The first Android phone had a QWERTY keypad and was manufactured by HTC. After that there haven t been a lot of droids with QWERTY keypads and HTC in particular never visited that territory. Not until now, that is. The successor to the original droid, the T-Mobile G1 was followed by the G2, which is several leagues ahead of its predecessor. Of course, that phone is restricted to T-Mobile so HTC came up with the Desire Z - the phone that we are reviewing today - where they loaded it with their own Sense UI and are selling it unlocked in other markets. The phone has been selling in the Indian market for some time now but it took HTC a while to send us a review sample. Nevertheless, we have the phone with us now and we have been spending some quality time with it. So read on if you want the full review.
Design and Build
The Desire Z has a slightly subdued design compared to the Desire. You can tell it is designed to suit a businessman more than, say, a college goer. Nevertheless, it is still a handsome phone. The silver brushed aluminum finish goes well with the grey rubberized plastic. Metal is used sparingly on the Desire Z, possibly to keep the weight less; the sliding mechanism already adds a lot to that.
Design and Build
The Desire Z has a slightly subdued design compared to the Desire. You can tell it is designed to suit a businessman more than, say, a college goer. Nevertheless, it is still a handsome phone. The silver brushed aluminum finish goes well with the grey rubberized plastic. Metal is used sparingly on the Desire Z, possibly to keep the weight less; the sliding mechanism already adds a lot to that.
On the front you have the large earpiece on the top with the ambient light sensor and the proximity sense hidden towards its left. Below is the 3.7-inch display covered with a Gorilla Glass. Below the display is a thin row of touch sensitive keys along with an optical trackpad. We preferred the physical controls below the Desire's display; it is much more difficult to press unintentionally. The trackpad has a ring that glows when you have a notification.
On the left side are the volume control buttons and the micro USB port. On the right is the camera shutter button, and the button for releasing the battery cover.
On the top is the 3.5mm headphone jack and a power button.
On the back you can see the 5 megapixel camera lens with an LED flash. The loudspeaker is on their right.
To open the slider you just have to apply some force on the left edge and it immediately pops open. HTC is using a unique mechanism for the slider. Like the one on the E7, it can barely be called a slider since there is hardly any sliding going on. The display actually lifts off the hinges and falls back above the keypad. There is a difference between this mechanism and the one on the E7. In the latter, the display rests at an angle, whereas on the Desire Z it lies flat. The second method is more comfortable for typing as the display is at the same angle as the keypad, but the tilted display on the E7 did come in handy while watching videos.
The slider, however, is a bit loose. This isn't due to poor build quality but more due to the fact that it had to be that way for the slider to open with minimum effort. You see, unlike conventional sliders, there is no sliding on the Desire Z, so for the display to lift and fall back into its place, it would take a lot more effort than usual. To reduce that effort, HTC seems to have used hinges that move much more freely than usual.
This has its ill effects, however. For example, when you are in bed and holding the phone upside down over your face, the keypad tends to close or fall back on the keys when opened due to gravity. Opening the phone in one swift motion with a bit more force seems to make it stay longer, yet at times it still tends to fall back.
This occasional annoyance aside, the slider really doesn't pose too much of a problem. In fact it is one of the nicest mechanisms we have seen on a phone and is effortless to use. It also feels sturdy, as does the rest of the phone.
Display
The Desire Z has a 3.7-inch, 480 x 800 resolution display, S-LCD. It is the same display as the one used on the Desire. The IPS panel is of extremely high quality and looks terrific indoors. The colors, contrast, brightness, black levels, viewing angles, all are superb. With LCDs like these you don't really miss not having AMOLED displays. The sunlight visibility could have been a bit better though. The display doesn't wash out completely, but is still not very easy to read and only visible at maximum brightness.
The display is covered by Corning's Gorilla Glass. We tested the scratch resistance and found it to be satisfactory.
The keypad on the Desire Z is its biggest feature and what sets it apart from other phones in its price range. At first glance it looks inviting and comfortable to type on but that wasn't exactly the case. First of all, the keys are a bit stiff and take a bit more effort to use. The top row is also pretty close to the display which comes in the way while typing. The placement of the keys also wasn't very well thought out and keys like Tab and Menu are placed where you are likely to hit them accidentally. We also missed a Ctrl button, that would allow us to do simple tasks such as cut, copy and paste without having to use the touchscreen.
HTC has included couple of shortcut buttons on the keyboard. You can assign a function to them, which can be accessed from anywhere. You can also assign a secondary function to them, which can be accessed by pressing either of the keys and one of the alphabet keys but this only works in the Home screen.
Overall the keypad is decent and definitely beats using a software keypad. But it isn't as good as the one on, say, the Nokia E7.
Hardware
The HTC Desire Z has a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 Soc. It has a 800MHz Scorpion CPU and an Adreno 205 GPU. We assume HTC went for the slower MSM7233 instead of the MSM8255 so that it would place the Desire Z in a lower class compared to HTC's other Android smartphones, such as the Desire HD, Incredible S and the new Desire S. It also has 512MB of RAM instead of 768MB.
