HTC Desire Z deals & review

The Desire Z is very similar in physical appearance and software design to the highly popular Desire, with the notable addition of a physical keyboard. The keyboard means that the Desire Z is bigger and bulkier than the standard Desire, although this is to be expected. While it is certainly a notable chunk of phone it is not too big or bulky for most people's tastes.

While the Desire was a highly popular phone the Desire Z is aimed at people looking for a similar experience but who like a physical method of typing messages and emails. An onscreen keyboard is still provided, so that you are given a choice in all situations and are not limited to one method of input.

From the front the Desire Z looks like the Desire. It has the same overall shape and feel to it, although there are a few noticeable differences. Firstly, the physical Android buttons that were found on the first Desire now take the form of soft keys below the screen. These are still in the same order from left to right: Home, Menu, Back and Search, and these new soft keys have also been featured on the more recent Desire S. In my opinion the soft keys are a little too close to the screen, and sometimes when trying to press them I have found myself selecting something on the screen by mistake.

The other main difference on the front of the device is the trackpad which is a bit bigger and easier to use. This helps you to navigate around menus and can be pressed to make selections. In reality though, as was the case with the Desire, you will probably not use this feature much at all. Even though it is now easier to use it is also still a bit redundant on a touchscreen phone which is presumably why HTC had it removed on the Desire S sequel. Still, such things remain a common feature on BlackBerry handsets and others which suggests that at least some people still find them beneficial.

Turn the Desire Z on its side and you notice one of the biggest differences to the original Desire; it is a lot thicker. This is because of the keyboard. As other people have pointed out the term "slide-out keyboard" is a bit misleading here as the keyboard doesn't really slide-out, it pops out. Using swivel arms the screen will rise up and move over in an arc movement which is pretty swift. It is also assisted by the mechanism so that when it has been pushed a certain amount it will automatically flip open or shut. Thanks to this mechanism the phone will not get stuck in a half opened state while in a bag or pocket.

The keyboard that it reveals is about half the size of the screen. It would be wrong to expect it to be the same size, as this would be an awful design, but seeing as the front face of the phone is not huge in itself the keyboard can feel a bit cramped for people like me who have bigger fingers. This may not be so much of an issue for people with smaller fingers or those who are used to using smaller keyboards like the ones found on BlackBerry phones.

I particularly found the top row of keys to be quite troublesome as they were too close to the screen for my liking causing me to have to point my thumbs in an unnatural stabbing position to press buttons. If you have long nails you will find this especially annoying, as the nails will require you to use the flat soft part of your thumbs or fingers. For other fat thumbed people like myself the keys may be a little too close together although they can still be typed with a high degree of accuracy. The buttons are fairly stiff which is I think the main thing that slows down typing with this keyboard.

I can't type as fast as on the Desire Z as I can on a standard computer keyboard, and can probably type more easily with the onscreen keyboard. Using the keypad is certainly very accurate but not quite as speedy as I would like. Typing with the onscreen keyboard in landscape is much quicker and highly accurate and if I found myself owning the Desire Z this is probably the method I would mainly use.

It is certainly much more accurate than some other Android keyboards, such as the one found on the Galaxy S2. Ironically, while the physical keyboard is great fun to have available I actually feel like the Desire Z is one of the few touchscreen phones that doesn't actually need one.

The software keyboard uses word prediction and can offer corrections for misspelt words. The onscreen keyboard in portrait mode is not so great. It is still accurate and responsive but the keys are too tall and narrow too make it easy to use.

Opening up the keyboard will automatically turn the interface into landscape mode. Closing it again reverts it back to portrait. Opening the keyboard also gets rid of the onscreen keyboard if you have this open, so you can't attempt to use both at once.

One of the things I liked most about this physical keyboard is that you can assign shortcuts to certain buttons. You can assign a button to load the camera (not necessary as there is already a camera button for this), or perhaps to load the web browser. Two buttons are dedicated to this task entirely, and can be activated from anywhere on the phones interface. Additionally, you can assign shortcuts to other buttons that can be used just on the homescreen.

These additional shortcuts are limited to homescreen use so that they don't interfere with other apps and features. If you assign the "C" button to launch the camera app, you don't want this happening every time you press the button when typing out a message or email. With the two main shortcut buttons you can quickly switch between your favourite apps without the need to navigate around the homescreen or applications menu.

The Desire Z is full of nice little shortcuts like this. One of the other ones I found particularly useful is that the phone provides you with shortcuts to primary apps from the notification tray. When you pull down the notification menu, from wherever this is possible, you can quickly launch the camera, messaging, browser or Android Market or simply load up the phone dialler. Another simple little idea, but one that makes using the phone so much easier. This will also provide shortcuts to recently used apps so that you can quickly get back to something you were doing just a little while ago.

