MWC: HTC Launches Revamped Nexus One As Desire

HTC, the company which makes Google’s acclaimed Nexus One smartphone, has revamped the design to launch a very similar product – the Desire, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The Desire updates the Nexus One, which was launched in January, with an improved joystick and new features including an FM radio. Photos of the phone – and two other HTC phones – were leaked online before the launch.

Both the Nexus One and the Desire have 3.7-inch AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) touchscreens, and run Android version 2.1. They have flash-equipped 5-megapixel cameras and run on 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chips.

The optical joystick on the Desire should be an improvement over the Nexus One’s trackball, because it elimiinates moving parts and won’t clog with dirt. Overall, sites have noted that the phone weighs 135g – 5g more than the Nexus One.

The new phone also has an improved user interface, the Sense UI from HTC, in which a feature called Friend Stream pulls social networking applications into one view, and groups contacts more easily.

Desire should be out in the UK in March or April – and T-Mobile has tweeted that it will be selling it on 26 March.

HTC also announced the Legend, an Android 2.1 phone with a more rugged aluminium casing and a 3.2-inch AMOLED screen.

Overall, AMOLED is now a must-have in this generation of phones, because of its better colours, its low power usage and its thinness – however, it’s stil expensive so it won’t be in all phones.

A third phone launched at MWC is the Mini, which runs windows Mobile 6.5. Like everyone else HTC won’t have Windows Phone 7 until the end of the year.