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After releasing its first full-QWERTY sliding Android HTC Dream back in June 2009, the Taiwan leader in smartphones now has the second full QWERTY with the HTC Desire Z. Feature-wise, it’s no different from the Desire HD that has sprouted a QWERTY keyboard but when closed, it has more affinity to the earlier Desire in looks and dimensions. In case people ask why designate it a “Z”, one has to look at the sliding mechanism from the side to see a similarity in the formation of its halves and its diagonal hinge forming the letter.

From AMOLED to S-LCD

The HTC Desire Z carries forward the company’s switch from Samsung’s inventory-starved AMOLED to Sony’s Super-LCD screen. Engadget has a good comparison between the two screens on the same HTC Desire and there’s nothing to conclude that one is superior to the other. Both have the same 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen technology with multitouch, a 400 x 800 resolution, 16 million colors and the usual sensors for proximity and accelerometer auto-rotate viewing.

Flagship Features

What adds to the appeal of the HTC Desire Z is its latest Android v2.2 Froyo OS while other Androids using a v2.1 Éclair are stilling awaiting upgrades. But it does step a lower wrung with a Qualcomm MSM7230 clocked 800 MHz when the earlier Desire had a 1 GHz Snapdragon. Other than that, the Desire Z is another upscale Android that has the following:
• Quad band GSM with class 32 GPRS/EDGE on 2G;
• Dual band 3G/UMTS with HSDPA at 14.14 Mbps and HSUPA at 5.7 Mbps data speeds;
• WiFi 802.11 b/g/n with DLNA, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP and microUSB v2.0;
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, geo tagging, face detection and 720p video recording
• 1.5 GB internal memory with 512 MB RAM and microSD support for up to 32GB;
• 9.8 hours on 2G and 6.6 hours on 3G with 430 hours standby time from a 1300 mAh Li-ion battery.

According to various rumors, there will be two major Android smart phones from Taiwan based phone maker HTC during the coming holiday season.

First on the list is the less believable HTC Sabor. Considering the impressive specs on the handset, it is hard to believe that by the end of the year, HTC would be offering the market a smart phone with a 2GHz CPU and a touch scree display with 1080p HD resolution.

The specs are something out of a smart phone lover’s pipe dream and one that is unlikely to be technologically available in the given time frame –if it does exist, the battery life on the device would be cut extremely short as there are no power-efficient 2GHz CPUs available or in development.

Even Intel has announced that they would not be entering the smart phone industry until 2011, and they have made no claims that they would have a 2GHz CPU either.

The other smart phone is far more believable because of the proposed hardware specs and because it has already been leaked in images. The HTC Vision is a touch screen smart phone that comes with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, and a new high speed CPU clocked at 1.5 GHz. Many HTC Android fans have been hoping for a keyboard loaded device since the Motorola Milestone came out and HTC has yet to answer the call.

A physical keyboard is big deal because it allows users to type plenty of text faster than using a virtual onscreen keyboard. While the feature is not suited for all users, a vast majority of smart phone fans love keyboards –this partially explains why BlackBerry devices are still in demand.

According to rumors, the two handsets will most likely come packed with the new Android 3.0 Gingerbread OS.