Hot 'Desire': HTC Debuts Android-Based Smartphones
Taiwan-based HTC used the Mobile World Congress 2010 conference in Barcelona Tuesday to unveil the HTC Desire, as well as a follow-on to the popular HTC Hero phone and the HD Mini, a smaller version of the company's HD2.
The Desire could potentially be sold with a lower price tag than the Nexus One and benefit from wider distribution, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. Another competitive advantage of the smartphone is a new release of the HTC Sense user interface, which the Nexus One doesn't use. Among the features of the new Sense is HTC Friend Stream, an application that aggregates updates from Facebook, Flickr and Twitter into a single stream.
The Wall Street Journal story quoted HTC CEO Peter Chou as saying in an interview that the Desire has very different sales channels than the Nexus One and so the debut of the HTC lookalike wouldn't affect the company's relationship with Google.
The Desire runs on Qualcomm's one-gigahertz Snapdragon chip and uses a 3.7-inch, active-matrix OLED display. It has 512 MB of RAM and a microSD memory card slot.
The HTC Legend, the successor to the Hero, sports a new aluminum casing and offers a 3.2-inch HVGA screen that also uses AM-OLED display technology. It runs on a faster microprocessor (600 megahertz) than the Hero and provides 256 MB of RAM and a microSD memory card slot. The Legend, which will be available exclusively from Vodaphone Group in Europe, also will use the new version of the Sense interface.
Both the Desire and the Legend, which use the Android 2.1 operating system, will be available in Europe this spring and will roll out to other parts of the world in the second half of 2010. The company did not disclose pricing for the new devices.
The HD Mini, a smaller version of the HD2, runs Windows Mobile 6.5 and also uses the new Sense interface. That device will be available in European and Asian markets beginning in April.
HTC CEO Peter Chou, speaking at the Mobile World Congress, said Monday that later this year his company would release new smartphones based on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 Series mobile operating system. Microsoft formally debuted Windows Phone 7 Series at the conference.