HTC Desire HD review

Does anyone remember the Mystery of the HTC Desire and the suspect battery life? Well, this is the sequel: HTC Desire and the suspect-er battery life (that's the best we could come up with? You expect me to believe you used to work in Hollywood? Get out of my office...)

The battery life on the HTC Desire was iffy at best - it would last a day or so without a problem, but heavy usage would bring that right down to sometimes needing a midday boost.

Android 2.2 helped to make that less of an issue, but it still wasn't the greatest - and the problem was exacerbated by the fact that the iPhone 4 managed to find nearly 40% more battery life through some nice processor integration.

The video issue aside (which we hope will be fixed in the near future) this is the single biggest flaw on the HTC Desire HD – in our tests we managed to get just under 24 hours' use out of the phone without needing to recharge.

The fear is that this will dwindle over time in the same way anecdotally HTC Desires appear to be doing.

If you start using the HTC Desire HD heavily, for video, music, camera or streaming media, then that battery life drops too, so you might need to recharge.

Where we struggled to work out what was nabbing the power from the HTC Desire, it's a pretty easy one with the Desire HD: the screen is apparently sucking half the power.

You can see when installing battery readers that the phone can hold charge quite easily in normal use – even when it's got push email on and is quietly syncing in the background, it's holding a pretty good charge, and as the signal doesn't drop too often it's not searching for another one.

It's odd then that HTC has decided on a 1230mAh battery when it could have added in a 1500mAh option instead – surely that 20-odd percent increase is crucial?

And as it's the screen, we don't see how it can be remedied. Overall, we didn't find many days when we were reaching for the charger before we got home – but it gets a little too close for comfort.