The HTC Desire S

This Machine is a heavy little unit. But that gives it a great feeling of quality. The battery compartment is something of an oddity however. On first inspection, there is no way to get into the back of the handset. The top and bottom are slightly rubberised, but they don't prevent the unit slipping in your hand. But where to put your sim in isn't immediately obvious. When you figure that you have to slide the bottom portion off, things get even more unusual. Two exposed metal contacts sit on the battery cover, initially I thought this was to connect the Mic, but they're not, the mic is built into the phone on the opposite side, it just pokes out of a small hole. These contacts must let the phone know that the cover is on. I would've assumed then that these trigger the phone to dismount the memory card, to avoid the potential of read/write errors corrupting it, but no, the card is still accessible with the battery cover removed. So I have no idea why they're there. The battery is encased within the unit and a small flap must be unlocked and opened fully, in order to slide the battery out. Whilst the outside of the unit looks hardy and sturdy. The inside looks a little frail and delicate. I guess this is one to leave closed? The multicoloured default wallpaper signifies that this is without a doubt a HTC unit (see pic). Touch screen controls across it's base vibrate when touched and are as sensitive as the superbly clear and detailed screen. The buttons are Home, Menu, Back and Search. A great way to test to the processor speed and responsiveness of the handset is to tap your compass icon whilst in the maps application. Then spin around and see how fast the machine can keep up. This unit keeps up well with the change of direction and would most likely never let you down whilst out on the road. Likewise, Google sky Map is very responsive and fast to re-render the images of the night sky. The mirror app was sufficiently detailed to show me I really ought to face facts and buy myself a nasal hair trimmer. The Camera coped really well in a poorly lit room and fared even better outside, picking up the reg plate of a car about 30 yards away. Installing Skype caused a temporary glitch, but hitting the home key and relaunching fixed the problem. The neat little chrome edging around the front facing camera and earpiece give it a feeling of quality. Within the drop down menu HTC have added icons for all of your recently loaded apps, which is useful. (I do wish someone would introduce a way to easily terminate apps on android units).  HTC sense is present as you'd expect. There is a nice selection of custom skins, themes and wallpapers, with more available online. Metal looks good. One of the live wallpapers, is live maps, which shows a satellite image of wherever you are, which is pretty cool. Pinch to zoom works well in the browser. Pages look bright and vibrant. I still find it funny that apple videos don't seem to want to play! Unlike the Xoom, real flash websites on these small devices is still rubbish, (Cbeebies for example!) Screen rotate is quick though.
So overall its another quality unit from HTC. It's hard to get too excited about it as it doesn't do anything particularly special, even though, it's built very well, feels like a quality device and is reasonably cheap (free on £25 over 24 months at time of writing). These devices are becoming so accessible for all and sundry now, everyone should have a decent smartphone! But at the end of the day, it's just another great HTC phone. Which sounds like a criticism, but isn't.