HTC Dream User Review

HTC Dream

So I’ve been testing out the HTC Dream for about two weeks now and I have 1 word for it, awesome!

The first cool feature of the HTC Dream is the “swappable desktops” which you can access by touching the display of the phone and either dragging your finger to the left or to the right. As with any desktop you can add shortcuts of your most used applications such GMail or YouTube  as well as some cool “widgets” like a clock and Google search bar. This coupled with the “swappable desktops” allows you to divide your desktop into different sections which can change as and when you feel like it. Adding shortcuts to your “desktop” was an easy feat; once they are there how do you get rid of them? I Only found out by accident that you had to press down and hold your finger on the shortcut, then your menu button changes to a trashcan. Drag and drop and the shortcut is history.

Let’s get to sending messages, oh boy. So you’d think “Ok, I use a QWERTY keyboard on my pc, how hard can it be to send messages?”. It’s not that easy to start of with but after a few messages I soon became used to the QWERTY keyboard on the phone.

Your messages are broken down into threads. All your messages are stored under one name of the person who sent or who you sent a message to. This is a nice way of storing the messages, no more do you have to scroll through twenty messages on your phone looking for something. Just go into your message application, select the name of the person of the message you want to go through, and scroll through the thread.

HTC Dream

The HTC Dream has a built in 3.2 mega pixel camera. The one thing I found disappointing is that the camera does not have a flash. When you are in a well lit room, the picture quality is awesome but when the light in the room is not sufficient, don’t even try to take a picture.

There’s a neat little notification area in the top left corner of your desktop that displays small icons of the events that happen on your phone. Be it getting a message, email, or event failures, all you do is touch the upper left corner with your finger tip and drag the area down to get a detailed description of the event that occurred. From there you can click on the notice to open up the email, read the message or resend the message that did not send.

The HTC dream comes preloaded with Gmail, Google maps and the Gtalk application. Setting up email and Gtalk it is just a matter of signing in and it works exactly the same as if you were using it on a desktop computer.

Getting your HTC Dream setup on a wireless network is a piece of cake. Enable your wireless on the phone, let it scan for available networks and connect.

I copied some music to the phone to test out the music player and sound quality. I was very impressed with the sound quality and how loud the speaker actually can go without distortion. The one thing I could not figure out was how to stop the music after it started to play. The only buttons available to you are previous, pause and next. You eventually end up pausing your music when you are done listening to it.

I found the battery life of the phone surprisingly long. I had to recharge the phone every four to five days and I was using the phone a lot during the day, sending messages, browsing the internet, and chatting on G-Talk. When I did have to charge the phone a awesome feature I found was being able to charge my phone through the USB port of my car radio.

All in all the HTC Dream is a very nice and sleek looking phone. Definitely replacing my old phone with one of these.