Android 2.3.5/HTC Sense 3.0 update starts rolling out for HTC Desire HD

It looks like Vodafone branded HTC Desire HD's are getting Android 2.3.5/HTC Sense 3.0 OTA updates. As updates are rolled out rather than being made available to all HTC handsets simultaneously to prevent overloading the servers, the rest of us should be getting it in a few weeks. 

No word on whether the HTC Desire HD is getting Ice Cream Sandwich, so this may be the last official update for this phone.

Belt clip case for a HTC Desire HD, fitted with a OtterBox Commuter case

Getting a belt case for the HTC Desire HD, fitted with a OtterBox Commuter case is not the easiest thing. I went to several stores, and eventually scoured the entire Greenhills. For the past few months I have been using an old belt case which I used to use with my Nokia E61i, but it is really looking old now, but I have little choice. 

Going online, I found NiteIze's Large Clip Case Sideways. Fits perfectly.

Repairing a cracked OtterBox case

Cracks developed on my OtterBox Commuter case for HTC's Desire HD, and I am attempting a repair.

The repair so far.

I pressed and held the cracks in the plastic outer case together by using Scotch tape and applied a small amount of Super Glue on the inside of the case. Waited for 24 hours to let the glue set.

I removed the Scotch tape and confirmed that the glue is holding the case together.

Since the only glue holding the pieces together would be whatever managed to seep into the cracks a place a second layer of glue behind the cracks and applied a small soft but strong piece of plastic for additional support.

Not the cleanest job... but it will do.

So far so good. I managed to re-insert the phone without re-opening any of the cracks. Lets see how this goes.

July 9 ,2011 update:  The repair went well and it I think the damage wont be getting any worse. Needless to say I am happy to have my phone under OtterBox protection again.

I emailed OtterBox and they told me they will send me a replacement. That is excellent customer service. Really surprised since I never expected anyone to warranty "physical damage". It will be cool if they do, if not I will just use the repaired case. Nothing else I have seen in the market has convinced me that it will protect my investment as well as an OtterBox Comutter or Defender case.

July 18, 2011 update: The repair worked out pretty well. So far no problems with the repaired case. I am a little more careful with how I press the buttons these days, pressing them from the front of the phone rather than reaching out from the back to press them, The replacement from OtterBox arrived today.

October 21, 2011 update: No problems with the new Otterbox case.

Cracked OtterBox Commuter HTC Desire HD case

I got an OtterBox Commuter case for my HTC Desire HD seven weeks ago. It is a very nice looking case an its two layers of protection, with a separate polycarbonate outer shell covering a silicone skin. I have not had the "opportunity" to see how well this case protects the phones from drops, but it does look like the most convincing case I have seen, short or OtterBox's own defender. 

Unfortunately, my case has quickly developed cracks near the volume rocker button and power button. I keep the phone in a belt pouch, so as near as I can tell they were caused by pressing the buttons. 

This case is bit expensive, so I will try to see if I can do a do-it yourself repair and will post about in this blog.

Update: Link to do-it yourself repair.


July 9 ,2011 update:  The repair went well and it I think the damage wont be getting any worse. Needless to say I am happy to have my phone under OtterBox protection again.

I emailed OtterBox and they told me they will send me a replacement. That is excellent customer service. Really surprised since I never expected anyone to warranty "physical damage". It will be cool if they do, if not I will just use the repaired case. Nothing else I have seen in the market has convinced me that it will protect my investment as well as an OtterBox Comutter or Defender case.

July 18, 2011 update: The repair worked out pretty well. So far no problems with the repaired case. I am a little more careful with how I press the buttons these days, pressing them from the front of the phone rather than reaching out from the back to press them, The replacement from OtterBox arrived today.

October 21, 2011 update: No problems with the new Otterbox case.

Droid Macro practice

Android's are not known for their camera's in general, HTC Droids in particular have generally below par cameras. Was doing some Macro shots tonight and this is what I came up with.

The HTC Desire HD can take some really amazing shots... with excellent natural lighting. Macro with indoor lighting is not its thing.

The 5MP shooter on the Samsung Galaxy Ace shows more promise. I have to get acquainted with its minimum focus distance, but I can see the potential.

Shots are not enhanced or re-touched.

OtterBox Commutter Case for the HTC Desire HD

Here are some pictures of the OtterBox Commuter case for the HTC Desire HD. The case consist of two parts. A soft inner black rubber sheath to protect your phone, while the hardened plastic exterior shell which I think is primarily designed to protect the black rubber sheath.

