The WVGA screen is just tip-top for multimedia as well - we've moaned in the past that the Android music player is staid and boring.

But we're glad to report that this element has been put right with the Sense overlay, offering you the chance to slide through artists, albums and songs at the bottom of the device.

Video on the Desire also looks great, as you might imagine - you can watch all variety of codecs on the phone and the 3.7-inch OLED screen gives some scarily deep blacks and lovely colour saturation, as well as a terrific response time for fast moving scenes.

The internet browser on the HTC Desire is up there with the best of them - we managed to load a couple of fairly heavy websites in a few seconds - over an EDGE connection, which is miles faster than most competitors.

The text reflow option is there as well, allowing you to practically zoom in so much that you're seeing only a few letters on the screen - with the text re-sizing every time your get closer, so the words still make sense on the screen.

Flash video is also present on the device, although it didn't work very well for us, with the test movie stuttering quite badly - will we ever get Flash working properly on a mobile device?

We're mightily impressed with the HTC Desire, and can see that this is going to be a real iPhone contender in 2010, no matter what Steve Jobs brings out later this year.

If you're in the market for a new phone in the next couple of months, you could do a lot worse than check this out, especially if you've been angling to try out Android for a while.