-
Pros
- Stunning screen.
- Spectacular video playback.
- Fast CPU.
- Smooth HTC Sense interface layer.
- Slim design feels expensive.
-
Cons
- Menus and dialogs can be difficult.
- Not upgradeable to Windows Phone 7 Series.
- Battery life could be longer.
HTC HD2 Specs
| 802.11x/Band(s): | Yes |
| Bands: | 1700 |
| Bands: | 1800 |
| Bands: | 1900 |
| Bands: | 2100 |
| Bands: | 850 |
| Bands: | 900 |
| Bluetooth: | Yes |
| Camera Flash: | Yes |
| Camera: | Yes |
| Form Factor: | Candy Bar |
| High-Speed Data: | EDGE |
| High-Speed Data: | GPRS |
| High-Speed Data: | HSDPA |
| High-Speed Data: | UMTS |
| Megapixels: | 5 MP |
| Operating System as Tested: | Windows Mobile Professional |
| Phone Capability / Network: | GSM |
| Phone Capability / Network: | UMTS |
| Physical Keyboard: | No |
| Processor Speed: | 1 GHz |
| Screen Details: | 480-by-800 |
| Screen Details: | 65K-color |
| Screen Details: | TFT LCD capacitive touch screen |
| Screen Size: | 4.3 inches |
| Service Provider: | T-Mobile |
Windows Mobile 6.5 may look like a lemon nowadays, but the T-Mobile HTC HD2 is a cool, delicious glass of the finest lemonade you've ever had. Yes, Microsoft is shifting its focus to Windows Phone 7 and leaving the non-upgradeable HD2 behind. But if you focus on what this phone can do, and ignore the HD2's creaky, older OS—easily done, given HTC's beautiful Sense UI—you'll find a gorgeous, spectacularly powerful smartphone for business and for pleasure. HTC's amazing work here makes the HD2 our Editors' Choice for T-Mobile smartphones.
Design, Call Quality, and Apps
This is one striking phone. The extra-slim HD2 measures 4.74 by 2.64 by 0.43 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.54 ounces, making it a bit longer, wider, and thinner than the 
). The HD2 features soft-touch sides, a brushed aluminum back panel, and a 4.3-inch glass capacitive touch screen with 480-by-800-pixel resolution. Dialing numbers was simple. In portrait mode, the on-screen QWERTY keyboard felt just about wide enough for comfortable typing. That's good, since it doesn't always appear in landscape mode (depending on the app).
The HD2 is a quad-band EDGE (850/1900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSDPA 7.2 (1700/2100 MHz) device with Wi-Fi. That means it hits T-Mobile and global 2G and 3G networks. I had no problem logging onto a WPA2-encrypted 802.11g network. Voice calls sounded clear and warm. Reception was average. Calls sounded fine through an 
) Bluetooth headset, and the speakerphone was loud and powerful. Battery life was somewhat short but not a deal-breaker at 6 hours, 8 minutes of talk time in EDGE mode, probably because of the drain from that vast screen.
The HD2 syncs with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server accounts with Direct Push E-mail. When you click over onto someone's contact card, you can see the conversations you've had with them recently. You can e-mail, send texts, and use Twitter in the HD2's Sense panels, but messaging setup is scattered through the Windows UI. A separate IM icon in the Windows Menu handles all the major services.
Browsing the desktop Web with Opera Mobile 9.7 was a pleasure, showing highly accurate pages; the browser supports pinch zoom, but not Flash (although the built-in, inferior IE6 browser also gives you Flash Lite as a fallback). As a Windows Mobile device, you get built-in Word and Excel file editing, plus PowerPoint and PDF viewers. The HD2 also works with
Music, Video, and Camera Performance
HTC didn't skimp on the multimedia features, though many will cost extra. The HD2 comes preloaded with Blockbuster on Demand, which downloads full-length video rentals that you pay for individually. It also comes with MobiTV for streamed live television at $9.99 per month, Gogo Inflight Internet with six months of free access, and Barnes & Nobles' eReader application that works with over a million e-books. TeleNav GPS Navigation is on board for voice-enabled, turn-by-turn directions at $9.99 per month.
The two included Transformers movies looked absolutely gorgeous in full screen mode, but seemed to come with their own movie player, complete with a "Transformers" icon in the main menu. I couldn't figure out how to use that particular player with any other files. Standalone 720p HD MP4 files looked sharp and vibrant in the clumsy Windows Media Player app, but extraneous graphical garbage plagued the animation. Other standard-definition WMV and MP4 files played normally. Infrequent gaps in the Bluetooth audio also marred the experience; thankfully, this didn't happen with the built-in speaker or the bundled, tinny-sounding wired ear buds.
For music, a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack sits on the bottom edge. A microSD card is located under the battery cover. HTC pre-installs a 16GB card, and there's also about 600MB of internal storage free on the device. Music tracks sounded crisp and clear over 
) Bluetooth headphones. But when you're in Bluetooth mode you have to use the volume control on your headphones, not the volume buttons on the phone. The HD2's slick music player displays album art graphics, as well as a jukebox-style album cover view in landscape mode, and Slacker delivers free, streamed Internet radio.
The 5-megapixel auto-focus camera comes with a dual LED flash. Test photos looked smooth and sharp outdoors, with slightly flat color. Shutter speeds were also fast; auto-focus slowed it down a bit, but no test photos turned out blurry. In the photo view, flick through a stack of pictures with your finger, and the OS smoothly spins each one off the page, which was a nice touch. Recorded 640-by-480-pixel videos were smooth and bright at 27 frames per second. The camera UI was simple to navigate in both photo and video modes.
Windows Mobile 6.5 and Conclusions
Let's address the concerns surrounding Windows Mobile. On the one hand, Windows Mobile 6.5 is a dead OS with poor task management, crappy built-in apps, uneven multimedia performance, and a clunky UI riddled with dialog boxes and error messages. But HTC patched most of these problems on the HD2, giving it slick apps, great multimedia, and a decent UI (as long as you stay within HTC's preloaded software.)
However, Windows Mobile's third-party app market is dying. If you're thinking of your next smartphone as a platform to shop for third-party apps and install lots of software, don't buy this phone; a ) or ) will be a smarter purchase. Consider the HD2 frozen in time.
T-Mobile has a hefty smartphone lineup these days: five Android handsets alone, plus various Windows Mobile and BlackBerry OS devices. In style, screen, and features, the HD2 trumps them all. BlackBerry's entire line is aging, and while the various Android phones have plenty of pluses, they all run on slow 528 Mhz processors with older versions of Android. The Google Nexus One is much more directly comparable to the HD2, as it has the same CPU and slab design, and it runs Android 2.1, which features multitouch support and free
It feels strange to bestow the Editors' Choice award for T-Mobile smartphones on a device with an obsolete OS and fading third-party app market. But if you're looking for an audio, video, and Web browsing multimedia powerhouse, this is the best smartphone in T-Mobile's lineup—bar none.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Continuous Talk Time: 6 hours 8 minutes
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