HTC Desire Review – Part 4 – Telephony

After all the gimmicks of Hardware power, I came on to the HTC Desire Telephony section. Typically Telephony supposed to be simpler such as – Browse contacts, dial, talk and then hang up. But HTC Desire bring it to a whole new level of Telephony combining the power of social networking and information management. I’m trying to keep this post as short as possible. But then we’re going to talk about a bit more of Contacts, Call quality, Messaging and few other components. Lets take a wider look into these.

Contacts / Phonebook

HTC Desire comes with powerful phonebook feature with integrated social networking contacts. HTC Desire resembles the one on the HTC TouchFLO but powerfully extends its functionality. There are five different tabs included beside the basic info tab of a person.

Contact Details:

• First Tab is the basic information of the user
  
• 2nd Tab is the list of messages exchanged between you and the person
• 3rd Tab is the list of emails you have exchanged with the contact person
• 4th Tab pulls the events related to or attached to the contact (Eventually it links Facebook Events for that contact)
• 5th Tab is the albums of the contact (Flickr and Facebook can be connected with the contact for this too)
   
• Last Tab is the tab where all the Call Logs has been recorded between you and your contact

Phonebook (Peoples):

Here is the science coming in. When I first turned on the HTC Desire it asked me for my Google, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr access. Not only does this give you access to your Gmail and populate Peep (Desire’s inbuilt Twitter application) it adds all the names from Facebook and Google contacts into the address book.

• 1st Tab is the list of all your contacts from Google and Facebook together with Phone Contacts
  
• 2nd Tab is the Groups of your Contacts
  
• 3rd Tab is the Directory services including Company Directory, Facebook, Plurk, Twitter, Flickr Lookup
  
• 4th Tab is the Call Log between you and your contacts
• Phonebook also features advanced technologies like “Linking up Contacts“. The phone will search for common phone numbers and email addresses, and link these profiles automatically. How cool is that!

Calling

You can expect crystal clear call clarity from the HTC Desire even though a noise cancellation microphone could make it awesome.

• The ‘Phone’ tab is prominent on all the home screens, and pulls up the most recently called contacts as well as the number pad.
   
  You will find out that you can use the dialer as a T9 dictionary to tap in a contact’s name and it will be pushed to the top of the list – this feature has been there from HTC’s Windows Mobile days.
• Call time Screen gives you access to few other functions like lookup phonebook, access the menu, mute the microphone and control the volume
  
• Remember, If you want high speed 3G data while roaming, that’s not going to happen.
• The built in speaker is pretty loud enough but don’t expect to listen to it in an airport.
• The provided hands-free kit works pretty well but I was having problems keeping it in my ear because it might be a little odd shaped.
• Mobile network resolves quite fast in HTC Desire, so from boot to get the network access is less than 2 seconds. I think it is MAXIS network advantage.

Messaging

Text messaging has a new life in HTC Desire. I used to be a hardcore physical keyboard phone Fan. HTC has proven how much thinking they put inside these touch text typing technologies. In my honest opinion HTC Desire (even Legend) Touch screen typing is simply without a par.

• It’s amazingly intuitive, and it learns as it goes along – if you use a word often it will remember it and default to it when the relevant keystrokes come along.
   
  Those who are worried touch screen keyboards, I would personally recommend them to use this feature. You may tapped on wrong from the intended buttons, and nine times out of 10 the Desire will work out the word you wanted by default.
• The large screen of Desire provides an comfort of speed typing in vertical mode
  
• A long press on editing screen provides handful number of common actions like Select Text, Cut, Copy and few other. Which is really helpful in many many situation.
  

Email & Gmail

Not much changed in the Gmail compared to other Android handsets. There are a few HTC add-ons, but nothing major. The batch operations are onboard – they allow multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted.

• The Gmail and Mail apps have been slightly polished interface with several icons in the menus changed. The extended Gmail features include spam report and conversation-style email view mode.
• When replying to an email you can either choose Gmail or the generic mail client, and set one of the two options as default.
• HTC has tweaked their custom HTC Mail app too. The general Inbox displays the last sync time, the sort order, the current email account and of course the actual messages.
• The conversations view tries to mimic the original Gmail client threaded view, which is otherwise missing in the HTC mail inbox. Attachments are not automatically loaded by default.
• At the bottom there are five virtual buttons allows you to change the inbox view to emails with attachments only, unread mail only, display conversations or display the messages from your VIP groups mail.
• Email sorting is possible too (in either ascending or descending order) by date, subject, sender and size.

It’s really hard to find any lack in HTC Mail applications. What you have is a true mimic of your Gmail account bundled with its core functionality plus a Microsoft Exchange compatible alternative client. And besides all that HTC Mail can manage multiple POP and IMAP accounts.

I am really having trouble finding a highly noticeable flaw in HTC Telephony system right now. The thing I can mention is that when sometimes it falls down to EDGE data service, it takes a while to come back to HSDPA service. Well, that can be network coverage issue. A very minor issue with the HTC Desire’s messaging system – you can’t save SMS messages to the microSD card.

Did you encountered any?

I’m still not yet completely finished writing this article.

The next one is “Multimedia Experience“ test results… So just hold on there for a while. See you soon.