The desire screen looks so much nicer than the iPhone’s. It’s OLED; black is real black, red is real red, furry creatures from alpha centauri are real furry creatures from alpha centauri.
The screen is responsive, and it leads to a pretty engaging experience. Photo’s are vibrant, movie clips look great. It actually makes the iPhone screen look subpar. In fact, if the iPhone 4 doesn’t have OLED, this will be a major disappointment for me.
It truly is THAT nice to look at.
However, thats where the great things end. As far as I can gather, it’s just not that accurate.
When browsing on an iPhone, you think your clumsy poke of a link wont result in the right link being opened, but somehow the software figures out what you meant, and it opens. Sure, errors happen, but where the error rate on the iPhone is small… the error rate on the Desire high. It’s possible this is a software bug that may be addressed in the future, but I doubt it.
In addition, double-tap leads to a really nice smooth zoom on the iPhone, but on the Desire, its all a bit clunky. It works, and you get used to it, but it’s not nice.
Further to the idea of zooming, the ‘pinching’ gesture does work on the Desire, but it suffers again from a less smooth transition than on the iPhone. The desire has plenty of power, so I’m convinced this is simply a matter of easing programming needing to be performed.
Scrolling again, is another place the Desire loses out. It’s just not as smooth as the iPhone. It’s pretty good, and when on the people / contacts application, its effective (but ill wait for part two for that one), but frankly again, can’t compete with the slickness of the iPhone.
The screen swiping is great, exposé style sceen selection via out-pinch gesture is lovely too, and the sense UI does a great job of making the home screens look great… but it’s just not an effect that is carried throughout the device. Not ENOUGH at any rate.
So, I’m sorry Desire, but your pretty OLED screen is just helping us see ever clearer how un-pretty the software transitions are, so you lose this one.
Desire 0, iPhone 1.
This evening comes Part 2: Phone Settings
