A lot of people have called the HTC Desire HD an EVO 4G for GSM carriers. While the form factor and specifications may seem similar, there are a lot of differences behind the Desire HD’s ample screen. It’s the screen itself that will grab your attention, and well it should. When it comes to screen dimensions, somewhere there is a line between “not big enough” and “too big”. I don’t think we’ve found that magic number just yet: the Desire HD’s 4.3-inch, 800 x 480 WVGA screen is “ginormous”, but not awkwardly so.
Many of you prefer having a physical keyboard to a slimmer phone. This phone almost does away with that need. When rotated horizontally, the phone’s on-screen keyboard is every bit as usable and finger-friendly as the physical keyboards that I’ve used in the past. Speaking of keyboards, the phone comes pre-packaged with HTC’s soft-keyboard (or “IME”), which is one of the more advanced, intelligent soft-keyboards that I’ve used – a large improvement over the stock Android IME (which is pretty good to start with). I was hoping for Swype to come pre-installed on the phone; it was not, and I had to install my beta copy (which loses some functionality when it’s not built onto the phone – more on that later).
