Day 3 and starting to hit some problems. I’ve had to put the HTC HD2 down, it’s a great device and I really want to use it, but the applications on the Windows Market are severely lacking. I have other apps like CoPilot Live v8 installed to it that work extremely well, but outside of this it’s just a phone and a nice looking one at that.
The Desire is still working well except one really big snag. The Android operating system only allows you to install apps to the main internal memory of the device. This unfortunately gets used up very quickly when you start installing 30 apps, having both your GMail and Exchange email synced to your device.
Why oh why won’t Android let you install apps to the SD card? This is a severe limitation of the operating system and seriously makes it less of a contender to the iPhone. If you take a look at the unlocked price of a HTC Desire at £439.99 inc vat and a 16gb iPhone 3GS PAYG at £449.00 inc vat, then why can’t HTC include a 16gb flash drive into the Desire at that price? Surely HTC are trying to maximise their profits. It’s not that they can’t do it technology wise, they’ve done it before on other devices like the HTC Touch Diamond that had a 4gb flash drive, and it works really well. In-fact, my HTC Touch Diamond is still running strong 18+ months later.
Now I have used up almost all of other internal memory on the device, I have two options…Uninstall apps which I don’t want to do, or hard reset it to see if I clear out some other cache (again I don’t want to do this). It’s a bit depressing after 2 days usage of the HTC Desire that I’ve run out of memory.
After 3 days of usage although I really like the HTC Desire and the Android OS is starting to grow on me, and I can seriously see myself using the HTC Desire in daily life, I sadly can’t use it as my main device if it keeps running out of storage memory 
The iPhone 3GS clearly wins here. If HTC were to put a 16gb and 32gb flash drive in for the same price as the iPhone 3GS then this would be a serious contender to being a complete iPhone replacement.
Im sorry but you will need to update your review, as Android do offer apps2SD, and in the 2.2 froyo update this functionality will be standard to install aps onto your Sd card, whereby you can use a 32 Gb micro SD to fill up all your memory. I own a desire, and will use nothing else, since the desire give iphone a hiding any day
By: Trinity on June 23, 2010
at 10:20 am
Apps2SD though means you have to reflash / root your device which is what a lot of phone users don’t want to do. There will be the ability to install apps to the SD card in Froyo but people will then need to uninstall to move their apps which will be an additional hassle. Unfortunately this was an area that Google investigated but didn’t want to support install to SD because they didn’t want people installing to SD and pirating apps from the Market Place.
You could likewise purchase a 32gb SD card is around an additional £85 which then makes the Desire (less desirable).
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Desire too, I own a Desire, 2x iPhone 3GS’ and a HTC HD2 along with a huge amount of other Android and WinMobile devices, the Desire is the closest that Google have come to the iPhone. I keep looking at the Desire every day wanting to use it as my main phone, but as soon as you start putting push notifications on it and desktop widgets, you get less than 4 hours of battery power and that’s not even using it to receive phone calls.
If HTC and Google can improve the battery performance and bring it closer to the iPhone as well as give it Froyo then it could be a good iPhone killer.
Thanks for your comments, I really enjoyed reading them!
By: Dave Burrows on June 24, 2010
at 11:10 am