Frustrated with Desire

I was planning to share my thoughts on the range and quality of the apps available for the HTC Desire and Android that I have installed on my phone.  However, after a night of absolute frustration with the device, I decided to sit on my hands and wait until calmer heads prevailed, and discuss what I think is one of the key shortcomings with the device, particularly in comparison to the iPhone.

One of the main things that has appealed to me about the HTC Desire is how easy it is to configure. This phone will allow you to do things that you can only dream of doing on an iPhone, such as adding a wide array of widgets, shortcuts and folders to its seven screens.

Widgets allow you to access at a glance text messages, mail, calendar, RSS feeds, music, as well as social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Shortcuts enable you to place links to information such as bookmarks, maps, and contact details on the home screen for quick access.

Folders allow you to group your shortcuts and applications into the one place, revealing their information in pop-up menus. In practice, this has meant that on my main homescreen I can have a link to my wife’s contact information, alongside a folder of my favourite contacts and my most used apps.

Most of the functions I use on the Desire can be accessed from one screen. This is something I really love. Tying these all together are Scenes. Scenes allow you to save configurations for specific uses, and then swap these as the need arises. The best way of explaining this is that you can have a Scene containing apps, widgets, shortcuts and folders that are useful in the work setting, and swap these over at the end of the day for a setup that hides everything work related and loads a setup that switches focus to music and social media. There are several that come loaded by default, and you can save your own Scenes.

Since getting my Desire last week, I had saved about a dozen scenes. You could probably load them chronologically and see me gradually defining and inscribing my personality in this new space. That is, if I hadn’t been forced to delete them all this morning to restore the phone to some semblance of functionality.

The problems began of Friday night. When dragging an app to the Phone/Remove bar at the bottom of the screen, the screen froze completely for about a minute, until I received a pop-up notification that the Sense UI had been forced to close. After restarting the Sense UI, animations such as switching screens or the ‘helicopter’ mode (Expose’ for the Mac nerds) lagged to the point where it felt like the 1GB processor was running at about twenty-five percent of normal capacity. The Sense UI continued to hang and force quit for the rest of Friday night, and all of Saturday. By the end of Saturday night, I was so frustrated I had to move back over to my iPhone.

This morning, I took a calculated risk and cleared the HTC Sense data, which took with it all the Scenes I had saved to that point. This has thankfully fixed the problem of the Sense UI crashing, which would seem to indicate that it was a corrupted Scene that was at fault. This raises a core issue I have with the Desire. On the iPhone, I was sufficiently frustrated by the lack of opportunities to customise, that I ended up jailbreaking for a while, which allowed me to tinker to my hearts content. This ability to tinker out of the box is what I love about the Desire. But the instability of the Sense UI often makes it feel more like a jailbroken phone than the brilliantly powerful device it is.

I have used a wide enough selection of computers and mobile devices to be able to figure out a solution to an OS problem when it arises - it is just a matter of getting your head around the particular metaphors and idiosyncrasies of that particular platform. Yet there would be many potential consumers of the HTC Desire who would have had not the faintest clue about where the problem I had with the Sense UI lay, nor the slightest idea of how to fix it.