The HTC Desire  is the company’s second-strike in what they hope will be a one-two sucker punch for the Android competition. Following on from the excellent HTC Legend, the Desire borrows plenty from Google’s Nexus One  but packages it with HTC Sense for arguably better out-of-the-box usability. It makes for a tricky argument, however; HTC manufacture both smartphones, and have been accused by some of purposefully building the Desire to a price by snipping away at the spec sheet.

We’ve got two questions, then: is the HTC Desire any good, and does it hold its own against the Google Nexus One? To find out, check the full SlashGear review after the cut.

It is no secret that the HTC Desire was patterned from the Google Nexus One which it was also commissioned to do (more like a co-branded partnership of sorts) early this year. As such, the Desire looks like a fraternal twin of the NX1 with some minor cosmetic changes and added features. To give you a better perspective, read my review of the Google Nexus One first.

The rounded corners, the brown and dark gray color tones and the optical trackpad are all signature designs of HTC. The Desire has all that with an anodized aluminum front and (rubber-like) polymer back panel. The power button is on top, just across the 3.5mm headphone jack. The micro-USB port is at the bottom and the volume rocker is placed at the left side. The handset lacks a dedicated camera button normally found in most other smartphones. At the back is the 5MP camera and LED flash.

It has a rubberised chassis, which is a little hard to grip at times. We’re not talking so slippy you’ll be dropping it all the time, but it still can be a little difficult to hold in one hand, especially if you have dinky digits.That said it sits very nicely in the hand, with a sumptuous curved chassis feeling very nice and making it easy to press the buttons on the front with the thumb. There’s actually very little button-wise on the HTC Desire, with only six in all. The front four buttons are standard HTC Android fare (Home, Menu, Back and Search) and the Terminator optical trackpad also clicks in as an enter key.

The HTC Tattoo wants to redefine smart in smartphone. This affordable little thing was among the first droids to go mass-market. But run-of-the-mill specs don’t mean a boring personality. The HTC Tattoo wears its heart on the sleeve and a shirt for every day of the week means no shortage of sleeves. What do you know, HTC are busy running a tattoo shop.

The Android Market is a huge part of the deal with every droid phone. The HTC Tattoo has two: a beauty shop and a food store to go to. Back at launch, the QVGA screen resolution wouldn’t let the Tattoo make the best of the Android Market. Things should be different a few months later with more QVGA droids around.

The back side hosts the 3.2-megapixel camera that we don’t expect much of. There is a picture of the iconic green robot next to it, but as you probably know, HTC has recently started a dedicated service that allows HTC Tattoo owner hopefuls to unleash their creative thinking and come up with their unique designs. Cool! Still… keep in mind the indisputable pleasure of personalizing the appearance of your future handset will set you back with extra 15 EUR.

The HTC Tattoo is a nicely built handset and feels very sturdy indeed, with no creaks or squeaks from its covers. The front of the handset features a 2.8-inch QVGA (240 x 320 pixel) resolution resistive touchscreen display, with an earpiece and notification LED above it, and most of the device’s hardware buttons beneath it. These hardware buttons comprise a home key, menu key, back key, search key, and call send and end keys. The Tattoo is also the first HTC Android device in the UK to come without a trackball, instead featuring a 5-way d-pad. Personally, although I like the trackball, I think the d-pad actually makes the handset easier to use in some ways.

The rear of the handset is very rounded at its edges, which gives the Tattoo a pleasant feel in the hand. Top left of the rear cover is the camera lens, next to the centrally-positioned loudspeaker grille. The texture of the front and rear covers feels odd, but in a good way. The surface is smooth, with an almost soft-touch feel. The right edge of the handset is bare, and the left is home only to the volume rocker. The top of the handset features the Tattoo’s 3.5mm headphone port and a lanyard fixing. The bottom features just HTC’s miniUSB port for charging and data, and a microphone pinhole.

The HTC HD Mini is a jaunty wee smart phone that manages to pull off the seemingly impossible — it runs the Windows Mobile operating system and still manages to be excellent. HTC has injected some life into the old dog that is Windows Mobile 6.5 with a snazzy user interface and sexy hardware. As far as pocket-friendly smart phones go, the Mini is a surprise success.