Software
The Desire Z currently ships with Android 2.2.1 Froyo, although a Gingerbread update is expected soon. It comes with the latest version of the HTC Sense UI. The new version adds useful features such as a new fast boot option, which puts the phone in a low power state when you switch it off so it can quickly resume when you turn it back on. This is similar to the feature that BlackBerry phones have, although HTC phones don't take as long to resume when you remove the battery. You can switch this feature off if you want and HTC advises that you should if you want to use some apps, but which ones exactly is not explicitly mentioned. There is also a new power saver mode, which gets automatically enabled when the battery level drops below a certain value. It disables or alters a variety of options, which you can choose from the settings menu, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, on-screen animations, vibration feedback, screen brightness, backlight duration, etc.
HTC has altered the notification menu as well. It now shows the list of last opened apps, although you can still press and hold the Home button to access the same. Along with wallpapers and scenes, you also have skins, which alter the look of the UI elements, such as the notification bar, the bottom bar on the homescreen and the lock screen slider, etc. and come with a matching wallpaper.
HTC now has their own navigation application on the phone, along with Google Maps. They also have their own application store called HTC Likes, although it does not actually house the apps. You are directed to the respective pages when you try to download an app from there. There is also the HTC Hub, where you can download wallpapers, scenes, skins, ringtone sets, etc. for your phone.
Apart from these major changes, the OS is more or less the same as what we saw on the Desire. As usual HTC has done a remarkable job of designing the UI. They have basically redesigned the whole UI, and it almost looks nothing like stock Froyo. Usually, we don't think too highly of custom skins installed by OEMs but we not only like HTC's implementation we think even Google could learn a thing or two from it.
There were certain issues we faced on the Desire Z though. At times the phone would become very sluggish, which does not suit a phone in this price range. For example, when we tried to open the notification tray, the phone would momentarily freeze. After the phone is unplugged from the PC it would become very sluggish till it finishes reading the memory card.
The biggest annoyance was using the search option in the phone, where the phone would just come down to a halt as it tried to read through multiple files and tried to search what we were typing. This would be extremely frustrating when trying to find a contact or an app in a hurry. We don't know whether it was the 800MHz CPU to fault or that HTC perhaps went overboard with the Sense UI and made it too heavy to handle, but it definitely took away a lot from the user experience.
Connectivity
The Desire Z is a quad-band GSM handset and also supports HSPA 900/2100 bands. It also supports GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth v2.1, Wi-Fi 802.11n and A-GPS connectivity. The performance of all radio units was satisfactory. Even the built-in FM radio, which we observed had very poor sensitivity in other HTC phones, was working well on the Desire Z.
The Desire Z has a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash. This is the same camera found on the Desire, which means it produces some strictly average quality pictures. Images shot with the Desire Z often have inaccurate colors, over-sharpened edges, poor details and more than acceptable amount of noise. The dynamic range was also poor and the camera often overexposes brightly lit objects, including those taken by its own flash.
Video quality too was average. The videos were slightly stuttery, which was the case with the Desire as well. We have seen better video quality on the iPod touch.
The music player on the Desire Z supports nearly every format except for FLAC, which was disappointing. It did support OGG though, which was highly unusual. The music player software is an improvement over the standard Android player although we were surprised at the lack of equalizers. Strangely, HTC deems it fit to include an equalizer on their Windows Phone 7 devices but not on their Android phones. Regardless of that, the audio quality on the phone is excellent through the headphones and it sounds good even through the loudspeaker, although it isn't particularly loud.
HTC has chucked the flashy 3D gallery of Android 2.2 for a better version of theirs. This new gallery, however, takes a while to create thumbnails for high resolution images. It also places the videos in the image gallery, even though there is a separate video player.
Speaking of video player, the new video player supports DivX and Xvid files, however, it only does that if the file is in the AVI format. MKV files are a strict no-no, which is a big disappointment. 720p videos work as long as they conform to the supported codecs, although occasionally the player drops frames. We tried a third party video player, Rockplayer, and although it had better format support, the videos were terribly sluggish and not watchable. We suspect the 800MHz CPU may be the one to blame here.
We have now come to accept that there is no point expecting good battery life from Android smartphones. Having all those services running in the background, there is no way these phones can still manage to give good battery life. The Desire Z did nothing to change this belief of ours and performed expectedly bad. With a full charge and heavy usage, the phone dropped down in the red zone after a mere 12 hours of usage.
Even with minimal usage we were having a hard time getting 24 hours of battery life. To get any more life out of the battery, we would have to disable most of the services that run in the background and completely miss the point of using an Android smartphone. Still, for once we would like an Android phone that does not punish us with poor battery life for using it the way it's meant to be used.
Verdict
The HTC Desire Z is priced at Rs. 24,999. Although it isn't cheap, you do get a lot for your money. Overall, the Desire Z performs well with no real weakness. There are minor annoyances, but then most phones do and the Desire Z is no exception. But perhaps the problem with the Desire Z is that while it does everything well it isn't great at anything in particular.
There is a full QWERTY keypad but it isn't that great that would make it the USP of the phone. So while the Desire Z does do well in most areas, it fails to excite and impress the way some of its competitors do and in a market crowded with so many great options, that is something that works against it. Simply put, even though it is a great smartphone, we probably won't put our money on it.
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