Nokia N8 vs HTC Desire - Hot review buy Nokia N8 phones soon

So you want a new smartphone and you’ve heard about this week’s launches from Nokia and HTC. But are they really any good? The Independent has had extensive access to both the Nokia N8 and the HTC Desire Z to bring you the first definitive judgements.

Both phones are bigger than the iPhone they hope to usurp, but the Nokia has the same sized 3.5-inch screen and the HTC Desire Z pips it with a 3.7-inch display . The Desire Z uses the latest version of Android software, while Nokia’s N8 has the company’s own operating system, brought powerfully up to date. The N8’s anodised aluminium casing is striking and it sits well in the hand. As it’s a touchscreen, there are few physical buttons – one on the front takes you to the home screens, there’s a dedicated button to launch the 12-megapixel camera and a sliding switch to lock the screen. Everything else is addressed from the touchscreen and it’s the new Symbian^3 which handles it. Compared to Nokia’s earlier touchscreens, this is a revelation. The most annoying element before was an erratic interface – very unlike Nokia. This meant you sometimes needed one finger press, sometimes two, to launch programs. Happily, one press is now universal and the system is pleasingly intuitive. The touchscreen itself is highly responsive and speedy. The haptic feedback – a vibrating response which confirms your input has been recognised – is the most effective on any phone, delicate but definite.

Of course, you’d expect Nokia to get the basics right: phone signal and call quality are strong, and sending a text or email is simple – though if you want a full Qwerty keyboard to appear on screen you need to turn the phone to landscape format. And the headline features, 12-megapixel camera, HD video recording and HDMI output through a mini-HDMI connector so you can play back your home movies on a TV are all beautifully managed. Photographic results are particularly strong, thanks to the sensor, the Carl Zeiss optics, the Xenon flash and the mechanical shutter. An electronic shutter – found on most cameraphones – registers the light from one corner of the sensor to another. It does this quickly but if your subject is moving, it shows. A mechanical shutter improves on this.

There’s also a neat BBC iPlayer widget which leads you online to stream or download recent shows. Playback looks excellent, though better for short programmes than epics. The N8 doesn’t have the CBD (ClearBlack Display) that makes the new Nokia C6 and E7 screens look so great, but while the N8 is good, bright light defeats it.

Multitasking is a cinch for both the phones here, though this can shorten battery life. Smartphones are notorious for short battery life – they have large, bright energy-draining screens and we use them heavily because they do so much more than make calls.

It’s only the latest iteration of the iPhone that has a decent life between charges. And Apple’s phones don’t have removable batteries so when the juice is gone, your phone’s dead. So it’s interesting that with the N8, Nokia has opted for a sealed unit with non-removable battery. Nokia must be confident its new handset has decent life. Our tests showed it holding up well. The HTC Desire Z has a removable battery but Peter Chou, HTC’s CEO, told the Independent that the battery life was 20 per cent better than previous phones. He candidly acknowledged that there was further to go, but insisted this was a step forward. The Desire Z is a snazzily designed, aluminium-clad handset. The keyboard, though highly usable, sits flat as a pancake behind the screen, so flat that when closed the phone doesn’t feel at all flabby or uncomfortably thick. The hinged mechanism shaped like a Z, you see, works very slickly and places the screen just far enough away from the keys that your thumbs don’t feel cramped. If the phone is closed you can still input text on the screen’s virtual Qwerty which is easy and permits speedy typing. Both the Desire Z and the HTC Desire HD come with FastBoot which launches your phone from off to usable in around 10 seconds – most smartphones would take up to a minute.

And there’s the latest version of HTC Sense, the interface which adds cuter icons and shortcuts to the Google Android system. It works tremendously, with great applications for email, social networking and more. The phone doesn’t have a chip as fast as Nokia’s 1GHz processor but the 800MHz one here feels very fast – there’s no lag. Plus, there’s Locations, the HTC take on navigation with its own maps (from Route 66) which you can download to the phone’s memory card. Do this before you go abroad and you can use the phone’s GPS chip without expensive data roaming charges (though you don’t get spoken turn-by-turn directions).

Like the Nokia, the Desire Z shoots HD video and has a strong camera with a still-decent 5-megapixel sensor. Both phones have a lot going for them, and offer strong alternatives to the iPhone. The Desire is the sleeker of the two, but the new Symbian software on the N8 may be enough to tempt Nokia loyalists to try a touchphone experience.