 Initially, I felt the power button was hard to depress but after a day I got use to it. The stiffer buttons also stopped all the accidental depressing I used to do to the volume rocker button when the phone was in its older Capdase Xpose case.

The biggest issue with this case is the price. At Php2,150 it cost more than twice as much as some other decent branded case. It more than many mobile phones for that matter. After two to three weeks of pondering whether I should buy it, well I finally gave in. I hope it is worth the asking price.

Day 14 with the HTC Desire HD: Value for money considerations

In the past seven years, my constant business companions have been a smartphone and a laptop. In those seven years, my laptop has gotten lighter with each generation, from 6-pound R50e to a 2.9 pound MacBook Air. Inversely, my smartphone screen has increase in size, from a 2.2-inch HTC Tanager, to a 4.3-inch HTC Desire HD.  As many as written, and has Steve Job's has proclaimed we are nearing the end of the PC era. 

HTC Tanager (a.k.a. The Smart Amazing Phone) circa 2003

While the smartphone originally just displaced the planner, but with each generation of smartphone, it has taken away more and more of the functions that I used to do with the personal computer. Is the HTC Desire HD worth the money. At Php25,000 it costs as much as a lower end laptop.  As compared to any phone I have had before, except maybe the Nokia E61i, the HTC Desire HD will make the most significant change in how I do things. The HTC Desire HD's 4.3-inch screen makes me more likely to reach for my mobile phone than flip open my laptop. If you buy this phone, it is all about the monster screen. That monster screen does bring a lot of baggage with it, which basically is the massive size of the phone and the mediocre battery life.

Still, I now handle 90% or my email, 90% of messaging and 90% of my social networking on the smartphone. Well, those 90% figures were not scientifically measure, but you get the point. The laptop still plays a important role, but is really relegated being mainly a word processor, a good part of my web browsing and of course, maintaining this blog. So by my measure, it was a good "investment".

Is the phone big enough to "save" you from buying a tablet? In my case, a tablet has limited appeal. But the reality is, even the HTC Desire HD's massive screen is small even as compared to the small 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab.

HTC Desire HD and the Samsung Galaxy Tab

So, it you are feeling inclined towards getting a tablet, the HTC Desire HD is not a massive enough device to quench that desire. Given that HTD Desire HD cost 25% more than the entry level Apple iPad WiFi and almost as much as the 16GB Apple iPad 3G, it may not be a great investment for many. You may decide to go for a cheaper smartphone like the HTC Wildfire and use the savings as a partial payment for a tablet.

But if you are like me... when I decide not to bring a laptop, I would not want to carry anything that won't fit in a belt pouch... holding on to a tablet under my shoulder the whole day is not something I am willing to do... than the HTC Desire HD is a compelling option. Other than making calls, what you will be doing most with it is looking at the display while reading messages, status updates, email or browsing the web. For that bigger is always better, well at least until the girth exceeds the reach of your fingers. Nothing significantly larger than the HTC Desire HD will still be usable. After two weeks of use, and with my own sense of priorities,  this is the best smartphone in the local market right now.

Day 10 with the HTC Desire HD: Handheld Browsing and more on Battery Life

Handheld browsing. I never really got into browsing WAP sites. It never appealed to me. My Sony Ericsson P990i was a very decent phone for web browsing, but my first carrier supplied unit displayed would have an "XML parsing error" and numerous websites. The replacement Sony Ericsson P990i displayed the same problem. The second replacement was thankfully a Nokia E61i, which had an excellent, for its time, web browser. The Nokia Mini-Map browser. After a month of using it to browse the web. While it 2.6-inch screen was large by the standards back than, I found it too small, and found navigating the web with a D-Pad uncomfortable.

With the HTC Desire HD and its 4.3-inch screen I can enjoyably surf the web for long periods of time, and not miss my laptop so much. The larger screen and the higher 800 x 480 resolution help a lot. But even more is the ease of navigating with a touchscreen interface combined with how the text on websites auto-fits into the boundaries of the screen leaving you only needing to scroll up or down. This auto-fit feature is not new. But it is just so seamless in the HTC Desire HD.

With the HTC Desire HD, I doubt I will be getting a tablet.

It seems like so long ago. A bit of nostalgia, and just to show how how far we come, I got this excerp from a post I wrote almost four years ago. 

The Nokia E61i was acquired to be used as a hand-held browser as much as for its other functions. No discussion of the phone would be complete without looking at its web browser and connectivity features. The E61i, like most N and all ESeries Nokia phones comes with the Safari based minimap browser.

