HTC Desire Z review

Is it worth giving up your BlackBerry for HTC's latest Android phone with its physical keyboard and remote security features? Read out review to find out.

IT Pro Verdict

The Desire Z is the first smartphone we’ve seen for some time from HTC to have a physical keyboard. Overall, the HTC Desire Z is a little large and heavy when compared to other smartphones with a similarly sized screen, and that’s all down to the keyboard which we don’t really think pays its way. It's not even good enough to match a quality Blackberry keyboard.Just as important is HTC's online service, www.htcsense.com, with its remote security features such as remote ring, lock and wipe. They still need some work though and aren’t as attractive if you already have access to remote security through a Microsoft Exchange server.Overall the Desire Z is a good smartphone, but there are one too many rough edges. Unless you must have an Android phone with a physical keyboard, we’d rather have a Samsung Galaxy S or wait for the Google Nexus S.

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The whole design of the HTC Desire Z looks and feels very well made thanks to the metal backplate and screen surround. A touchpad and four touch-sensitive buttons sit beneath the screen.

A 3.5mm headset connector sits on the top edge of the chassis alongside the on/off switch, the microUSB port and the volume rocker are on the left, and there is a shortcut button for the five-megapixel camera on the right edge.

One of the more interesting bundled apps is CarPanel which gives you a six icon grid of shortcuts for use when you are driving it makes the HTC Desire Z's screen look a little like that of a personal navigation device. You can use this to provide in car access to HTC's own new Locations application which is present alongside Google Maps. Location's navigation services include free map downloads and caching, but you need to pay for some additional data such as traffic information.

More familiar extras include QuickOffice for viewing and editing Microsoft Office Word and Excel documents, and HTC's FriendStream service for bringing together Facebook and Twitter communications.

Sandra Vogel
Sandra Vogel
Freelance journalist

Sandra Vogel is a freelance journalist with decades of experience in long-form and explainer content, research papers, case studies, white papers, blogs, books, and hardware reviews. She has contributed to ZDNet, national newspapers and many of the best known technology web sites.

At ITPro, Sandra has contributed articles on artificial intelligence (AI), measures that can be taken to cope with inflation, the telecoms industry, risk management, and C-suite strategies. In the past, Sandra also contributed handset reviews for ITPro and has written for the brand for more than 13 years in total.

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