Technology, Gadgets, IT, Games

The HTC HD2 is the flagship Windows Phone, with some impressive specs. Launched in Europe in November 2009, it won’t reach the North America market until well into 2010. There’s a lot to boast about, and a few pitfalls to consider. But will the HD2 win you over?

Hardware

But let’s start with the glossy 480×800-pixel multi-touch capacitive screen. This is what the phone is all about. It’s great to look at – bright, crisp and clear. The high resolution means a wide variety of fonts, sizes and even ClearType being available, ensuring a comfortable read for pretty much everyone. The capacitivity means that instead of pushing the screen, you touch it and stroke it. No more tapping away with a stylus or jamming your finger into a dodgy resistive touchscreen, this is the real deal. This is a real step up from almost all other phones I’ve used. Fingerprints are the obvious risk, but this isn’t quite the magnet that other glossy devices are (particularly the iPhone), and a quick wipe whenever you notice a smudge sorts it out, so no need to panic.

The handset is sleek and thin, but still a fairly large size (due to the screen). However, it is still pocket-sized and solid without being stupidly heavy, so no qualms from me – particularly since I’m used to the E90 and X1. I’ve kept it in the leather pouch to protect from scratches and smudges, although it can be a pain to get it out quickly when you need it without accidentally answering/rejecting a call.

The phone-down button is also the lock/unlock button, and press+hold for shutdown options. If you have a passcode (like me), hitting this button costs you five seconds every time; so you need to get out of the habit of pressing it to close everything and return to the home screen. The five front hardware buttons are annoyingly not illuminated, but there’s only five so it’s easy to figure out which is which and press them in the dark. The volume control on the side is easy to access, although some applications annoyingly take control of this for some up/down functionality, making it very confusing and more than a little awkward when you need to silence a blaring NSFW Youtube video in the office!

The HD2 has a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU with 512MB of RAM – better than some laptops I have lying around. Definitely a very capable piece of kit, and it’s barely missed a beat. I defy anyone to do better in the next six months.

Operating System

Windows Mobile 6.5 is a bit confusing. It has the flashy interface of a brand-new operating system, and although it’s built on the recent Windows CE 5, it’s still got Pocket PC 2002 at heart. WM6.5 was never actually planned by Microsoft, but released as a much-needed update after huge delays to Windows Mobile 7 – the vastly-rewritten mobile OS now due in mid-2010. WM6.5 is still a decent improvement, with a good touch-focused UI so long as you don’t dig too deep. However, delve into ancient areas such as networking settings and you end up with dropdown lists and tiny scrollbars that should have been ditched as soon as people realised they had fingers. This isn’t the end of the world, as your day-to-day usage.

However, the HD2 has one useful trick up its sleeve to beat all this. When Windows Mobile 7 comes out (sometime in 2010), you can install it on your HD2 for free. Unlocked phones can be upgraded directly from the HTC site, but carrier-specific devices need to wait for their network to release a custom version (and some are notoriously slow with that). Still, WM7 is a great incentive to get this phone now, and ensures its resell value for a couple of years. In between WM6.5 and WM7, there are a few extra releases which should keep things improving until the big changes come in.

Dragging things about can be slightly laggy compared to the iPhone, but it doesn’t put you off, it’s just not quite spot on with the immediate response of a mouse cursor on a PC. This is most likely a software performance issue that should be addressed with Windows Mobile 7, rather than an intrinsic hardware fault. I’ve also found myself accidentally hitting the soft keys  – the bottom left and right buttons on the touchscreen (labelled Phone/Menu above), sending texts before I’m finished; but that’s just something to watch out for.

The Windows Marketplace (WM equivalent of the App Store) works well, but the number of applications available is pitiful compared to Apple. Of course you can get trillions of WM applications from all over the web – and even many ancient PocketPC apps will still work – but it still would be nice to see some centralised place for the vast majority of your app needs, and it would be nice if they were all of the same consistent quality as on the iPhone. One main issue is that because of the wide number of handsets that WM runs on (some big screens, some small, some touchscreen, some stylus, some just with buttons), the apps rarely suit all of the possible variations. Apps made with one handset in mind will be horrible on another, unlike the iPhone where there is only one size, so all their apps work as intended on every single iPhone.

User Interface

HTC Sense is the HTC user interface they have now ported to Windows Mobile. This is not just a custom home screen, but a whole suite of really nice touch-friendly applications, such as Peep (for twitter), a calendar and contact list manager. The most annoying thing is that if you disable the HTC Sense home screen, all those applications disappear too. This means that if you prefer the default WM6.5 UI or a 3rd-party shell such as SPB Mobile Shell, you have to stick to the default (or downloaded) applications even though your phone has better ones built in. In fact, you need those to be active tabs in Sense (taking up home screen space) for them to work. I find HTC Sense overly complicated and quite restrictive, so I tried using the normal UI and SPB, but it was these applications that forced me to use it, and I’m doing my best to tailor it to my methods of working. A compromise would be nice HTC!

The one issue I do have is that pressing the X in the corner doesn’t exit a program, although Menu>Exit does (if the app has that). I can understand multitasking, but it is virtually impossible to actually stop many intensive applications from running. You have to go into the HTC settings, switch to the Windows Mobile settings, find the task manager and kill the process from there. It doesn’t have the normal task manager in the status bar, which is pretty awkward. However, the HD2 is more than capable of running a lot of programs, so there’s no need to panic about this unless you notice some lag or need to kill a network-draining app.

The Obvious Question

Of course, as with every touchscreen phone in the past three years, everyone is comparing the HD2 to Apple’s iPhone. And for good reason – the iPhone is a good piece of hardware with a lot of applications and has dominated the consumer smartphone market. However, there are a lot of deep-rooted problems with the iPhone. It only gained major functionality (ie: copy/paste, video recording) in its most recent version, it’s completely locked down against tweaking and modifications, and the applications are restricted to those Apple approves in its App Store. Windows Mobile doesn’t restrict users at all, allowing anyone to hack in, install software and tweak to their heart’s content – just like a real PC. That is a completely necessary difference if you aren’t 100% sure that the default OS functionality and App Store meets all your needs.

Verdict

Unless you fancy waiting six months for the next wave of WM7-dedicated phones, the HTC HD2 (also known as the HTC T8585, HTC T9193 and HTC Leo) is going to be your best bet, particularly as it will be upgradeable when that launch finally goes down. The huge capacitive multi-touch screen is great to use and absolutely future proof. The software is decent, the UI is full of features, the handset is nice and the internals are powerful. Unless you really can’t tear yourself away from a physical keyboard, or have a nasty case of Appleitis, I’d strongly suggest you give the HD2 some serious consideration.