HTC MOBILE: HTC Desire HD

HTC Desire HD

The machined aluminium case feels wonderfully solid. We'd still rather not drop it on concrete, but it feels more likely to survive than most large smart phones, especially since the aluminium case wraps around the edge of the screen. But the trade-off is weight -- combined with the huge screen, the Desire HD weighs in at 164g.

Inevitably, the Desire HD feels massive in your hand. You could still pop it in a pocket, but you couldn't sit down comfortably. Whether such an enormous screen is worth the weight is up to you -- we love it, but we like our smart phones bodaciously big-boned. If you want something smaller, the HTC Legend may be more your size.

Despite its vast surface area, HTC has made a few surgical snips to the Desire HD compared to the original Desire. Gone are the optical trackpad and the four physical buttons along the bottom of the screen, replaced with the touch-sensitive kind. We prefer the physical buttons, but in our tests, the touch-sensitive ones on the Desire HD worked very well.