After a long history of running a Microsoft operating system on its handsets, HTC suddenly switched over to Google Android. Microsoft fought back with Windows Mobile 6.5 and has once again teamed up with HTC for the HTC HD2.

As well as the new OS, the HTC HD2 also features the 1Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile processor, which, it is claimed, will give you super speedy speeds even when using multiple applications.

By way of declaring an interest, we have to tell you that we've never been fans of Windows Mobile phones, finding them dull to look at and fiddly to use – but after just five minutes, we were mightily impressed by the HTC HD2.

 

Style and handling for the HTC HD2

Taking up almost the whole of the phone's front is the massive 4.3-inch TFT capacitive screen. There is space for just five keys below it: Call, Home, Windows, Back and Call end. These and the volume keys on the left-hand side are the only hard keys on the whole device; we would have liked to have seen a dedicated camera key, though. It's minimal and really rather lovely looking, with a concrete grey and black finish and a narrow, 11mm width. It is prone to fingerprints, a common issue with touch-screens, but overall it looks great.

The screen is so large that it wasn't always easy to reach every corner without adjusting the position of our handsets. Generally, though, it feels good in the hand.

The screen is capacitive rather than resistive – a good thing, in our opinion, as you can swipe the screen lightly. It's a tactile experience that pulses with each key press so you know you've hit home. The first time you switch your phone on you are prompted to calibrate the screen. This works really well: the HTC HD2 tracks how you hit the keys and calibrates accordingly. For example, if you habitually strike the F key when you mean to hit D, the phone will adjust to compensate.

 

User interface on the HTC HD2

HTC Sense, which first appeared on the Hero, is the 'people-centric' (says HTC) user interface that brings all your contacts from your phonebook, email and social networks into one handy list. So look up a friend and you'll see their name, address, number, email, and latest Facebook and Twitter updates alongside a Profile pic. One potentially nice feature is the ability to view your friends' Facebook photo albums from your contacts page. We say 'potential' because it didn't work – all we got was empty boxes where the photos should be. Hopefully this is a glitch that gets sorted out soon, because it's a great idea.

 

Social networking on the HTC HD2

The HTC HD2 has the now-obligatory Facebook app on board. Made especially for mobile usage, it's intuitive to use. You can even view photos on the whole 4.3-inch screen. Because it's so good, we keep expecting the same features as we would get on a PC, and then get frustrated when we can't. The most annoying is that you can't search for people who aren't already on your friends list.

If you're a tweeter, you have Peep, HTC's Twitter client, on board. Alerts are pushed to the phone, and you can choose to have as many or as few as you like. Every tweet is accompanied by a sound effect of a tweet (do you see what they did there?), pretty much guaranteeing that you opt for a few pushed alerts as possible. You can also post and repost your own tweets.

 

Email on the HTC HD2

The HTC HD2 is a real email pro, offering up to 10 push-email accounts to be synced simultaneously. When we first started it up, the device gave us a step-by-step guide to setting up our Outlook and Gmail accounts. Hotmail required manual setup through the settings menu, but didn't pose any problems.

Email messages appear on the screen in note form, stacked up in a pile. Click on the message to mark as read. A rather nice bonus is when you scroll through your contacts list, an envelope message icon appears next to a name if you have an unread email from them.

 

Internet browsing on the HTC HD2

Browsing the web on the HTC HD2 is a satisfying and speedy process. The device features both HSDPA and Wi-Fi, meaning you can have broadband-speed browsing anywhere with Wi-Fi connection. And  that 4.3-inch touch-screen allows you to view a large amount of a full internet page.

You have a choice of internet browsers; Opera 10.10 is our favourite because it makes quick work of resizing webpages into mobile format and allows you to save your pages to read offline – a brilliant feature if you have to travel by underground train. Double click to zoom in (the zoomed-in portion of the page fits the screen perfectly) and zoom out again. If you want to watch flash video content, though, you'll need to use Internet Explorer, as Opera doesn't support flash.

The HTC HD2 has a copy and paste function like those on the iPhone 3GS and BlackBerry Storm 2 – the latter didn't work at all. Luckily, the HTC HD2 is more like the Apple device – hold your finger down on the screen to turn on the text selection tool, then highlight the required text with your finger before pasting it in a text or email message.

 

Video and music on the HTC HD2

The high-definition screen is great for watching videos on. Everything we watched, from our own downloaded content to YouTube clips, was pretty much perfect. We were also chuffed to find a 3.5mm headphones jack, but bizarrely it's at the bottom of the phone, so when you listen to music, you have to put the device upside down in your pocket to avoid tangled wires.

We don't know what HTC was thinking when it decided on a paltry 448MB memory. You can barely store anything with that, and buying a memory card will cost you extra.

 

Five-megapixel camera on the HTC HD2

Okay, the HTC HD2's camera is five megapixels and features a dual LED flash (a new feature) and an effective Panorama mode, it's still lacking something. HTC is yet to impress up in the camera department, and the HTC HD2 doesn't change anything. Most frustratingly, the whole thing is controlled from the screen, meaning you need to navigate through the menu to access your camera and even zoom is operated this way instead of via the volume keys. It rather puts the kibosh on spontaneous snapping. On the plus side, though, you can record high-definition video footage of up to 30 frames per second, which the company claims is DVD quality.

 

The verdict on the HTC HD2

The HTC HD2 is the best Windows Mobile phone we have seen so far. It's covered up all the niggling Windows Mobile faults (they're still there, just not as obvious), and the handset looks and feels great and is rammed full of features. It's a no-brainer for windows fans, and we reckon it may just win over some sceptics too.

 

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