HTC Desire S review

This time last year, HTC had two Android smartphones for the mainstream: the three.7-inch Desire , outfitted with the newest and greatest, and the three.2-inch Legend, which was humbler in specs but offered the newness of an aluminum unibody construction . After considering the fact that strategy repay handsomely, the corporate’s get back in 2011 with an identical proposition. The 4-inch Incredible S is now the better-end device, while the three.7-inch Desire S is the smaller, aluminum-shelled handset. What’s curious this time, however, is that the will S has the exact same 1GHz Snapdragon inside it, a similar graphics, same WVGA resolution, and an analogous 768MB of RAM because the Incredible S. Throw within the fact it comes with Gingerbread preloaded and some new tweaks to the Sense UI and also you’ve got to wonder whether this may not be the more, um, desirable of HTC’s new Android duo. Just one thanks to discover, right? Full review after the break.

Hardware

HTC is rightly pleased with its aluminum unibody construction method. It goes beyond what other manufacturers do — akin to Nokia with the aluminum-clad N8 — using only one piece of the lightweight metal, that is wrapped round the phone’s internal components and acts as both its case and frame. At the Desire S, there are about a plastic-covered rear compartments, one to deal with the 5 megapixel camera, LED flash, and loudspeaker, and the alternative to allow access to the 1450mAh battery and SIM and MicroSD card slots. The latter chunk of soppy-touch plastic also acts because the Desire S’ antenna. It’s possible you’ll expect the move to a metallic construction to incur some penalties when it comes to weight and bulk, however the Desire S is five grams lighter than the unique Desire at 130g (4.59oz), 4mm shorter at a height of 115mm (4.7 inches), and just slightly thinner and narrower than its predecessor. Another appreciable upgrade over the unique Desire is that the display now sits in the direction of the glass on the front of the telephone, eliminating what was a noticeable distance between both at the older device.

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In day-to-day use, we found the will S stupendously easy to function, as a result of its well curved back and subtly protruding bottom end. It’s the old chin design that the Hero and Legend sported so proudly, but done even more delicately. The three.7-inch screen size makes it easy for many thumbs to succeed in both the end left corner and the hunt capacitive button at the lower right without resorting to the usage of a second hand. That’s a marked improvement in ergonomics over the unique Desire or even betters the Incredible S. The decision at the Desire S’ physical characteristics, therefore, is an uncomplicated two thumbs up, however there’s one small software foible that we must relate. The capacitive Android keys — sorry, Desire fans, no hard buttons or optical trackpad here — don’t always remove darkness from after they should. That becomes a good looking serious problem when using the telephone at midnight, as with out a visual or tactile indicator of what you’re about to press, the one information you will get from those keys is the haptic feedback once you’ve pressed one. In our experience, the determinant for whether the backlight would come on looked to be sheer randomness, and we’ve heard of others having an analogous issue so can’t put it right down to just having a defective unit. Still, that strikes us as an eminently correctable flaw, however it’s a frustrating one while it persists.

Internals

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Delving contained in the blue-hued aluminum body, you’ll find Qualcomm’s very hot MSM8255 system-on-chip, which you’ll also know because the second-generation Snapdragon. In our Incredible S review, we took a glance at its performance relative to the older 1GHz part and located it to be approximately 6 15 percent faster 6 . More often than not use, the chip proves itself perfectly in a position to handling Android’s demands, making HTC’s Sense UI look light and airy. 768MB is a generous chunk of RAM to incorporate besides, because it’s 256MB greater than competitors like Sony Ericsson are bundling with this actual Snapdragon part.

The loudspeaker doesn’t actually go up all that top, however it has a delightful, almost surprising, clarity to its output. Bass, however, is as absent at the Desire S as on the other smartphone’s speaker. Engaging in the now auxiliary function of creating phone calls could also be no problem for the need S — it neither sets itself apart in the case of call quality / reception, nor trails the pack.

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Perhaps the largest fault you may find with the unique Desire was its short battery life. It gave you an awesome screen to observe and a ton of capabilities to take advantage of, but nowhere near enough endurance. Thankfully, the newer Snapdragon hardware is way more efficient with its energy use and makes the 1450mAh cell contained in the Desire S seem like a standout. It had no trouble matching the similarly specced Incredible S for runtime and you’ll rest assured which you’ll get a hectic day’s worth of battery from it. With lighter use, there’s no explanation why you won’t be capable to go more than one days between recharges.

Display

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The will S uses a similar Super LCD tech because the Incredible S, leaving us to simply echo what we said of its bigger sibling. You get vibrant, well saturated images, which also take advantage of excellent viewing angles. The one weakness is readability in direct sunlight. Something we omitted to say within the Incredible S review was that the screen is protected by Gorilla Glass, a feature that has naturally been included at the Desire S besides. We’ve made no secret of our admiration for the Gorilla tech, which you’ll investigate cross-check within the demo video below. We’d do one for this actual handset in addition, but doubt HTC would appreciate us looking to destroy its tenderly crafted device.

