The HTC HD2 is the greatest Windows Mobile phone in the world. That may not necessarily be saying much, but HTC has effectively covered up Windows Mobile’s flaws with a customised user interface so beautiful that just looking up the weather brings tears to our eyes. Also, the HD2’s huge, 109mm (4.3-inch) screen makes the tiny icons in Microsoft’s mobile OS worth tapping on.
Hardware
The HD2 is a magnificent monster. It is a hulking, intimidating, massive slab of a gadget. If you think the device looks big in photos, it’s nothing compared to how it seems up close. Yes, the HD2 is large — some might say too large — almost less a phone and more a tablet. We don’t happen to fall into the camp that has complaints about a device of this size (the whole thing measures 4.74-inches up and down by 2.64-inches across), in fact, we love the bulk and surface area of the HD2. Of course, not everyone will feel as affectionate about the size as we do, and even though the phone is a svelte 11mm (0.43-inches) thick, the sheer vastness of the handset might be a turnoff to some; to be fair, small-handed folks might have trouble getting comfortable with their grip. The industrial design of the device itself is perfectly at home with its contemporaries in the smartphone space, and the metal and glass unit comes off feeling like a kind of large, first-gen iPhone (minus the gaudy bezel). It strikes just the right middle ground between sophisticated and ostentatious — and we think it’s a winning mix.
The basic layout of the HD2 is uncluttered and uncomplicated, providing only a few hardware buttons, and leaving the rest of the navigation up to that beautiful screen. On the front of the device are a set of standard hard keys: phone, home, a Windows key, back, and end. Around the left side is a thin volume rocker, along the bottom is the micro-USB port and 3.5mm headphone jack, and the backside reveals an oddly protruding camera — it really stands off the rest of the phone. In all it’s a handsome and useful mix, but given all this real estate, a ringer on / off switch and dedicated camera button would have been welcome inclusions.
Internals
Much fuss has been made about the guts of the HD2 — mostly due to the inclusion of the heavily hyped 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, a first for HTC. We won’t lie; this thing blazes. For a WinMo device (or any device, for that matter), the HD2 is one of the most fluid and snappy that we’ve tested. Applications open up like whip cracks, scrolling through menus in the graphically intense Sense UI is buttery smooth, and the overall speed of the phone feels accelerated compared to its competitors — especially in the Windows Mobile space (including HTC’s other offerings). Aside from the ‘dragon, the device sports 512MB of ROM, 448MB of RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, an auto-focusing 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash, a microSD slot (supporting up to 32GB cards), a 3.5mm headphone jack, plus an accelerometer, proximity sensor, and light sensor on-board. To say it’s stacked is an understatement; hardware-wise, the HD2 joins the ranks of devices like the Droid, N900, and Liquid in the new class of high-end smartphone.
Display
Forget miniaturisation. We want bigger, flashier screens on our mobiles, and that’s what the HD2 delivers. It sports an epic screen — the biggest of any mobile currently out there, in fact. Despite this, unlike the Toshiba TG01, it doesn’t feel that huge, since the bezel around the screen is so small. At 67 by 121 by 11mm, it’s possible to pop the HD2 into a pocket, although you’ll need a big one.
We love the large touchscreen for all the usual reasons — it makes it simple to surf the Web and watch videos, for example — but one of its biggest strengths is that it makes using Windows Mobile easy. Despite improvements in the latest version of the OS, Windows Mobile 6.5, there’s no hiding the fact that this operating system was originally designed to have tiny icons that the user poked with a stylus. Now that we’re used to poking with a fingertip, we need big, finger-friendly icons. The HD2’s huge touchscreen makes everything easy to tap.
