HTC's latest Android phone may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it manages to improve on the already successful formula put forth by the HTC Legend and Google's Nexus One nonetheless. Following in the footsteps of HTC's earlier Android offerings is no easy task. Both the Nexus One and HTC Legend are devices that have garnered rave reviews amongst critics, and the HTC Desire shares a great deal in common with its predecessors in the Android Market. The Desire manages to borrow the best elements of these phones and builds on them, making this HTC's best Android offering to date.

The Desire offers a 3.7 inch screen that's both larger and sharper than the Legend's, an optical trackpad in lieu of the Nexus One's trackball, and raised, click-sensitive navigation buttons (rather than the flat touch-sensitive ones that became the ire of many a Nexus One user).

All in all, this is a phone that's learned from the strengths and weaknesses of its earlier ancestors.

The user interface for the Desire is HTC's proprietary HTC Sense, which provides seven customizable homepages that users can tweak to their liking. Out of the box, HTC Sense provides basic widgets, including weather and time and a variety of shortcuts to commonly accessed features such as the camera, mail, maps and messages.

The most notable feature is "Friend Stream," a single newsfeed collecting and displaying the most recent posts from your Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter accounts. A quick click on any of these will take you deeper into the Friend Stream app, allowing you to comment and like any posts that tickle your fancy. The app works likewise in reverse, allowing you to update both your Facebook and Twitter with a single 140 character entry.

Friend Stream may be the most immediately noticeable social networking tool of the HTC Desire, but it's far from the only one. Photos can be shared to your Facebook, Flickr, Picasa within seconds of being captured. The same goes for putting videos on Youtube. Everything is streamlined with a one-click mentality. With logins and passwords remembered by the device, sharing your content is as easy as telling the Desire where you want it to go.

When you start to look at the more traditional reasons to have a phone - making and receiving calls - the HTC Desire's performance is second to none. Call quality is crystal clear, and even when tested in a large metropolitan area, not a single dropped call was experienced. In a word, the reception offered by the Desire is exceptional.

Picture and video quality is good as well. The Desire's 5-megapixel camera has no trouble capturing sharp, crisp photos in the right situations. Depending on the lighting, you may find that some pictures end up a little washed out, while others may lack the richness in color that you might expect from a standalone
digital camera. But in the proper lighting, the images captured by the Desire can stand toe-to-toe with most smartphone cameras on the market.

A bright flash placed near to the camera's lens means that even night time photography isn't out of the question, although you'll need to keep your subjects in close range if you want your evening photos to show the same quality as their daytime counterparts. It may have its weaknesses, but the camera here is definitely competent enough to get the job done.

When seen in the right light, the screen on the HTC Desire offers outstanding clarity, packing in a whopping 240 dots per inch. The problem, of course, is finding that right light. Using the Desire out and about on the town during a sunny day makes the screen harder to see than it should. While you'll have no real problems completing some basic tasks in these situations, more engaging pastimes like movie watching or game playing are pretty much out of the question.

The range of supported video formats isn't quite as wide as one might desire, either. Offering MP4 and WMV playback is nice (in addition to the less commonly used 3gp and 3g2 formats), but what we'd really like to see is the DivX support - rumored to be in the pipeline for a future update.

The Desire also manages to be surprisingly fast, traversing through apps and widgets in the blink of an eye with no app requiring more than two or three seconds to load. In the app-heavy age we live in, it's a delight to find a phone that doesn't struggle to perform.

With a comfortable interface, a speedy processor, and outstanding call quality, the HTC Desire could have been the best Android phone on the market today. For those who spend much of their digital lives socially connected, this smartphone is doubly delicious. However, some flaws in camera performance and difficulties reading the screen in direct sunlight keep the Desire from attaining perfection, but overall this is a top notch offering that belongs on the radar of any smartphone enthusiast.

The HTC Desire is available in Canada from Telus starting at $79.99 on a 3 year plan and going up to $449.99 for the no contract option. US availability will start on August 27th through US Cellular, and later through Cellular South.