Phone Guide: HTC Desire

Ok guys and gals, the Desire is a fantastic phone, probably the best on the market at time of writing, a truly desirable device!This guide will be split up into the different logical segments of the phone, offering hints, tips and general know-how to ensure you get the most out of your new phone.

As always please leave a comment if you have a tip to add or wish to clarify something I have written here.

General Android Advice

• Android is a multitasking operating system. It is very smart at self-managing its memory and applications. You may hear talk of using a task killer, or another memory management tool, but this is NOT necesarry. Android will manage this task itself. You may have the question “How do I close this app?”. With android this question does not need to be asked as android will take care of it in the background.
• Turn off WiFi and GPS if you are not using them. They can cause the battery to drain much quicker than if you turned them off. Toggling between these settings is easy via the default HTC widgets.
• To add a new photo album, just mount the phone via USB to a PC, create a new folder and give it a name. Add your pictures to this folder. Now browse to the “Albums” in your phone and it will automatically create an album with the folder name you specified containing the pictures you added.
• Calibrate your keyboard!!! You will find using the keyboard waaay better. To this via:

Settings > Language and Keyboard > Touch Input > Text Input > Calibration Tool

• There are 3 types of keyboard available for the Desire built in “full QWERTY”, “Phone keypad” and Compact QWERTY”. Give them a try, one may suit you better. To change do the following:

Settings > Language and Keyboard > Touch Input > Keyboard Type

• A Class 6 micro sd card is preffered to ensure the fastest possible experience on the phone.
• If you have both WiFi and data connections turned on, your phone will default to using the WiFi connection as long as you are connected to a WiFi network. So no need to turn mobile data off using home WiFi.
• Setup your phone contacts as Google type contacts. You gain a lot for doing so. It automatically syncs your contacts to your gmail account providing a great backup solution, and you can only use voice dialling for google contacts too!

Status Icons

Notification Icons

Adding New Ringtones/SMS Notifications/Alarms

To add new ringtones or SMS alerts, connect your Hero to USB and mount the device on your PC. Browse to the following folders:

If these folders do not currently exist, then just create them yourself.

Ringtones:
/sdcard/media/audio/ringtones
SMS Alerts:
/sdcard/media/audio/notifications
Alarm Alerts:
/sdcard/media/audio/alarms

Copy your mp3 files into the appropriate folder above then go to:

Ringtone:
Settings > sound and display > phone ringtone
SMS:
Settings > sound and display > notification sound
Alarms:
Set the sound when adding a new alarm.

Then select the ringtone you put in the above folder(s).

Desktop

• Click the Search key while on your desktop to bring up a quick search. You can search your phone and the internet from here. To customise exactly what you can search from here go to:

Settings > Search > Searchable Items

• On the Desktop press menu and wallpapers to change wallpapers.
• Long press on the Home key to bring up a list of your most recently used apps, very useful to quckly switch apps and a brilliant example of the benefits of multitasking.
• Pinch Zoom on your dekstop to bring an overview of all your 7 screens, then simply select the screen you wish to jump to.
• Press the Home key when on your main (middle) screen to also bring up the 7 screen overview.
• Press the Home key when on any of the other 6 screes to jump to your main screen
• Drag your finger to switch between screens you can also use the optical trackball to produce the same functionality.

Explanation of Desktop Items

Widget

Similar to an application, a widget sits on your desktop providing some sort of functionality. Eg A clock, list of favourite contacts, twitter updates

Program

A shortcut to any of the apps you have installed on your phone. Eg a shortrcut to your browser, or to facebook.

Shortcut

Some apps provide shortcuts to features of their application, Eg A Gmail Label, a new task in a to do list app, a ‘jump straight to new text’ for a specific contact.

Folder

Folder allows you to group program shortcuts on your desktop, keepsthings nice and tidy. Live Folder can be used to hold a list of all your contacts, or perhaps a link to an actual folder.

Add Icons/Widgets/Shortcuts to Desktop

• Long press on a free area on the desktop and select your choice from the pop up list
• Click the little plus sign on the bottom right of hte screen, to the right of the Phone text.

Move/Remove Desktop Icons/Widgets/Shortcuts

• Long press on the icon, and drag it to the bottom of the screen where you see the ‘remove’ text. You may also move icons around the screen this way.
• To move icons to a different desktop, drag and hold the icon to the far left/right of the screen for a few seconds and the screen will scroll.

Browser

You cannot close the browser normally. You can escape from the browser in two ways:

• Press the back button repeatidly until you eventually leave the browser
• Press the home button

Browser Tips

• Pinch Zoom: Pinch the screen to zoom in/out.
• Double-Tap: To zoom in/out
• Long Press on the screen to bring up the word selection tool.
  • Drag either of the green pointers to highligh more or less
    • Click the magnifying glass to either:
      • look up the selected text in wikipedia
      • Translate the selected text
      • Look up the selected text in the dictionary
    • Click on the pages to copy the selected text
    • Click the green upwards arrows to share the selected text

Don’t like pages to open in full view?

Menu > More > Settings > Untick ‘Open pages in overview’

Select the default Zoom of a new page

Menu > More > Settings > ‘Default zoom’