HTC Desire Z Review: Specifications and First Look

HTC Desire Z Review: Specifications and First Look
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HTC Desire Z Review: First Look

HTC is having a field day in the press. It has been in the news for about a week now. First, news of a Google branded Chrome OS tablet by HTC leaked out. Then the Desire HD was officially announced by HTC. Along with the Desire HD, another Android smartphone has been launched by HTC, it’s the HTC Desire Z. It is the HTC branded version of the T-Mobile G2. It offers some nice hardware specifications and offers a 3.7 inch S-LCD touchscreen display with a QWERTY keypad.

Design

The HTC Desire Z is a stylish smartphone with a very appealing design. It is pretty compact with dimensions of 119 x 60.4 x 14.2 mm and weighs about 180 gms. It has a sliding horizontal QWERTY keypad and a 3.7 inch S-LCD capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. The S-LCD is probably used because of the worldwide AMOLED panel shortage.

It has four touch sensitive keys - Home, Menu, Back and Search and comes with an optical trackpad.

Hardware and OS

The HTC Desire Z is powered by some very good hardware, though not the very best. It has an 800 MHz Qualcomm MSM 7230 processor with 512 MB RAM. It offers 1.5 GB internal storage and supports up to 32 GB microSD cards.

It comes with Android 2.2 Froyo installed and also sports the HTC Sense UI, which is probably the best custom Android UI. It will include full support for the Android Market and the ample amount of RAM will ensure that you can multitask a number of apps easily.

Multimedia

The HTC Desire Z is well endowed on the multimedia front as well. It has a 5 MP camera which can capture images at a maximum resolution of 2592 х 1944 pixels. It comes with autofocus, LED flash and features like geotagging and face detection. It can also record 720p HD video. It also has an FM radio with RDS and can play MP4, 3GP, H.264 videos as well as MP3, AAC and WMA audio files.

The 3.7 inch display is big enough to watch videos and movies without straining your eyes.

Connectivity

Like every other smartphone I’ve reviewed in the past month, the HTC Desire Z sports the standard connectivity options - GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP. It also has microUSB 2.0 connectivity and comes with a GPS transceiver with A-GPS.

It comes with the default Android Webkit based browser, one of the finest mobile web browsers.

Conclusion

The HTC Desire Z is a very nice Android smartphone which is perfect for those who want a physical QWERTY keypad. It is powered by some very good hardware and runs the latest Android OS version.