Camera

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Other than their divergent dimensions and construction materials, the most important difference between the need S and Incredible S is of their camera sensors. It’s not always true that more megapixels equal better image quality, bu subsequently, the 8 megapixel imager at the Incredible S is markedly just before the will S’ 5 megapixel unit. You won’t notice this advantage while perusing images at the phone itself or maybe when sharing them over the net at resolutions of one megapixel or below (e.g. 1280 x 720), but when you care about quality on the full 2592 x 1552 size, you’ll be left a touch disappointed. HTC very actively compensates for camera noise by blurring areas of comparable color while simultaneously sharpening edges where it finds them. For the foremost part, this software strategy to an underwhelming sensor works rather well, but photography purists might be cringing, and so will anyone else who could be occupied with taking broader shots and cropping them all the way down to the areas of interest. Chromatic noise also makes an unwelcome appearance but does so relatively rarely and is hardly noticeable in lower-res pictures. The will S’ camera could be considered great at 1 megapixel resolutions and merely okay on the full 5.

This handset also comes with the most recent trendy add-on, a front-facing camera, but like the overwhelming majority of them, it’s a hard and fast focus VGA imager with decidedly poor image quality. Noise, of each color and creed, dominates proceedings, though when you’re in some weirdly dire have to use it, you might obtain half-decent results from front camera in well lit situations. HTC’s picture-taking software is quick and snappy, and is derived with a group of fancy / gimmicky filters you are able to apply both in the event you’re shooting and afterwards. There also are options for cropping and rotating photos, either one of which we appreciated having. Video is recorded in .3gp format and stretches as much as 720p. The telephone handled the processing task simply, though the same old rolling shutter effect was readily apparent and we found the will S seemed somewhat more sensitive to refined movements and vibrations than other phones. Image quality inside the captured video wasn’t anything to put in writing home about either, regrettably. Take a look at a sample video below.

Software

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Both Android and the Sense UI adorning will probably be familiar to you already, but there are a few fresh additions that merit discussion. Firstly, the aforementioned absence of an optical trackpad isn’t a trouble for the need S, which now permits you to place your cursor precisely within text using a magnifying glass overlay and gives more than one draggable pointers for outlining text selections. It’s the very same set of functions as you’ll find at the Incredible S, but relative to the will, it marks a major upgrade in usability. Unless you were totally in love with that trackpad, without a doubt .

2 Where the need S differs from the Incredible S is, firstly, within the underlying Android OS, which tastes of Gingerbread (2.3.3), Google’s latest mobile flavor. There aren’t actually quite a few noticeable differences between both devices on that account, but HTC has also taken the chance to tweak Sense at the Desire S besides, with a group of changes you’ll notice more readily. One among them is that the jumbo clock / weather widget now has an alternate clock / social feed option, whereby you get the newest update out of your Facebook or Twitter friends as slightly blurb under the time. More valuable, however, is HTC’s integration of a fast Settings menu alongside the standard Notifications inside the drop-down Android menu. This offers you shut to instant access to options you’ll likely use frequently, inclusive of toggling the WiFi, GPS, or mobile hotspot functions off and on. We’d be even happier to work out this menu take over the location of the Personalize item next to the telephone dialer on the bottom of the house screen, but having it in any respect is a move forward.

HTC also preloads the Kobo ebook reader at the Desire S, which it outfits with a neat choice of classic books to get you going. We’ve never been massive fans of reading on our smartphones, but as e-reader software goes, this one’s perfectly dandy. Rotating between landscape and portrait mode is accompanied by a red underline of a few of the text so you don’t lose your home while the content reformats itself. Overall, it left us with the impression that’s it a well thought-out, useful little slice of software.

Sense also gets an overdue upgrade to how it manages applications — with the icon grid now scrolling up and down in a paginated fashion and being accompanied by subcategories to your downloaded and most often used apps — but our overwhelming feeling remains that we’ve seen this all before. Regardless of its small iterative steps forward, Sense is now a user interface that’s starting to show its age, with oversized widgets that fail to make worthwhile of the distance available to them and that egregious omnipresent menu bar on the bottom that takes up rather more space than a few links on your apps and contact must. Most other Android skins have now taken to using that as an app launcher dock, but HTC insists on providing you with instant access to objects like personalization options (which, in themselves, are hardly all that varied) other than providing you with your best option you actually want — to clear that junk far from the screen. The onscreen keyboard HTC uses can also be not the very best in its class. We found ourselves reverting to landscape mode to type comfortably, that is a bit galling on a three.7-inch device when the three.5-inch iPhone has shown that portrait touchscreen keyboards needn’t be a chore to take advantage of. All in all, we’re left eager to see some more of that fancy new 3D-ified Sense UI that HTC showed off at the recently announced EVO 3D. It’s a shame the need S couldn’t partake in that new goodness.

Wrap-up

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One of the simplest ways we are able to think about to summarize the will S is by comparing it to its nearest and dearest. Set alongside the unique Desire, it’s head, shoulders and elbows above its elder, because of a enormous improvement in battery life, a much more rugged construction, better ergonomics and the natural evolution of higher specs and software. Up against the Incredible S, things are rather less clear-cut, because the bigger brother packs a much better camera sensor and a bigger screen. Still, the will S is priced a couple of floors below the Incredible S’ penthouse ambitions, which makes it our number of the 2. Ultimately, the will S is a really well executed refinement on a formula HTC knows well, which deprives it either one of any glaring faults and of any standout features. It’s not novel, it’s not surprising, it’s just very, excellent.

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This post is tagged: construction method, internal components, lightweight metal, megapixel camera, metallic construction, rear compartments, unibody construction