With multiple shortcuts calibrated to the keyboard you can quickly and easily load up several different apps without going to the homescreen or app menu. This was my favourite thing about the Desire Z's keyboard because, as already mentioned, I found it easier and preferable to type with the onscreen keyboard. This combined with the app shortcuts added into the notification tray make it much easier load certain apps on the Desire Z than many other Android phones.

The Desire Z is made from an aluminium chassis which is one the things that make it feel so sturdy but also one of the things that make it feel quite weighty. The materials used make it feel like it could be dropped with less damage accrued than would be the case with many leading plastic phones that would shatter in the same situations.

The battery cover is also metallic and only covers some of the back of the phone, rather than the whole body. This is easy to remove with a physical switch on the side of the phone which can be flicked to remove the battery cover. You won't find yourself doing this by mistake all too often as it is a stiff and sturdy switch that requires some force to activate, but not so much that you will have difficulty removing it intentionally. This beats trying to prize off a thin and delicate plastic casing with your nails – as is the case with more recent handsets on the market.

The screen on the Desire Z measures 3.7 inches which is spacious while still allowing the phone some good pocket friendly proportions. The screen is Super LCD which offers some good colours and detail. Like many LCD screens it suffers a bit in direct sunlight but is not anywhere near as bad as some phone screens I have seen.

This is a bit of an older phone and it can be seen with the screen. Although it is not a poor quality screen by any means, the actual display is quite far behind the touch sensitive panel on top of it which gives visuals a bit of a depth. This is not an issue really, although if you are used to newer phones which have virtually no gap between the display and touch sensitive panel this may feel quite prominent to you.

As for buttons, the phone has the aforementioned Android buttons and trackpad, as well as a volume rocker, power button and a camera button. The latter can be used for taking pictures and can also be used for opening the camera app. Then of course, there are also plenty more buttons available on the keyboard itself.

The Desire Z comes with a decent 5 megapixel camera that is especially good considering that this phone is several months old. This includes an LED flash so that it can be used in darker environments and it also comes with 720p video recording. The Desire Z features a dedicated camera button that can be used for taking photos, recording video and even just to get quick access to the camera when needed.

Within the camera app you are provided with a good range of features to play around with, and you can also make use of geo-tagging. One of things I found most charming about the Desire Z's camera app was the way that the icons rotate when you turn the phone between portrait and landscape. Most phones will turn the interface around but won't go to the same level of detail in the transition. This doesn't really add anything to the phone's camera, but it is a nice touch.

One of the more annoying features of Android Froyo (and earlier versions) regarding photography, particularly if you have had any extended use of Gingerbread and above, is that you can't take photographs without an SD card inserted. This is despite the fact that the Desire Z comes with 1GB internal storage. So even though there is space available on the phone you will get an irritating "please insert SD card" message when trying to press the camera button.

The phone does include a microSD card slot, and can support an impressive 32GB, but does not come with a card included. If you have just bought this phone, opened up the camera app and then seen some once in a lifetime event that would have won you a Pulitzer prize for photography and a nice big mound of cash, you would quite rightly feel highly frustrated upon pressing the camera button to be told "please insert SD card". The fact is that you may not be aware of this problem until you come to use the camera.

Having said this, with an SD card included the camera works like a dream. Photos are high quality, as are videos. The camera includes touch focus and an auto flash. The camera also includes some excellent effects to play around with, which are a lot more fun than the effects that you would find on other devices. These include distortion, vignette, depth of field and posterize camera lenses. These effects can also be used with the video recorder in real-time to produce some interesting, albeit unwatchable, home videos.

Desire Z does not include a front facing camera so video calls are not really possible. This is no great loss as it is a feature that the vast majority of people do not use anyway even when it is available. If you are one of the few people who do actually make regular video calls on your phone you may find this to be a huge drawback though.

HDMI is not supported although the Desire Z does support DLNA Wi-Fi, allowing you to connect the phone to a TV. The Desire Z was one of the first phones to implement DLNA sharing and it is a pretty simple feature to make use of. You simply launch the Connected Media app and then load up your TV's DLNA interface and you are pretty much done. You will need a home wireless connection to make use of this feature, but once everything is connected you can enjoy photo, video and music content stored on your phone through your home TV.

I found HTC Sense to be a little bit slow in certain places, for example trying to load the menu to change the interface theme took a second or two to load properly. The Desire Z only runs on an 800MHz processor and I may be unfairly comparing it to more modern high powered devices with dual core chips, but being used to more seamless devices caused me quite a lot of frustration when encountering lag as I sometimes ended up loading things I didn't want to by mistake (from repeatedly pressing the screen to try and get it to respond).

