Review : hTC Desire

This is more like a mini-review on Eureka too since they’re the store I purchased my hTC Desire from. I wasn’t satisfied at all with the experience I had with Eureka but they were the best choice from the 3 stores selling the hTC Desire unofficially, it still has not been officially released in the middle east, you can go to hTC’s website and select the middle east only to see how far behind we are in phone models. That is why for store’s to profit they have to bring phones unofficially released because it takes forever otherwise. A big surprise to some of you, even the iPhone isn’t official in Kuwait (not even in the coming soon category) let alone the recently released bigger version of the iPhone lacking multi-tasking, the iPad.

These were the current offers I had to pick from

Al Ghanim (Xcite) - 249KD - 1 Year( Warranty )
Eureka - 219KD - 1 Year ( Warranty )
Electrozan - 219KD - 30 Days ( Warranty )

Clearly Eureka was the better choice, so I went to Eureka got the phone with an extended 1 year warranty (They charge you 7% of the product price for 1 extra year and 11% for 2 extra years). So that’s just about 234KD, added a 16GB memory card for 13KD, hit 247KD total. The sales person warned me the device didn’t have Arabic which I was already aware of and didn’t mind. I went home all hyped up, noticed Desire’s box was all in German, opened the box and all the catalogs were in German too, funny I’d end up in this situation in an Arabic country with English as second language, kind of ticked me off.

Switched the phone on only to be surprised with a T-Mobile logo popping up.

So now I’m stuck with a T-Mobile firmware which wasn’t part of the deal, I felt ripped off because they probably got the phone for free, unlocked it and sold it. Won’t be surprised if they get sued for this, it’s not legit at all. People should by now know how far stores are crossing the red line to sell the latest phones and we’re the ones that suffer. If they warned me before purchase that it was T-Mobile firmware I would have bought it elsewhere. It’s sold for around 150KD in Amazon UK, I didn’t pay an extra 70KD only to get a T-Mobile ripoff.

Now to the phone itself, when it comes to hardware hTC Desire is without doubt one of the top devices in the competition at the moment, iPhone 3GS wouldn’t come close with a 400Mhz Processor compared to Desire’s 1000Mhz Snapdragon. Let’s just hope the iPhone 4G sheds some light.

On to software, the Desire obviously operates using Android, which is the main reason why I bought the phone. Android’s sales hit 2nd this quarter just behind RIM(blackberry) which is an amazing achievement knowing that the Android first hit markets only 18 months ago, now they have over 50,000 applications. Desire runs on Esclair (2.1) and I can’t wait for it to update to Froyo 2.2 (Frozen Yogurt). There are so many features I can’t wait to get my hands on like storing apps in the memory card and making my phone a hotspot where up to 8 devices can connect at the same time and of course having the new JIT (just in time) technology making the device run 2-5 times faster.

To me, I honestly see hTC’s Sense UI (User interface) as a disadvantage for one major reason. It takes way too long for hTC’s Sense to integrate on an updated version. I mean sure I get to have a really cool looking theme with a few extra apps but I would rather have my phone updated on the day of the update release and lose all those extra features. That’s why you see hTC users rooting their devices like crazy to get Froyo in and Sense out. In Sony Ericson’s case it’s a complete disaster, they are way behind when it comes to software, the 4.0 inch x10 runs Donut (1.6) and is expected to be upgraded to Esclair (2.1) by the end of the year yet people are already running Froyo (2.2) on other devices right this moment! They need a lot of catching up to do if they want to stay in competition. All this falling behind in updates on hTC and SE devices is because they need time to make their applications and UI’s compatible with the newer version of Android. This why Nexus one has an advantage, it runs on Vanilla OS, which updates instantly when a newer version is out.

To conclude, I’m loving every aspect of the phone, I’m just pissed off at Eureka abrupt actions. Feel free to leave any questions about the phone and I’ll reply whenever I have time in my hands.

Written by Abdulaziz