First and foremost, the HTC Desire is great for making calls and sending messages; calls sound clear in a variety of situations, and the on-screen keyboard has been set out in such a way that typing out messages is quick and easy. As for the internal hardware, it packs in a 1GHz Snapdragon processor and 576MB of RAM, which puts it right at the top of the pile in terms of processing power. In general, HTC has got the basics spot on with their latest release, and have clearly built on their well received earlier handsets. The user interface is a nice mixture of style and usability, and the capability to customize several homescreens with shortcuts and widgets of your choosing is a real time saver. There are lots of good apps and pieces of software pre-installed, which will allow you to do most of the things that you would want to do on a smartphone. Anything extra that you do want can be downloaded from the Android Market for a reasonable price, or maybe even for free. All of the media features on the HTC Desire are better than average, but a couple could have done with being a little bit better. The camera is a 5 megapixel one, but the quality of the pictures it takes is not as good as similar priced smartphones, and the media player, whilst working fine, does not support as many different types of files as the ones used by competitors. On the plus side, browsing the web is a really nice experience. The screen is clear and crisp, pages render correctly and load quickly, and scrolling through long pages is smooth and fluid. HTC has made sure the Desire is as good for business as it is for fun, and has extended its normal support for Microsoft Exchange email to include the ability to search a corporate database for contacts - a feature rarely seen on any other smartphone. Quickoffice is installed for viewing and editing Microsoft Office documents, and the HTC calendar is a winner with its clean user interface and the integration of up-to-date weather forecasts into calendar entries.