HTC Desire - any good?

[Danny]

Thinking of buying a HTC Desire to replace my blackberry but not sure about getting it due to the reports of poor battery life and bugs like loosing contacts.

How have you all found the phone, is the battery life that bad, have you had any major bugs/issues like loosing contacts?

Does the calendar and mail syc work well with outlook?

Your thoughts would be appreaciated.

[Tarmacsurfer]

Battery life - condition the battery. I have started getting another 12 hours or so out of mine since letting it bed in and then recalibrating it. Average to heavy use sees it lasting me a day easily, just gets charged overnight. If I switch it down to GSM and only use it for communications (text/calls) then I can go a weekend with no trouble. Lasted until late Sunday afternoon from Friday morning while at Sonisphere.

Outlook integration - I've actually transferred contacts, calenders and so forth to my Google account now and would recommend doing that to anyone, heard it's not too bad for integration though.

No major bugs, been rooted for a while and using the Leedroid 2.0 rom. Standard rom is fine but I like the tweaks with this one.
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I'm immortal. Well, so far.

[JonB]

[Tarmacsurfer]

Clicky
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I'm immortal. Well, so far.

[locked]

Got mine the other night and so far I think its fantastic. Its miles better than my previous phones which were the E71 and HTC touch pro2.

Its so quick with the apps, runs very smoothly.
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[Danny]

Cheers guys.

So the battery life is a lot worse than my blackberry which can easily last me a week.
Guess I could always buy a second battery as a spare.

Any particular reason you recommended transferring to using google calendar etc?

[Tarmacsurfer]

It's pretty much seamless, can use any PC browser to access calenders, contacts, maps etc and then the phone will sync whenever it has a connection. I also started forwarding email to the gmail account for the push convenience. You can set it up for exchange if needs be but for personal use it's far more convenient to use a cloud based system.
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I'm immortal. Well, so far.

[JonB]

Yep, Google is so much better than all that Microsoft exchange crap. I use Google calendars and it was just so seamless.
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Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it?s worth.

[MattHirst]

As for loosing contacts, i've never had that problem but mine are synced with google just incase.

When i flash new roms etc i do loose my contacts (if i do a factory reset). As soon as i sign into google, my contacts start re-appearing and are all there within about 5 minutes

If you use NTL/Virgin as your ISP, you can only RECIEVE email, you cannot send it. That goes for any device, whether it be a phone, pda, laptop, desktop etc.

You can only send an email when going through your NTL/Virgin network. You can use the webmail if you're out and about but it's a pain in the arse.

Unless someone knows a way round this!
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[The Artist]

Desire = win.

Android = made by google so it works perfectly with any google products, mail, calendar etc.

It is a modern smartphone which has a 1ghz processor. My grans pc has less computing power. The battery life isn't as long as other phones but when you see what it can do, you won't mind charging it in the evenings. If you don't do anything on it, then it won't use much battery, if you are using wifi and 3g and constantly uploading and downloading thern yes the battery life won't be as good.

[Danny]

Okay I'm sold on it.

Evenutually managed to talk Vodafone into giving me one for free for £25/pm.

[The Artist]

[Danny]

Had to call several times too.
The first time spoke to their upgrades department who couldn't even match the offers on their website.
Second time spoke to cancellation department who managed to match the offer on their website, big deal.
Finally someone from their 'outbound retention' department called to give me my mac code and try and convince me one last time.

[bazza]

[Flip]

[Danny]

Got the phone yesterday, generally it's quite good, but the calendar is awful. It's showing events on the wrong days, e.g. showing an event on the day view for today that is actually an event for next week as well as showing duplicate events.

[The Artist]

[Aka Matt]

[JonB]

I got my Desire for £25/month on Orange but only with a 24 month contract. Not particularly fussed, this might actually be the only phone I keep for the whole contract term.
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Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it?s worth.

[Danny]