With the smartphone scene more crowded than Oxford Street on Christmas Eve, it's getting tough for newcomers to catch our eye. But then HTC is on a hot streak, and has again managed attract a small huddle in the Stuff office with its new HD2 (centre, above).
This WinMo 6.5 phone's biggest weapon is a glorious 4.3in screen that, as you can see above, makes the iPhone's look a little pedestrian, and the Palm Pre's slightly ridiculous.
Crucially, it offers multitouch web browsing in the Opera browser, and thanks to a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, is lightening fast around menus and web pages.
With HTC Sense on board, navigating the HD2 is a joy – you can barely tell you're using WinMo much of the time – and there are Facebook and Twitter apps included on the toolbar at the base of the screen.
Thanks to the inclusion of multitouch, HTC has dispensed with the 'zoom bar' seen on previous models, meaning the screen takes up virtually all of the phone's face. There's also a 3.5mm jack in the base:
There's no doubt the HD2 is a hefty slab of phone (it's 120.5mmx67mm) as you can see in a side-to-side with the Touch HD below. But it doesn't feel quite as large as Toshiba's wideboy TG01 in the hand and is only 11m thick:
The HD2's capacitive touchscreen is very responsive, but in our early plays wasn't quite as fast with pinch-to-zoom gestures. But then it has almost an extra inch of screen estate to render:
Naturally, there's a shortcut to Marketplace in the home menu, though it's still poorly stocked compared the iPhone's App Store:
Round the back there's a 5MP camera with a dual LED flash – we've yet to test it, but it'll need to improve upon HTC's previous offerings, which have struggled with washed out colours:
Earlier today in an interview with
Forbes HTC Chief Exec Peter Chou quashed rumours that it'd be launching an Android version of the HD2, saying: 'I have to take care of Windows Mobile. We're working hard on these kind of products to get excitement about Windows Mobile back'.
With the HD2, they might just have done it – stay tuned for a hands-on video and full review very soon.