In Nokia's own words this browser is designed to allows you to "Experience true Web" by bringing "desktop-like Web browsing experience to mobile devices." The Nokia Mini Map Browser render pages exactly the same way they would be rendered on a desktop or laptop computer. Rather than trying to get the whole page to fit within the narrow horizontal confines of the screen, Nokia gives you a more convenient way to navigate a web page which cannot fit on the screen. Since the Nokia Mini Map Browser displays that page in a the same way your desktop would, you will only see a small section of the page on the cellular phones screen. This means you have to do a quite a bit of vertical and horizontal scrolling to see navigate the page.

The Nokia Mini Map browser allows you to do this in an easier fashion. Press the Function Key + "8" key and a mini map of the entire page is displayed on your screen. A red box shows you where you are on that screen and from this mode you can scroll vertically and horizontally to the part of the page you want to see in greater detail. You can also zoom in or out of a page by pressing Function Key + "*" and Function Key + "#".

Battery life. In the local forums, I have read that battery life of the HTC Desire HD improves after several charge and discharge cycles. And I find that observation to be accurate. My initial use showed that the battery life would be about 24 hours with the data connection enabled. Now it is looking more like 24. Another thing I might suspect is after the initial "newness" or the device wears of, users might spend less time marveling at the screen. Given that the display accounts for a large fraction battery usage (right now mine is reading 75%) this factor might also account in the reported increases in battery life. 

Signing out for now.

Day 8 with the HTC Desire HD: Typing Speed and Size

The big 4.3-inch screen really enhances hand held web browsing

Typing Speed. For the nearly 5 years I have been using a phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard. When I got my first QWERTY messenger, a Nokia E61i, I swore that this was the perfect form factor for a phone. Great for typing SMS and firing up emails. When deciding to make a shift to a touchscreen phone, I thought about long and hard about getting one with a slide out QWERTY keyboard. The HTC Desire HD decision was an impulse buy. When I went to the store to buy a HTC, I was pretty much set on getting the HTC Desire Z. But seeing the 4.3-inch screen in action was just too compelling. 

As I feared, my typing speed went down. While a physical keyboard with small keys lends itself to touch typing, a small keyboard on a touchscreen does not. Most of my friends type on the touchscreen phones in landscape mode, and I did not find this too comfortable. So I persisted using the phone in the portrait mode with the virtual QWERTY keyboard. My typing speed slowed down due to plenty of wrong key presses. Experimenting a bit, I tried the Compact QWERTY keyboard, and my typing speed is back to normal. The Compact QWERTY keyboard is near as I can tell identical to BlackBerry's SureType keyboard.  The Compact QWERTY keyboard has two letters in one key, which means bigger keys. It utilizes T9 technology to determine which of the two letters you wanted to select.

Size. This is a big phone. It measure 123 x 68 x 11.8 mm. It does not lend itself too well to single handed operation. I did not realize how big it was, pretty much since coming from a pair of QWERTY messengers I am used to manipulating a phone with two hands all the time. I used the even wider E61i for two and a half years, which measures 117 x 70 x 13.9 mm, I guess I have gotten used to large phones. Still, the HTC Desire HD is a lot bigger than my last QWERTY messenger which measures in at 111.8 x 59.6 x 12.6 mm.

The size of the HTC Desire HD is a big part of its charm. The big screen endears. The wide case needed to hold the large screen might a bit to big to be usable for some.

All for now.

Day 5 with the HTC Desire HD: Applications and Content

Over decade ago I was a Power Downloader, I would spend hours on the net searching for the latest software. A friend of mine joked that the PC was a self-propagating hobby. He said "We download new software to improve our internet experience, and one we have optimized our PC, we use it our faster optimized PC to further improve our internet experience." Back than, on a  56kbps connection it was no joke. Today, I download Googles Chrome browser, add OpenOffice as my office suite, and grab a decent photo editor and an instant messenger from the net, and am good to go.

On my past smartphone phones, I do not recall downloading any software from my Microsoft powered HTC Tanager. On my Nokia 6600, Sony Ericsson P990, Nokia E61i and Samsung B7320, the only software I really added was that I actually used frequently was the Opera Mini Browser.

Astrid Tasks

The HTC Desire HD comes with an impressive set of software or applications out of the box. Aside from the mandatory contacts, calendar, browser and gallery a host of other useful applications are pre-installed. You have Adobe Reader, Quick Office, Google Maps, Locations, Navigation, an eBook reader, news readers, weather apps, and software to access Facebook, Flickr, Plurk and Facebook among others. In some cases, you have two pieces of software to choose from for the same function.

