The postie deliv­ered the HTC Desire that I’ve been given by Tel­stra as a part of their Social Reviewer pro­gram at 3:30PM this afternoon. I’ve been pok­ing at and tweak­ing it since then, so the thoughts below rep­re­sent a very ini­tial and fairly ran­dom set of responses.

Android is still some­thing of a geek’s phone OS. The geek doesn’t need to be a tech geek, but they do need to have the intel­lec­tual bent to poke, tweak and manip­u­late. The obvi­ous com­par­i­son is with the iPhone OS, which for the moment is bet­ter inte­grated than Android; it’s a more pol­ished expe­ri­ence where over­all user expe­ri­ence is bet­ter, and def­i­nitely bet­ter for non-​​geeks. How­ever, the dif­fer­ences aren’t so ter­ri­ble as to make the Android expe­ri­ence a huge hur­dle. Of course, that’s a sub­jec­tive view.

The Desire works a lot like my wife’s Nexus One. It feels as fast. The screen is as bright and detailed. It feels much the same in the hand, which I actu­ally like a fair bit more than my iPhone 3GS. Con­nect­ing to my wifi net­work was triv­ial, and 3G con­nec­tion is nice and fast (or so Speedtest told me).

Scenes are a life­saver and a major fea­ture. The default Tel­stra scene and many of the oth­ers are full of Telstra’s branded apps. The branded apps are largely use­less to me, so being able to reset the scene to Clean Slate is a god­send. My app and wid­get set and the lay­out I’m using is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent to all of the installed Scenes.

Sev­eral of the default apps, even if I do use them — the Music app, for exam­ple — are Bigpond/​Telstra mod­i­fi­ca­tions. I’d much rather have the default ver­sions, thanks.

I’m already on Google Apps Pre­mier, so every­thing just works out of the box — mail, con­tacts, sync­ing between Face­book, Twit­ter and con­tacts all just hap­pen. That said, the default apps for Twit­ter and Face­book seem less func­tional than the down­load­able ver­sions from those net­works and it’s unclear how they all inte­grate together, espe­cially if I install the Face­book and Twit­ter apps direct from the man­u­fac­tur­ers, or another, third-​​party appli­ca­tion for those services.

The Google ecosys­tem inte­gra­tion is a huge bonus for those of us who are bought into that world, and all the sync­ing now hap­pens with­out ever con­nect­ing phone to desk­top or note­book. Even if you’re not a part of the Google ecosys­tem, HTC Sync (Win­dows only) will make a lot of that hap­pen for you.I hope sync with OS X isn’t far away for those with Macs and not using Google Apps.

I’m a lit­tle sur­prised that all the fea­tures avail­able in Android aren’t set up in the Tel­stra image. Neerav Bhatt detailed at ITNews how Google Earth, turn-​​by-​​turn nav­i­ga­tion and Voice Dic­ta­tion are MIA. When it just works on my wife’s Nexus One that’s on a Vodafone-​​using small telco, it’s actu­ally kind of annoying. More than any­thing, it looks like Tel­stra might be push­ing for their own apps that more-​​or-​​less fill these niches to gain the upper hand. I’d be happy if I was shown the error of my ways, but on try­ing to install Google Earth on my Desire, it sim­ply fails — both through the Android Mar­ket­place and by brows­ing to the URL.

I’ve also read through the How To’s at the HTC web­site and I can­not fig­ure out how to add my own file (.mp3, .m4r, .m4a) and select it as my own ring tone. The files I add to the phone, no mat­ter where I put them, never become avail­able for me to select.

Con­nec­tion mode doesn’t seem to want to stay set to USB. There was one point where I could set a par­tic­u­lar mode as default, but I can’t find it again. That I can’t find it is some­thing of a user expe­ri­ence annoyance.

I’m yet to ade­quately explore a bunch of fea­tures includ­ing music, pod­casts, pho­tos and the like. I’ll be look­ing at those in the com­ing days, espe­cially as I start my over­seas trip at the end of this week.

I’ll con­tinue to post my views here as I test the Desire. In the mean­time, you can see the apps I’m using at App­Brain.