[Desire HD General] tomegranate:
This is my attempt to review the phone after a year (and a bit) of use. It may seem pointless to review a phone that is at least a generation old, but I think what I have to say gives some insight into HTC as a manufacturer, and Android as a whole. These are also the sorts of things that can't be understood from using a phone for a few hours. I'll also cover Sense in part.

I'll start by listing everything that has annoyed or just disappointed me over the last 13 months.

Battery life

One of my major worries with Android as a whole (and by extension, all smartphones and the direction the market is heading): it is just not acceptable for a phone to not last a whole working day on moderate use (which for me is: about 2 hours web browsing and listening to music, a few text messages and emails). There are ways to avoid this happening (and the question should be, if users can do things to improve the battery, why don't they come out of the

factory that way?) but the fact is that a phone that requires the user to tinker extensively to get a day's reasonable use is not well designed. The trade-off is a thinner, lighter phone. Well, it's not worth it. Consumers are being hoodwinked into desiring crazy thin handsets before the technology is really there to support them. Ever-faster specs are the other side of this sorry tale. Phone software shouldn't need dual-core phones running at above 1Ghz, with 1gig of RAM. WP7 and iOS show this.

Build quality: I've had several serious problems caused by the hardware:

The battery cover - everyone knows about this. It is possible to remove it, and reinstall it, but it's difficult - and it just shouldn't be. That's all there is to it.

Volume rocker - the poor arrangement of the battery cover and the volume rocker meant that when I tried to pull off the battery cover, I broke off the top half of volume rocker. Luckily it still holds on and the volume control still works, but again - not good enough. The fact that there are packages of replacement volume rockers complete with the needed tools on Ebay show this is not limited to me and my clumsiness.

USB port - for no obvious reason, and very suddenly, the USB/charger port stopped working properly - no power was going to the phone. The main board and so the whole until had to be replaced. I'd not been rough with the connection. Which lead to...

GPS. One of my biggest disappointments. Although it worked reasonably well to begin with, when my internals were replaced because of the USB port failure, the internals must have been from the batch with the poorly connected GPS module. Everyone knows about this issue by now. I never ever ever get any GPS signal, no matter where I am or what the weather's like. Yes there are solutions, none of which worked for me, and I couldn't bare to be without my handset for another 7-14 days to get it repaired. Very poor.

HTC Sense

I've not found Sense to have any additional functionality that make it worth the resource overhead on top of Android. Really the only useful thing it does is linking contacts between my contacts and Facebook and Twitter (though this brings it's own problems, for instance forcefully importing a friend's outdated phone number from Facebook without giving me the option to choose the stored number instead). I've never been able to use the default Android calendar app because the Sense one replaces it, and I don't like the Sense one at all, it's quite unintuitive.

I find the extra chrome is not especially attractive, and doesn't make efficient use of space. It looks very mid-late 00s. So dumping Sense was one of the first things I did, first in favour of ADW Launcher and lately GO Launcher, for it's superb and beautiful widgets.

HTCSense.com - I've nearly forgotten what it did. Suffice to say, none of the services were useful enough or reliable (they didn't work at all for the first few months) to keep me coming back.

General Android issues

Music playing

There are many brilliant music-playing programs for Android. I've happily paid for two that I love using (PowerAmp and PlayerPro). Sadly, four years in, the experience of getting music onto an Android phone lags behind iPhone fundamentally. Spotify subscribers will call me a dinosaur for caring about this, but for those of us with large mp3 collections that they like to change up on their phones regularly, it's an unhappy experience. Technology

blogs would have you believe the iTunes/iPhone experience can be replicated, but my experience is that this just isn't true.

To give an overview of the problem (for anyone thinking of coming to Android and hoping to use their phone for playing music), here's my experience of using several Windows music management apps, and their limitations as a solution for managing Android devices.

DoubleTwist - marketed as iTunes for Android - laughable, and crushingly disappointing: ignoring slow performance and instability, not finding all files, misreading mp3 tags, all DoubleTwist does is sync a playlist to the phone (over Wi-Fi if you pay the upgrade). If you use iTunes, it will sync any playlist that you create in iTunes - but does anyone want to install iTunes if it's just to transfer music? I hate having it on my system. The main failing is that it has no easy way to select tracks to be transferred - they have to be added to a playlist. Unlike iTunes, you cannot tick or untick songs from the main library. If you want to remove a song from your phone, you have to find and then remove it from the appropriate playlist. Which is far more time consuming. No developers of music management software for Windows seem to understand this. The same problem applies to Winamp, Songbird, MediaMonkey, all of which I've tried and none of which work as well as iTunes does for iPods. All have various bugs or limitations (Winamp won't let you browse the syncing playlist by artist/album, only letting you edit the sync list as a great big long list, does a really poor job of finding artwork and lyrics. But the wifi sync option is very cool, if slightly pointless. Songbird is still unstable after years of development and has enduring problems with recognising tags.)

So far the best option is MediaMonkey, which is fast, stable and has some brilliant additional functions even in it's free version. It does allow you to browse tracks stored on the phone by artist and album which makes it easier to remove tracks, but doesn't give the selecting tracks from the main library option that iTunes has. Also, CD-ripping is only available in the paid version ($40).

Ideally I'd like to see Google develop or encourage the development of an iTunes equivalent media manager for Android phones on Windows that would do the simple job of syncing music easily, effectively, and without bugs! However this would go against their ambitions for getting everyone to to everything (including music) through the cloud, so I don't have much hope.

Another small issue I've got with music on Android is that the system's music management library doesn't recognise the album artist tag on music files. This means that when browsing music in any application by artist, compilations are split out into each artist. This makes for a messy library. I want the option to have all compilations combined under the 'Various Artists' name - simple to implement, but only possible by recognising the album artist tag.

Android Market

A constant source of irritation to me is a couple of bugs in the Market. The first of these is automatically starting updates which stall before downloading starts, requiring you to long-press and cancel, and then manually re-start each of the updates. Tedious. The other major problem is that about 1/3 to 1/2 the time, completed downloads will fail to install, often repeatedly. No idea. It works eventually, so it's not an issue of compatibility. Aggravating.

In progress...