Still some key pieces of software are missing from the HTC Desire HD. There was no pre-installed to do list application, something which comes standard with Symbian and Windows Mobile 6.5. So I turned to the Android Market, which provides you with dozens of choices. More options than I want really. But based on recommendations on the web, I tried Astrik Tasks and gTasks, and opted to keep Astrid Tasks. There was no simple note taking application built-in so I downloaded ColorNote. The HTC Desire HD does not also come with an instant messenger installed, so I downloaded Yahoo Messenger. I am actually still trying to figure out which of the dozens of available unit converters to download.

ColorNote

While I really do not know for what use I also downloaded Google Goggles and Talking Tom. I also installed Click the City, which is a local (Philippine) app similar to locations, but providing you event, TV and movie schedules as well. I figure, sooner or later I will give in and download Angry Birds.

I was pretty surprised by the amount of free content. The HTC Desire HD comes with eight: Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cties, Bram Stocker Dracula, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jack Londons White Fang, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. 

Day 3 with the HTC Desire HD: Managing battery life

I am still focused on how to manage the battery life of my HTC Desire HD. The HTC Desire HD finished charging just before midnight, and I opted to turn of data, both WiFi and 3G, while I slept. I activated date when I woke up in the morning. I also decided to keep the data off, while I have my laptop on. Since both my laptop and smartphone are getting updates from the same services, it does not seem to make sense to keep both running. Having spend most of the day in the office, by 6:00 P.M. I still had six bars, which dropped down to five bars (50%) twenty minutes later. With minimal use data turned off, and just one phone call and a half dozen SMS, my consumption was much lower than the first day. It looks like this phone could easily get more than 36 hours of battery life with such use.

But that really defeats the purpose of getting a Android Smartphone in the first place. Trying to figure out how to manage battery life, I turned to the Battery University for tips. On Lithium Ion batteries one piece of advice was:

"Avoid frequent full discharges because this puts additional strain on the battery. Several partial discharges with frequent recharges are better for lithium-ion than one deep one. Recharging a partially charged lithium-ion does not cause harm because there is no memory. (In this respect, lithium-ion differs from nickel-based batteries.) Short battery life in a laptop is mainly cause by heat rather than charge / discharge patterns."  

The site also says that "Lithium-ion does not need to be fully charged; a partial charge is better."

This advice solves most of my battery life issues. Top it off at night and keep data off. Do a full or partial recharge mid-day in the office. On days when I am on field the whole day. The fifteen hours on data I got on my first day, with a fair amount of use, should be enough.

Day 1 with the HTC Desire HD

I decided to take the plunge and picked up a HTC Desire HD. Many things told me I should not buy this phone. It is more than I really need, based on all reviews it runs out of juice really fast, but after looking a more reasonable options, this monster SnapDroid was just to hard to resist. I am not going to try to review this phone. I has been done before, and I don't have the know how to really conduct a good review. 

If you are looking for a HTC Desire HD review here are some good ones:

GSM Arena - HTC Desire Review: Most Wanted

TechRadar.com - HTC Desire HD Review

Phone Arena - HTC Desire HD Review

Battery life. If you have read all those reviews, your biggest concern will be battery life. Well, it does not disappoint. As the reviews stated, battery life is not it strongest selling point.

I unplugged the Desire HD from the charger at 5:40 A.M. this morning, with Google Sync set to sync email, calendar and contacts, Twitter is set to update every four hours, and news and weather every six. Set to always be on, either connected via WiFi or 3G (in the absence of a WiFi connection), it got me to 9:25 P.M., at which time it was down to 15% and plugged it to the wall.

After unplugging the phone I went over to the Android Market and installed  a Twitter update, ClicktheCity (a local app which gives you movie and TV schedules, events and the like), Yahoo Messenger and Google Goggles. Throughout the day, four phone calls, maybe about 15 minutes. Am not big on SMS, but today was heavy, received more than 30 texts and sent out 30 responses. Received seven emails and replied to two. Browsed the web for a few minutes, and spend some time customizing the UI. Tried out Google Maps and GPS. Put a slate wallpaper to try to save on battery. A bit less than 16 hours ate 85% of my battery life.  

I am not disappointed, I got this phone expecting to have to charge it every day. And like I said, it does not disappoint. 

   

On the one hand, this is a completely impractical phone. It has a screen so big that I can understand why it sucks juice so fast. It has an OS with so many cool battery draining widgets. Despite all this, all I can say I love the HTC Desire HD. After a day with the 4.3-inch screen, there is no going back.