Emails on the home screen look great, but, to read the whole message, you have to use the ugly Windows Mobile email viewer
What really made us drench the HD2 in tears of joy, however, is the fact that the touchscreen is of the capacitive variety, so you don’t have to apply pressure to make it work. The touchscreen is responsive and a pleasure to use, especially in the parts of the user interface customised by HTC. The home screen, for example, has a fun, sliding menu bar along the bottom, for navigating to key areas of the phone, like contacts and messages. HTC’s great design and the huge screen make this part of the phone simply gorgeous. We usually consider weather apps a waste of space, but we could watch the smooth, beautiful animation of clouds rolling in on the HD2 for days.
Camera
The HD2’s 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and dual LED flash is only part of the cameraphone experience; software factors in heavily, too, and HTC has loaded up the device with its own special blend of camera / photo management apps. At the outset, we felt that the device was capable of really solid picture-taking, offering more than adequate standard shots and decent macro with excellent focal lengths for the small lens. We ended up with a handful of nice images — the focus time was The experience was a quick and painful reminder that no matter how pretty the window dressing is here, HTC has staged its fashion show in a building that should be scheduled for demolition.
sufficient, and while the color balance seemed a bit mismatched to our subjects, it wasn’t a show stopper by any means. In general, the camera performed dutifully, and seemed on par with many of the HD2’s contemporaries. We can’t say that’s a consistent feeling we have about this camera, however, due to the incredibly buggy experience the software provided when trying to capture video. Switching to video mode caused the device to stutter into the secondary functionality with a not-so assuring hiccup and jump. Once we were able to actually shoot, what we saw on-screen was a laggy, jerky mess. The refresh rate was abysmal — perhaps 5 FPS. We experienced similar problems when going from dark to light settings with the still mode, but nothing like what we saw when shooting video. The real insult happened once we completed shooting; when trying to play back the video, not only did it never load, but it crashed out the app and forced us into a nice Windows Mobile error screen. The experience was a quick and painful reminder that no matter how pretty the window dressing is here, HTC has staged its fashion show in a building that should be scheduled for demolition.
Coincidentally, some HD2s in the field are afflicted with a strange issue causing images to come out with strong pink casts, and admittedly, our unit did have an odd hue in some shots; HTC has yet to determine whether this’ll require a hardware or software fix, but for the sake of current owners, we’re hoping it’s the latter.
Social-networking
HTC has brought the same social-networking mojo that we loved on the HTC Hero to the HD2. This includes an address book that grabs your friends’ info from Facebook, a photo gallery that grabs their online photos, and a dedicated Twitter app as one of the home-screen tabs. It all works fairly well, although we had to merge many of our contacts manually if they weren’t using the same email address everywhere. Also, Twitter didn’t update reliably enough.
Walking the Web
You have a choice of two built-in Web browsers. HTC has gone with the speedy Opera Mobile as its default choice, but Internet Explorer is also on-board, and, although slower, it supports Flash so you can see more Web sites as their designers intended.
You can also track down other choices, like Fennec (from the crazy kids who brought you Firefox) and Skyfire. With a big screen like the HD2’s, it might be worth trying them all out to find your favourite.
Multitude of touches
HTC has put some welcome effort into making the HD2 support multi-touch gestures, letting you, for example, zoom into Web pages by pinching the screen with two fingers. But be warned that, in terms of browsers, multi-touch gestures only work with the default Opera Mobile. Multi-touch functionality also makes an appearance, however, in the Google Maps and photo-gallery apps. It makes using the phone so much more fun that HTC should get a hug every time someone takes advantage of it.
Speaker / earpiece
The sound on the HD2 was certainly more than passable. We wouldn’t say it was Droid-level clarity, but HTC has done an admirable job of equipping the phone with a solid, loud speaker, and a decently clear earpiece. We mainly tested the unlocked device on T-Mobile, which handled calls well, and there was little-to-no distortion or noise for both sending and receiving. The speaker had no trouble handling our conference calls (of which there have many lately… hello redesign), and all callers reported clear signals from our end. Generally there was little to report of note, suffice to say that the HD2 held up well in tests, and certainly can’t be knocked on sound quality.
