Photo gallery: HTC HD2First impressions
HTC's HD2 reads like a perfectly balanced mathematical equation of geeky desire. When compared to last year's Touch HD, this new model has pluses next to just about every spec; the former's 3.8-inch screen is now 4.3 inches, the HD2's processor and RAM configuration is nearly double that of the original with a massive 1GHz Snapdragon processor under the hood, and its version of Windows Mobile is up by a huge 0.4 from version 6.1 to 6.5.
We love that HTC is pushing the boundaries of handset size with the HD2, and though we think the 4.3-inch screen is verging on the critical mass for style of device, we are sure we're going to love the extra screen real estate. Plus, this is HTC's first Window's Mobile handset with a capacitive touchscreen and the first to support multi-touch gestures. Best of all, while the screen size expands, the HD2's waistline remains impressively thin at only 11mm, which is a millimetre thinner than the Touch HD, believe it or not.
With the release of the HD2 we'll also see a significant change overall for HTC's TouchFlo 3D Windows Mobile interface mod. The latest version of this skin features new look colour icons, funky new theme modes and extra tabs to accommodate social networking tools like a custom-built Twitter widget and HTC's geotagging software Footprints. It also seems that HTC has changed the name of the skin to Sense, aligning it with the company's Android OS interface to be seen first in Australia on the HTC Hero.
Of course, there'd be no point calling the handset the HD2 if it couldn't hold its own as a media player, and even in this regard HTC has stepped it up a notch from last year's phone. The HD2 features a wider range of media file codec support, now including XviD and DivX, plus it still sports a standard 3.5mm headphone socket. The only thing missing, it seems, is a few gigabytes of internal storage, so you'll have to make do with a microSD card for transferring all of your music and video to.
HTC intends to ship the HD2 in the UK from 19 October, and while we'd like to think this means we'd see it down under soon after, the delay of the HTC Hero release locally suggests we might not see the HD2 for a few months yet. Stay tuned for more details, but in the meantime check out a hands-on video posted by Engadget on YouTube.
(Credit: Engadget)
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