A sense of desire
Smartphone maker HTC hosted its biggest launch event to date in London today, flying in hacks from around the world to witness its new shiny things.
The two handsets launched were the Desire HD and Desire Z. The former appears to the Android successor to the HD2, sporting as it does a massive 4.3 inch screen, 8 MP camera and 720p video capture. The Desire Z combines a 3.7 inch screen with a slide-out QWERTY and puts the emphasis on good old social networking.
But as big a handset launch as this is for HTC, the enhancements to its own user interface - HTC Sense - seem to be at least as momentous. The new Sense marks the launch of HTCSense.com - a range of new services.
"HTCSense.com provides customers with the additional ability to customise and control their handset experiences," said Peter Chou - HTC CEO - at the event. John Wang, the chief marketing officer, insisted that Sense is not just a UI, but a "holistic experience". The aim is to make communicating, via the ever-growing means at our disposal, as easy and intuitive as possible.
With Android fast becoming ubiquitous, how handset makers differentiate the core offering could prove critical. As well as all the social networking yumminess, there are unique navigation features, multimedia options such as the ability to share video with TVs, and an e-reader with a new e-book store.
Back to the handsets, the Desire HD is the first to be powered by the 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 8255 SoC - the successor to the Snapdragon found in the original Desire and the Nexus One - while the Desire Z has the 800 MHz Snapdragon 7230. Both have the new, improved Adreno 205 graphics core.
Both phones will be available next month in Europe, but HTC didn't mention pricing. It looks like North America only gets the Desire Z, and that's later in the year.