Software
Ultimately — as most avid readers of the site are probably thinking — the HD2 questions aren’t really about the hardware (impressive though it may be). No, the questions you likely have about the HD2 concern the software side… more specifically, HTC’s Sense Experience UI and its marriage to the newly (kinda) minted Windows Mobile 6.5. This is where the phone ultimately shows its true colors, and where we think the meat of this review lies.
If you don’t know (and honestly, you don’t?), HTC has moved on from its TouchFLO interfaces into decidedly more mature and sophisticated territory with Sense. Instead of simply skinning some of the elements of Windows Mobile, the company has eradicated major parts of the OS, created a handful of really dense and useful applications and utilities, and added functionality like multitouch pretty much throughout the OS. The Sense Experience is based on a simple use paradigm; the lower part of the display is lined with small icons — shortcuts to applications and widgets — on a potentially endless, scrollable list, while the majority of your view up top is used to display the application or widget itself. The widgets are either self-contained programs, or hook into more in-depth apps, usually activated by a single tap on the main content of that particular view. Because the Sense UI is shared by both Windows Mobile and Android now, not all of these applications will seem completely fresh. For instance, the company has bundled its Twitter client, Peep, with the HD2 (as on the Hero / Eris), as well as the geotagging photo program Footprints, and has skinned the mail, message, and homescreen views with Sense’s polished style and functionality. The home view is of particular note; HTC has created a combo clock, weather report, calendar notification, and application launcher which is not only really useful, but incredibly attractive. One of the really jaw-dropping points of the phone is its animated weather displays in this view, which take over the entire display with rainstorms, lens flares, and banks of clouds moving in from the screen edges. It’s a delightful — if totally useless — example of just what this platform can do.
Windows Mobile is a great platform for app developers, but we found the HD2’s on-board apps to be a mixed bag. For instance, the YouTube app is fast and easy to use, while the Facebook app doesn’t have all the features we need — we ended up going to the Web site to check our inbox.
There are heaps more excellent apps out there for this platform, but they’re not always easy to find or install. Microsoft has launched Windows Marketplace for Mobile to help, but the shelves are still almost bare. We missed the simplicity of Apple’s App Store, but at least the big screen makes browsing the Web for good apps a pleasure.
The HD2 also includes the Microsoft My Phone service, which makes it wonderfully easy to back up your files and manage them from anywhere over the Web. It beats ActiveSync and a USB cable any day, and, unlike Apple’s MobileMe offering, it’s free.
Battery life
As with most smartphones we test these days, the HD2’s battery life was sufficient, though not by any means breathtaking. On an average day of use, we could power through till evening without need a recharge, though if we were on the phone a lot, we found the drain to be fairly noticeable. We got the overwhelming impression that WM 6.5 isn’t perfectly optimized for data-heavy devices like the HD2 — phones getting constant emails, IMs, Twitter updates, and pulling down robust webpages. Still, the device held up decently in our tests (it didn’t strike us as terribly distinct from something like the iPhone 3GSs battery performance), and given the gigantic screen and 1GHz CPU, that’s pretty heartening.
We like:
Huge capacitive touchscreen; speedy and responsive; good-looking home screen; great virtual keyboard; built-in social-networking links; speedy Wi-Fi and HSDPA connectivity; 3.5mm headphone jack means you can use your own cans; useful My Phone back-up service; good apps available; support for multi-touch gestures in many apps; 5-megapixel camera with two LED photo lights
We don’t like:
HTC’s user-interface tweaks feel skin-deep in places; apps are hard to find and install; confusing overlap between features; rubbish app store; some features are rough around the edges
You might also need:
A microSD card will pump up the memory
Conclusion
The HTC HD2 applies a substantial boot to the backside of every other Windows Mobile phone currently available. In fact, it accomplishes the near impossible — it makes Windows Mobile crave-worthy. We love its huge capacitive touchscreen, and, thanks to HTC, it’s got a lovely home screen and some excellent apps. We only wish that the user-interface tweaks were less skin-deep in places, and that Windows Marketplace for Mobile did a better job of helping us find the best apps out there.
