latter camp): today is a Windows Phone day...

Still the highlight may not be Windows Phone at all, but the stupendous engineering feat HTC has managed to pull off in the shape of the ‘HD2' (formerly Leo). From a hardware perspective, the HD2 is a heart stopping piece of kit with a huge 4.3in touchscreen, 5MP autofocus camera with dual LED flash, HSUPA, WiFi, GPS and superfast 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset. What's more, HTC has broken new ground with the HD2 bringing a capacitive 480 x 800 (WVGA), multi-touch display to Windows Mobile 6.5.

"The HTC HD2 Windows phone breaks new ground with its responsive, touch screen," said Microsoft Business senior VP Andy Lees in a statement which is far more humorous than I suspect he intended.

Furthermore, HTC has become arguably the industry leader in convincingly re-skinning Microsoft's dodgy user interfaces and it's excellent Sense UI should undo most of the damage still present in 6.5. As for the rest of the hardware rundown, the footprint is understandably large at 120.5 x 57mm and hefty at 157g, but at least it remains slim line at an iPhone-ish 11mm thick.

Battery life isn't bad either at up to 320 minutes talk time or 490 hours on standby though music playback isn't great at just 12 hours. That said, you'll be able to listen through a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, there's AVI video support, an FM tuner and the array of accelerometers and proximity sensors you'd expect in a smartphone these days.

One fly in the ointment however is the 512MB of native memory aboard. Windows Marketplace apps can currently only install on native memory so it won't matter if you have a 32GB microSD card or not, you could well run out of space pretty quickly. Bad Microsoft, bad!

Still HTC is pulling out all the stops and the HD2 will hit UK networks before the end of the month. An earlier leak suggests the HD2 on O2 is a formality, though HTC doesn't reference any single exclusive deal which - given the telco's horrendous data network problems - is probably a godsend to many. Would it be mean if I were to say the HTC HD2 could be the perfect phone... if it had Android on it?!

Link:
HTC HD2 Product Page

Latest 4 of 26 Comments

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Nicholas Pires said on 7th October 2009

It's funny reading the comments here in this posting mentioning WM6.5 fails to deliver at user experience compared to the iPhone which is "so great". It is harsh to dismiss 6.5 so quickly.

It is better than 6.1 (I know as I often flash my Diamond 2 regularly to try different ROMs on xda-developers) and can say yes it does need some tweaking but overall is an improvement over the older 6.1 build it still needs to be faster but with some ROMs it's pretty responsive already.

I don't mind the honeycomb effect but do like the grid layout of TF3D, personally it doesn't make a big difference to me it's a visual difference, user experience and doesn't detract from user experience as some of you are saying.

Personally from all the people I know that use the iphone and blackberry are very happy with it but after I show them some of the the things I can do on my winmo phone they feel like getting a winmo phone for its functionality as I did when I was first looking for a phone and I did compare it to the iphone and even symbian.

I went with winmo for the fact I could put anything I wanted on it and not have to worry about "jailbreaking" it and other warranty voiding procedures.

iphone having to "jailbreak it" before you can do anything great on it yeh awesome user experience there... people give winmo less credit than it's actually due as you can do pretty much anything you want out of the box.

Dare I say iphone for the magpies (flashy flashy icandy wanters) and winmo for the more practical minded :P

I'm happy with winmo and look forward to more improvements to come, just hope HTC continue to support it for longer as android is getting popular, but in closing yes the iphone is cool and has a nice user experience and the UI could be better in winmo but is far from the dismal experience that the reviewer and uninformed people posting here make it out to be, unlike most iphone users if we don't like it we can change it (we got more choice of OS shells than you do HA!) Do your research first before you start to bash the OS.

Winmo will only get better where as iphone is only filling in the blanks :P

It's funny reading the comments here in this posting mentioning WM6.5 fails to deliver at user experience compared to the iPhone which is "so great". It is harsh to dismi... more

Gordon said on 7th October 2009

@Nicholas Pires - thanks for the long and thoughtful piece. Appreciate feedback and differing opinions. It would be dull if we all agreed on everything.

lifethroughalens said on 7th October 2009

@ Gordon, wow a Hack with a degree of humility, whatever next?!

Well, it's been 8 years since i've even considered a WinMo phone, Symbian was my tipple for 7 years a... more