HTC HD2 smartphone

MORE: read our full review of the HTC HD2

The HTC HD2 is a designed to rival Apple's iphone, which has now become the benchmark by which other smartphones are judged. HTC is trying to outperform the iPhone with the HD2, which has the largest touch-screen display we have seen on a phone, measuring 4.3 inches in length.

The screen is only surrounded by a small bezel though, so the HD2 resembles a tablet. Watching movies on the screen is great and makes it easy to forget you are holding a phone rather than a device designed solely for watching video.

The HD2 also has some impressive internal specifications, such as a fast processor and plenty of on-board memory, which makes a big difference to the software that runs on it. This helps a lot with web browsing for example, so even a page filled with graphics will load quickly in the browser, and the screen updates fast when you zoom in or resize a page for easier reading.

The HD2 runs Windows Phone, or Windows Mobile 6.5, an operating system that has received a fair amount of criticism in the past when used on some other devices, but to our surprise it works very well on the HD2.

This is partly thanks to HTC's touch-friendly Sense graphical user interface which runs on top. At the top of the new home screen there is a giant clock and underneath it there is an area where you can create shortcuts to commonly used applications, frequent contacts, or even your favorite websites. A bar at the bottom links to more applications.

Every aspect of the Sense interface is designed for handsets such as the HD2 which don't have a stylus and rely entire on a user pressing the screen with their fingers. Items on all the phone's main option screens are big and bold, the capacitive touchscreen is very responsive and text input is performed with an on-screen keyboard.

Every time the HD2 recognises a key entry, the phone lightly vibrates, and if you need quick access to numbers or punctuation marks, rather than having to switch the keyboard layout to a different set of characters, you can hold a key down and choose extra characters not visible on the main keyboard.

There are also some clever applications installed on the phone. Some of these are just meant to show off the phone's graphical power, such as the weather application. The HD2 can work out your location, download a weather report for your local area, then update the graphics on the entire display depending on the weather.

If it's raining, it draws raindrops dripping down the screen, or if its cloudy the interface is partially shrouded in cloud.

There are some more useful aspects of the user interface though. Browsing through images is easy with the phone's image browser. A single flick of a finger flips from one image to the next, pulled from a stack underneath.

A central contacts manager can link email addresses and telephone numbers with facebook and twitter accounts, both of which can be accessed and updated on the phone with custom applications. Bring up a contact and you can call them, send them a text or email, or check on their Facebook status, from a single screen.

The HD2 also has a GPS receiver that integrates perfectly with Google Maps. Even if you cannot receive a GPS signal, for example when indoors, Google Maps can still make a rough estimate of your position, based on the location of nearby mobile phone masts.

The HD2 also has a five-megapixel camera, which works well, but as with c ameras on other handsets, it is no substitute for a dedicated digital camera. To take a photo, you do not press a physical shutter button, its all done using the touch-screen display.

The camera has some basic settings to help you take better photos, including auto-focus and facial recognition, a selection of ISO settings and different options to set colour and brightness. It also lets you take panoramic images, which look good if you tweak the settings.

As the HD2 uses the Windows Phone operating system, it integrates perfectly with Windows on desktop PCs. We plugged the phone into a PC running Windows 7, which took a minute or two to find a suitable driver, then correctly identified the phone, which showed up in Windows Device Center.

This meant we could automatically synchronise contacts between the phone and Microsoft Outlook, browse files stored on the phone and easily transfer items on or off the handset, without needing extra software.

We cannot say the experience of using the HD2 was completely flawless. One problem we encountered was with a large file transferred over to the phone. The file became locked, and we couldn't delete it until we reset the handset.

At other times, the Sense interface slightly lags when switching between applications. This can happen when lots of other applications are running in the background, but loading the Windows Phone task manager to shut down unneeded applications requires navigating through a few menus.

As with other handsets, the HD2 can work out whether you are holding it in landscape or portrait mode, and rotates the interface correctly. This is accompanied by some animation in Windows Media player, but in the web browser there is a slight delay before the screen updates on the HD2.

Not all applications on the HD2 respond to multi-touch gestures. Using Internet Explorer, you cannot pinch to zoom in, but you can with the Opera web browser.

We also found the phone's battery life was only average, managing around a day and a half, which is less than other handsets, but when we tested the battery, the phone had its work cut out as we were browsing lots of websites and using the camera a lot.

If you need to keep the phone running for extended periods on a single battery charge, we recommend turning off Wifi, GPS and Bluetooth when you do not need them.

There are some extras that come with the phone too, such as Microsoft My Phone, which lets you back up all your contact information online. There is also the Windows Mobile store, a repository of applications provided by Microsoft and third-party developers.

There are not many of these yet, and few that are free, but there is a large back catalogue of software developed for older versions of Windows Mobile which are not shown in the marketplace, but these should run without a problem.

In summary, we like the HD2 a lot. The screen is great for watching video, although some might find it excessively large. Indeed, when you pull the phone out of your pocket you may find someone joking that you are holding a television to your ear.

It's size means it also picks up lots of finger prints. But even after the initial wow-factor of the screen's size has worn off, there is plenty to like about the HD2, despite the niggles we had with it.

The phone integrates well with services both on the web and on your desktop PC, its interface is responsive and intuitive to use, and it does a good job with all the applications you might need a smartphone for, whether that's email, web browsing, social networking or music and video playback.

MORE: read our full review of the HTC HD2