Even though the processor is a little old now it is still competent at what it does, and aside from these occasional screen changes the phone runs pretty smoothly. The handset has 512MB of RAM to play around with – and this is comparable to more modern handsets like the iPhone 4S, so the Desire Z does have a fair amount of power to play around with.

The Desire Z can competently run many apps at the same time without any significant drop in performance. What I particularly liked about the Desire Z is that it makes it much easier to switch between apps when multitasking. You can assign physical buttons on the phones exterior to load particular apps allowing you to easily switch between your favourite services.

The older processor also means that the Desire Z is not anywhere near as resource consuming as newer Android phones, and this is reflected in the great battery life. The Lithium Ion 1300 mAh battery provides an excellent amount of talk time, around ten hours, and can easily be left running for over a week on standby.

GPS is included with A-GPS support and the usual assortment of apps to use it with – including Google Maps and many more from Android Market. The Desire Z also includes an internal compass and an accelerometer. The Desire Z has 3G download speeds of up to 14.4Mbps making it as fast as any competitor when downloading maps away from a wireless connection.

The Desire Z runs on Android Froyo with HTC Sense on top. This includes the iconic HTC clock widget and also includes the Friend Stream social media widget. Like all Android phones you can tinker around with the widgets and background images to customise the Desire Z to your personal tastes. HTC Sense is a lot more customisable than other interfaces as you can change the menu themes just as easily as background images.

Customisation is obviously a big thing here, as the personalisation options are available from one of the fixed buttons on the homescreen. Manufacturers who develop their own interfaces tend to place shortcut menu buttons for things they like to focus on. For Sony Ericsson phones you can get quick access to media like music and videos – for HTC it is personalisation.

HTC Sense includes seven homescreen panels so you are provided with a great amount of room to add shortcuts and widgets. The Sense widget allows you add your favourite contacts to the homescreen to give you quick access to people that you tend to contact the most. The notification tray is another area of Android that tends to get tinkered around with a lot by manufacturers making modifications. With Sense HTC has added nice little shortcuts to your main apps and most recently used apps, so you can get quick access to the camera, internet or whatever you were just doing previously.

As well as the Friend Stream homescreen widget HTC has put a lot of effort into integrating social networks on Sense. The contacts list displays recent tweets and Facebook status updates from individual contacts giving a more social feel to your phone book. The Desire range were some of the first smartphones to really experiment around with social networking features and although this phone is now a little older it still holds up well in this area.

While it comes with the Friend Stream social media widget and social media notifications interwoven with the contacts list the Desire Z supports dedicated Android apps for social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It also comes with YouTube support allowing you to seamlessly stream videos from the internet.

Within your contacts menu you can block individual callers, and any attempt at calling you they make will go straight to voicemail. You can turn this on and off for individual contacts as you see fit, and can be great if you are trying to avoid someone. While this is available on most Android phones it is much easier to switch on and off when needed with the Desire Z.

The Desire Z comes with some nice little features regarding phone calls. Using the proximity sensor the phone can detect if it is in a bag or pocket and so will ring louder than normal in case you can't hear it. You can also turn the phone onto silent by turning it over to be face down. This feature is handy if your phone suddenly starts ringing when you were supposed to have turned it off, for example in a cinema or lecture, but at the same time you don't really want to answer it or be too prompt to reject the call.

The Desire Z uses smart dial. With this you can use alphanumeric keys to type the name of a contact as well as numbers when making a call. Smart dial will select what it thinks is the most accurate contact from the information you have entered – this may match part of someone's name or part of their phone number. So typing in 269 may select someone called Amy, according to the example offered by HTC. This can be a handy shortcut if you have just opened up the dial pad rather than searching through your contacts list, particularly if there are a lot of people in your contacts list.

The Desire Z features a really handy app for transferring data from your old phone via Bluetooth. I tested this out by transferring contact data from the Xperia Play, even though the phone was not supported on the device list. The whole process took just a couple of minutes and went through without any difficulties. This app is handy to have to hand if you have a lot of contacts and data on your old phone that would take hours to manually transfer. Although obviously you will not be able to use it if your old phone does not feature Bluetooth.

The Desire Z comes with Android Market support and so has access to thousands of apps and games that are on offer. This does not really differ to any other Android phone although the Froyo Android in use may make some apps unusable. However, the keyboard on the Desire Z may make it better suited to other apps that rely on typing or use a lot of different controls (such as some games).

The Desire Z includes a Gmail app, specifically for Gmail email accounts (which are necessary to use Android) and another email app for using other email accounts. Email addresses are easy to add to the phone and the keyboard can be handy to have available when writing emails. This is a fairly standard Android feature and offers the same level of email support as other Android phones – but one that will suit people who rely on email a lot and would like to access it from their phone.

