It looks like I’ve found the first big Achilles Heel of this thing, and for me, it might just be a deal breaker.

The Tel­stra edi­tion of the Desire does not have enough mem­ory. The specs say it has 512Mb ROM, which is where I’m assum­ing the apps are stored and run from. That doesn’t sound like much, but most Android apps that I’ve found take up a few hun­dred Kb or less. With sev­eral in the 1-​​5Mb range. The apps I have installed add up to a grand total of 30Mb. If I add up all the apps and stor­age in my apps list under Menu>Settings>SD and phone stor­age, it comes to a touch over 120Mb.

Even con­sid­er­ing how much space Android OS (unzipped, Eclair is around 250Mb, I’m unsure how much more space Sense uses) takes up, I’ve got to imag­ine that’s nowhere near 512Mb.

You’d think I had plenty of app stor­age left, but appar­ently, this is not the case. I’ve already had to unin­stall some apps that I down­loaded as I had begun get­ting stor­age space warn­ings. Where’s all the mem­ory gone? Until the Froyo ver­sion of Android, I can’t install apps to my MicroSD card unless I root the device and run apps2sd.

I’m not averse to doing that, but I shouldn’t have to, right? I’ve installed nearly 100 apps on my iPhone 3GS and it hasn’t even blinked.

I’m think­ing this is a problem. So, how to solve it?

I know, delete the Tel­stra apps and icons that are pre­in­stalled and of no use to me. Good idea, right? Wrong. You can’t delete them. Typ­i­cally of tel­cos and their mod­ded phone OSes, there’s a wealth (around 20) of largely use­less and not very good qual­ity Tel­stra or Big­Pond branded apps and links that are tightly bound into the install. They reg­is­ter as 0Kb in size, but they must con­sume some space, right?

So now, I’m just annoyed. I am run­ning out of stor­age and I can’t remove the pre­in­stalled apps that are the likely cause of my pain.

Dis­claimer: I’ve been gifted an HTC Desire by Tel­stra and they want me to review it here, on Twit­ter, etc. Sorry if my tweets (and those of my fel­low review­ers) have irri­tated you. I noticed they were get­ting up the col­lec­tive noses of a few folk today.