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HTC’s next big-name phone is the HTC Desire HD, a 4.3-inch giant Android that’s set to take over the mantle of the current HTC Desire. What makes it better than the current king of Android? We take a look…

Desire by name, Evo by nature
The HTC Desire HD may sound like a direct relative of the original, and rather wonderful, HTC Desire, but its look is far removed from its forefather. Gone is the bronzed finish, the curved edges and two-tone colour scheme, replaced by sharper lines, an all-black finish and touch-sensitive softkeys instead of physical ones.

Why so different? The HTC Desire HD is based on the US market’s HTC Evo 4G, so the link to the HTC Desire is as much about marketing as being part of a handset family. One big bonus about the new boy is the unibody design — the body’s made largely out of a single piece of aluminium, like the HTC Legend.

Android 2.2 – the way to go
It never seems like your Android phone stays up-to-date for too long at the moment, with waits for updates spanning months, but the HTC Desire HD will ship with the latest version of the OS, Android 2.2. Android 2.2’s top additions include SD card app installations, so you no longer have to rely entirely on internal memory, and full Flash support. Wave Flash Lite goodbye, the real deal is here.

Snapdragon power
Qualcomm is prepping the next iterations of its Snapdragon mobile processor as you read this, but the HTC Desire HD will rock the current popular 1GHz model. Worth crying over?

Not at all — Android 2.2 runs lightning-fast with a 1GHz Snapdragon, and few, if any, apps make use of the Snapdragon’s power. The main bonus that the new dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon will be able to playback 1080p vids. Not much use unless you have a TV that can handle it too…

Biggest screen on the block
The HTC Desire HD uses a massive 4.3-inch AMOLED screen, using a capacitive touchscreen layer. After the Dell Streak was labelled as more of a tablet than a phone, despite having phone functions, we’ve learnt that a 5-inch screen is just too big for many people to accept as a phone.

A 4.3-incher? We’ve seen such dimensions accepted by the mobile phone public before, with the HTC HD2 and (less successfully) the Toshiba TG01. The HTC Desire HD is almost certainly going to be the most accessible 4.3-inch screen phone yet too, helped along by its link to the now-popular HTC Desire. It’ll still find the most favour with the techie crowd, but this is no obtuse Windows Mobile phone like the Toshiba TG01.

Camera skills
Android phones of the past two years have re-iterated that megapixels don’t mean everything when it comes to camera quality. The HTC Desire HD features an impressive-sounding 8-megapixel camera with a dual-LED flash and (obviously) autofocus. The previous 5-megapixel camera of the HTC Desire couldn’t stand up to many 5-megapixel rivals in image quality terms, but will the Desire HD be the same?

The best way to predict quality is to look at the HTC Evo 4G. US reviewers reported that low-light performance was often quite iffy, but that under good lighting conditions, it can produce fab shots. It’s also capable of capturing 720p HD video. It’s unlikely to be able to square-up to phones with a real focus on their cameras, like the Nokia N8, but it should prove to be near the very top of the Android camera phone tree.

Built-in bits
At this level, you can expect a whole lot to be included in your phone as standard — Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, readily expandable memory (iPhones excluded, of course). Everything you’d expect is included too, with a bonus of 4GB of internal memory, which you can then cheaply expand to 36GB with a microSD card.