It sounds like a recipe for success: take the surprisingly popular HTC HD2, shrink it down some, and offer it as a more pocketable alternative. Yet out of the three devices HTC announced at Mobile World Congress in February, the HTC HD mini has prompted the least interest. The HD mini  has to convince prospective buyers not only of its own merits but that it’s worth buying into an ageing OS that’s just months away from replacement. Can it deliver? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.

The hardware is great. It’s what we’ve come to know and love from HTC, scaling the HD2  down to a more accessible size. It’s an industrial one, the HD Mini. Certainly not sleek and sexy like the Legend, nor curved like the Desire. Exposed screws on each corner of the rubberized back plate give it a very masculine appearance—which I loved.

Underneath the cover lies a bright yellow inside, a hidden secret which I showed off to countless friends while testing it. The size of the phone is perfect, proving easier to handle than the 4.3-inch HD2, with the 3.2-inch capacitive HVGA screen more than big enough to browse and type on. It’s bright until you hold the phone in the sun.

The first thing to be said here is that HTC did itself a disservice by calling this the HD Mini. Sure, the company’s trying to capitalize on the parallels with its brawny WinMo flagship, but the fact is that this handset has the looks and construction to easily withstand one of HTC’s more flamboyant names — we’d have few qualms about calling it the HTC Spectacular.

The plastic back cover — which offers a pleasing, grip-friendly surface — envelops most of the body, with the only seam being where it meets the front end’s glass screen. This leads to a smooth and sophisticated appearance, garnished by the exposure of the internal screws. It’s a nice aesthetic touch, which doesn’t actually affect the cover itself — it slips off around them. Aside from such minimalist design flourishes, the phone’s body looks about as tapered as can be. Its back is as flat as the front, thanks to the camera and speaker module being perfectly filed down, and aside from the fact we’d prefer more screen and less bezel (a longstanding bugbear of ours), there’s really very little cause for complaint. If we have to pick some niggles, the cover is a pain to remove and having to take out the battery to replace SIM cards isn’t ideal, but those shouldn’t be things that will trouble you on a daily basis.

After the success of the HTC Hero, the Taiwanese firm is back again with the first of its duo of Android 2.1 phones, the HTC Legend. Featuring a full aluminium chassis and high-res OLED screen, as well as the latest version of Android from Google, HTC is clearly looking to jostle its way to the front of the best-selling phone queue with the HTC Legend and Desire.

The HTC Legend features a sumptuous unibody aluminium chassis – taking more than a few visual cues from the MacBook range, and refining the lines of the HTC Hero to produce a sleek and very aesthetically pleasing phone.

The predecessor of the HTC Legend, the Hero, pioneered Sense UI and this latest gadget follows suit, but brings some innovation of its own.The HTC Legend borrows a page from high-end laptop design – the aluminum unibody. The unibody design was touted as a game-changing breakthrough when it hit the laptop market. A lot of that was marketing hype, but the fact is that unibody metal designs still have a distinct quality feel to them.

Before we jump into any details, we’ll go over the key aspects of the HTC Legend and what we found lacking.

Key features

• Aluminum unibody design
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
• 3G with HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 2Mbps
• Android OS v2.1 with latest Sense UI
• 3.2″ capacitive AMOLED touchscreen of HVGA resolution
• Qualcomm MSM 7227 600 MHz CPU, 384 MB RAM
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and VGA@30fps video recording
• Web browser comes with Flash support
• Multi-touch zooming in gallery and web browser
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and GPS receiver
• Digital compass for automatic navigation of maps
• Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and turn-to-mute
• Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP); File transfer over Bluetooth
• Standard microUSB port for charging and data
• Standard 3.5mm audio jack
• FM Radio with RDS
• microSD card slot with support for up to 32GB cards (2GB one included)
• Tethering support right out-of-the-box
• Social networking integration with Facebook and Twitter
• Direct access to the official Android application repository