Myhphone – Mobile Phone Info Center

Since the original HTC HD was launched about a year ago, it was highly complimented by most of the reviewers for its astonishing display and excellent UI. Hence when the company announced the HTC HD2, we are really looking forward for the device to be released. Thankfully, the device is finally hit on the market, and by only look at the specs, we already impressed: 4.3″ screen, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, tons of RAM, and etc…However, that is only a part of the of the handset, it is definitely have more than that. Keep read on to get more info about it.

Design

As you already know that HTC HD2 has a 4.3 inches display, it’s clearly that the phone is not small. The 120.5 x 67 x 11 mm of size is really acceptable since it has such a large screen, and with the thick of 11mm, it is considered a very slim device. The giant 4.3 inches display has a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, and applying capacitive touchscreen technology, which mean the screen not only big but also good for touch control. The image is brilliant displayed on the screen, colors are sharp and bright, no wonder the phone is called HD. Below the screen are five hardware buttons which is the same layout as we have seen on the HTC Touch2 : talk/send, home, start, back and end/power. Overall the design of the phone is great, but the hardware buttons seem spoil the front design. We prefer touch sensitive keys like it predecessor because it feel more classy than hardware buttons.

User Interface

HTC HD2 is applied their own revamped HTC Sense UI  (previously knew as TouchFLO 3D) which is famous of their customization and able to conceal the Window Mobile 6.5 OS UI.  The UI has 13 tabs for different application panel that including Homescreen, Contacts, Messages, Mail,  Internet, Calendar, Stocks, Pictures and Video’s,  Music, Weather,  Twitter, Footprints and Settings. Except for homescreen and Settings, all the tabs can be enabled or disabled and  also re-ordered at your own will. 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. One of this significant layout is there is a slider bar at the bottom for different application widgets. The widgets can be either self-contained programs, or hook into more in-depth apps. In many applications, the HD2 makes use of multitouch to pinch and zoom.There are many application can utilize the pinch to zoom feature like Office Mobile apps, photo gallery, PDF reader, Outlook, NewsBreak, Internet Explorer mobile, Remote Desktop Mobile, and Google Maps. The whole Sense experience just well, thanks for the Snapdragon 1GHz processor and 448 MB RAM&512 MB ROM, the UI seems running smoothly, no noticeable lagging was found.

Social Networking

Well, it seems a must for every high-end handset to giving the social network friendly application/features on their handset now, no different for HD2. On the homescreen you can see a Twitter client widget on there. Tap  on the widgets and then swipe across, you will able to see replies, direct messages and any starred tweets that you’ve marked as a favorite. Also, there is Facebook integration too, but unfortunately unlike twitter, you can’t see status updates direction from the homescreen. However you can include an address book that grabs your friends’ info from Facebook.

Music and Video

The HTC HD2 has their own music player instead of the depressing Windows Media Player. You can access the music player by the Music tab.  The music player includes its own similar to the iPhone’s Coverflow, and have very basic control like play, pause, and go to the next and previous song. Video playback however in the other tabs, because it don’t have dedicated video player tab like the music player does. You can access the videos only on the Pictures&Video tab. The video player is able to playback many format such as MP4,WMV,H.264,H.263 and even DiVX and XviD files. As expeceted, watching video is enjoyable by the big screen.

Final Words

Needless to say the huge capacitive touchscreen is the selling point of the phone and we do like it very much and that is not the all of the phone. The multi-touch browsing and overlap UI also work very well and the respond of the phone really fast. In a nutshell, for all the WinMo phone that we have seen so far,  HTC HD 2 could be the top.