It’s no surprise that HTC is working very hard on increasing its brand awareness, preferring to market phones as being HTC devices instead of carrier-branded ones that do not carry any HTC branding at all. This strategy is paying off, and today must’ve been very nice for them: they held an Apple-style product announcement in London, attended by media from all over the world. The news: two new phones, and an improved Sense experience which includes a web presence where you can remotely manage your HTC devices.
Let’s start with the phones first. The HTC Desire family – already consisting of two devices – has been expanded today with two new top-of-the-line phones which compete directly with Apple’s iPhone 4. The first can be described as the EVO for Europe, while the second one is the Android QWERTY-slider you’ve been waiting for (I think – no idea).
Let’s start with the former, the HTC Desire Z, running Android 2.2. It’s actually not a slider, according to HTC, but a pop-out – whatever that means. It’s powered by an 800Mhz Qualcomm processor and carries HSPA+ and 802.11n connectivity, a 5MP HD-capable camera, and comes with the new version of HTC’s Sense UI which we already mentioned in the teaser – more on that a few paragraphs down. As usual, Engadget shot some decent video material of the new Desire Z for us to stare at.
The second new piece of kit can basically be regarded as the European version of Sprint’s HTV Evo. It’s got a massive 4.3″ display housed in a body constructed from a solid block of aluminium. It’s got a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 8MP camera with dual-LED flash and HD recording, Dolby Mobile, and HSPA+ data with 802.11n connectivity. It also runs the new Sense UI on top of Android 2.2. Again – Engadget has the hands-on video.
The new Sense UI consists of more than just a few tweaks to the user interface on the mobile phones itself. HTC has launched HTCSense.com, which is a set of online services and functionality connected to your HTC mobile phone running Sense.
“For example, people can easily locate a missing phone by triggering the handset to ring loudly, even if it is set to silent, or to flag its location on a map. If the phone’s been lost or stolen, users can remotely lock the phone, forward calls and texts to another phone, send a message to the phone to arrange its return or even remotely wipe all personal data from it,” the press release reads, “HTCSense.com makes it easy to setup a new HTC phone or access archived mobile content such as contacts, text messages and call history from a PC browser. People can also customize their phones with exclusive HTC content like wallpapers, HTC scenes, sounds or plug-ins.”
These new devices and services will launch in October in Europe, and the Desire Z will move to North America later this year.
I remember from the buzz that HTC Hero has and the promise that it’s software will be updated to 1.6 initially, then 2.1 and this update fails to get there. In this way you remain with some annoying bugs that will get with the products (like for original Hero it’s extra sensibility controls and no way to upgrade without jailbreak).
Hope will get it well anyway as are really nice products!
There is an official 2.1 ROM out, it’s not a WWE ROM but works perfectly well. I think I got it from the xda forums.
The Hero as much as I hate to say it was old news when I got it. It’s got another 12 months in it at least but Android 2.1 is the limit for Hero hardware.
Actually the Hero already got a 2.2 hack rom crossported from the cyanogen side. The ram is enough to run 2.2 decently, I personally think the real end of life will be with 3.0 when lots of graphical stuff is moved into 3d. The hero simply has lousy 3d.
There definitely was no technical reason not to give the Hero Froyo (unlike the G1)
That sounds as a major security issue. If you can do that yourself, someone else could. Imagine someone tracking you without your knowledge, or forwarding calls to their own phone (not to mention wiping all data). I’d rather not have these features, thank you.
That sounds as a major security issue. If you can do that yourself, someone else could. Imagine someone tracking you without your knowledge, or forwarding calls to their own phone (not to mention wiping all data). I’d rather not have these features, thank you.
I can bet my ass there will be people trying to do exactly that. Hell, it’d be really lucrative for the criminals to forward all your calls and whatnot through an expensive number, keeping all the money but leaving you with a huge bill. Or spy on your calls if you happen to work for some largeish company and wait for you to say something they can use to their benefit, like f.ex. planned acquisitions which could affect stocks.
I really do hope they’ve made it very secure.
Well, I’d rather not have the HTML5 geolocation API because of the potential consequences of vulnerabilities in geolocation-enabled web browsers, but I think we’ll all get it anyway…
And another stupid feature : did you know that a bluetooth device paired with your phone can do basically anything it wants with it ? Including making calls, sending SMSs, reading yours… Discovered that some years ago, had some fun with that, it’s quite frightening.
Edited 2010-09-17 21:23 UTC
you don’t need to have these “features” for the phone to be able to do that.. just download a install a rogue APK (android application..) and boom, on any android.
Or get your phone hacked by whichever security hole there could be.
(doesnt make other phones better btw, you can just see the iphone4 jailbreak from a link on the web.. that’s complete phone compromise without user knowledge if you will, just include a self loading url in some page the dude will load – ofc it’s fixed now)
The difference being that htcsense.com now offers pirates a centralized way to do that.
So I just hope HTC will make it really secure. Like if it was online banking (with the security card or stuff).
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/google-flips-remote-kill-swi…
http://www.dailytech.com/Google+Uses+Its+Remote+Kill+Android+App+Re…
Unboom.
Edited 2010-09-16 12:58 UTC
You have the listed the phones in the wrong order in your opening paragraphs
A slight typo here too (looks as if you accidently hit the button next to C).
Sorry to be a pain – normally I can’t pick fault with your language, but this time round you really threw me.
The video with the security alarm going off is really annoying. The other one, where the sound gets cut off at the end, is a bit annoying too.
Edited 2010-09-16 13:35 UTC
An Android phone from HTC that can compete hardware-wise with the HD2!
Edited 2010-09-16 15:20 UTC
The HTC Desire HD is not quite the Sprint Evo 4G:
* No front-facing camera
* No 4G
* 768 MB memory, rather than the 512 MB in the Evo
* 1 GHz Qualcomm Scorpion (or Snapdragon 2?) rather than 1 GHz Snapdragon
The HTC Desire Z is coming to the United States as the HTC Vision/T-Mobile G2 (“successor” to the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1) without HTC Sense. That probably means we Americans will be able to load HTC Sense roms on it, while Europeans can load stock Android if they want…
Actually, the G2 is one of only two devices I can think of that came with stock Android, that Google wasn’t publicly involved in creating (the other being the HTC Hero/T-Mobile Mytouch 3G/”the European HTC G2″)
I’m quite looking forward to it, the Moto Droid 2 didn’t impress me for whatever reason.
Edited 2010-09-17 02:51 UTC
Small nitpick; the application core of Snapdragon has always been called Scorpion. So the HD has a 1 GHz Snapdragon as well, though it is a die-shrunk (45 nm) and tweaked version compared to the one in the Evo.