HTC Desire Z -- The brand new desire

There are plenty of new Android devices being launched in the Indian market every month but HTC does manage to sizzle things up every time it enacts a new salsa with Android OS as partner. The same is also true for newly launched HTC Desire Z.

Known for its quick booting, this device is up within seconds of touching the power button. Just like the Nokia E7, this device also boasts of a slide out QWERTY keypad, which is comfortable to use. However, the slide mechanism or the hinge seems somewhat loose. It’s a sleek-looking device but at 180 grams, it did feel a little heavy. The front panel has a 3.7 inch capacitive touchscreen, below which are four touch sensitive keys for home, menu, back and search. Below the screen is the optical track pad that is responsive, but with the touchscreen and the QWERTY keypad it was rarely required.

The HTC Desire Z runs on Android 2.2 operating system and comes with the HTC Sense UI. There are seven home screen panels and simply pinching on the home screen will bring all the seven panels to the same screen. HTC Scenes are also available on this device. These pre-configured profiles are evocative of ideas like work, play, travel, social and HTC. Personalization includes adding widgets, changing sound notifications like ringtones, alarm, etc.

There are some widgets that you can edit, for instance, the clock widget offers many display options. The notification bar remains at the top, and along with other things it also shows recently used widgets. When it comes to the response, you have a virtual and hardware QWERTY keyboard, and one can choose which ever they find more convenient. The contacts of the phone come with strong social networking integration. You can add contacts from company directory, Facebook, Flickr, HTC Sense, Plurk and Twitter accounts to your phone-book. The accelerometer has some cool functions. For instance, you can turn the device to silence the ring; also the volume of the ringer goes down once you pick the phone up and will increase if it is in your pocket.

The phone supports all popular Email clients along with Microsoft Exchange. The batch operations feature for Emails lets you deal with multiple mails at the same time. Apart from the Google login, you can also login to HTC Sense that will connect you to your other friends using htcsense.com. You also have the HTC Hub, where you can browse for some apps for your phone. The phone has a 5.0-megapixel camera with the highest image resolution as 2592 X 1552 pixels and can record 720p videos. The pictures can be geo-tagged too but not the videos. The quality if pictures and videos did not excite us much.

The music player is pretty standard and there are no other equalizer pre-sets. Songs can be sorted by artists, albums and playlists. There is a connected media application that lets you share music and videos using DLNA to other devices.