The Desire Z can be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot, so other wireless devices can connect to the internet through the phone's 3G connection. For example, if you have a computer with a wireless connection you can access the internet on it through the phone. This is not really advisable though as it will be slow and cost you a lot of money through additional data charges, but if it is your only option it can be a handy little extra to have available.

The music player is easy to use, offering an easy scrolling interface through your music's album covers. Directly from the player you can access the Featured Music section of HTC Sense and can also go directly to Amazon MP3 store to purchase new tunes. Music can be listened to while you go and do other things, and you can pause or change tracks from the notification tray wherever this is available.

However, pausing a track from the notification tray means that you have to go back to the music player to unpause it, as the option disappears from the notification tray. The great thing here is that Sense will include a shortcut to the music player from the notification tray anyway, so this is a pretty simple task. A headphone socket is included and is nicely positioned at top of phone. This positioning means that it doesn’t get in the way while doing things like watching videos.

The Desire Z is as easy to use as any other Android phone and is pretty similar in user experience to other phones in the Desire series including the Desire and Desire S. Even if you have not used an HTC phone before the phone will feel instantly familiar if you are used to using Android, and pretty easy to get the hang of if you aren't.

Even though it is a little older now the Desire Z is a great phone. It is very similar in appearance to the popular Desire although obviously the physical keyboard adds quite a bit of thickness and weight to the device. Using other touchscreen phones with awkward and erratic onscreen keyboards there have been many times that I have wished for a physical keyboard as well. In my experience I have found the Desire Z to have one of the best onscreen keyboards on offer, and I prefer the onscreen keyboard to the physical one so in my mind this is one of the few phones that doesn't actually need a physical keyboard anyway.

Despite this, many people still prefer the use of physical keys, or at least to have the choice between physical and onscreen keyboards. Personally, if I owned the Desire Z, I probably wouldn't use the physical keyboard all that much. There are times when it is useful beyond typing, such as the ability to assign shortcuts to certain buttons which is exceptionally handy for quickly flipping between apps. It is one of the best keyboard sporting Android phones around and so if a keyboard is an essential feature that you look for in a phone then the HTC Desire Z maybe something worth taking a look at.

Desire S – Similar to the Desire and Desire Z, the Desire S is a more modern phone but lacks a physical keyboard

HTC Sensation – With a larger screen than the Desire Z and a dual-core processor, the HTC Sensation is a more powerful phone but also lacks a physical keyboard.

The HTC Desire released in early 2010 was a phenomenal success for HTC. It was inevitable then that the Chinese manufacturer would seek to extend this further with some follow on devices. The Desire Z and Desire HD both adopt the name and design inspiration of the original Desire, but take them in different directions. While the Desire HD has expanded the screen and thrown in all sorts of high quality video entertainment the Desire Z has instead opted to cater for the more professionally minded phone user with its sliding QWERTY keyboard.

The screen on the Desire Z is the same 3.7" as the original and HTC has managed to retain the same thickness for the phone despite the additional keyboard. Such keyboards usually add extra bulk and weight to phones but HTC has managed to implement this feature while keeping the Desire Z slim and pocketable. The screen comes with WVGA graphics and capacitive touchscreen technology which allows for multitouch features such as pinch-zoom. While multitouch may not seem like a big deal to some people it does make touchscreens far easier to use and more intuitive.

While the operating system has been pushed up a notch to Android 2.2 Froyo, the underlying processor power has been downgraded from the Desire´s 1GHz to a slightly less zippy 800MHz. This does not produce a dramatic difference in app and interface speed and for the inclusion of the QWERTY keyboard a compromise had to be made somewhere.

Like the Desire the Desire Z comes with a 5 megapixel but this time with the added benefit of full HD video recording. There are still the same great additional features found on the original camera such as face detection and geo-tagging. Videos you have captured on the Desire Z can be transferred to your home computer via USB or just watched directly through your TV via DLNA. The media player supports a good range of video and music formats and over 32GB of storage space is available through microSD.

Although the Desire Z is more professionally minded than its siblings, with its QWERTY keyboard and with a unified email inbox for various email accounts, there is still the same great range of additional messaging features. With SMS threaded viewing supported the Desire Z also comes with HTC´s Friend Stream which will pool information from social networks like Facebook and Twitter and integrate it with the contact information on the phone. This provides a much easier way to stay up to date with friends without needing to log in through the web browser.

The web browser itself is ideal for surfing the internet, with 3G and Wi-Fi both supported. The web browser displays real web pages and comes with Adobe Flash support, opening up much more of the internet than is available on Apple phones.

While the Desire HD packs a more powerful punch when it comes to video entertainment the Desire Z stays truer to the original Desire. With a more recent version of Android and a number of improvements here and there, the Desire Z offers more flexibility for people who had been looking into getting a Desire, and the decision between the two essentially just boils down to your preference regarding QWERTY keyboards.