Review on:

HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2)

Shaun’s Rating

Purchase Date: May 2011

Purchase Price: $200.00

Community Rating:
(1 reviews)
Shaun

T-Mobile G2 Review

Pros: Great everyday web experience. Great selection of apps. Solid platform.
Cons: No capture screenshot feature, poor flash support
Lucky for me, I mistakenly went swimming with my G1. As a result, I got the G2 (HTC Desire Z). While it’s not considered the best Android phone on the market, it’s not too shabby. As compared to the G1, it’s light years ahead. It really is. Can you believe the processor is only 800mhz? Is this 2005?

I'm still really surprised there isn't an easy way to take screenshots. I took my screenshots with the DDMS utitlity found within Android SDK (or you can root it).

Flash worked fine for most things I needed. The browser rendered flash-intensive sites perfectly, but once I began interacting with them, I found bugs: Most of the touch and scroll stuff was borked. Trying to touch a flash-based button with your finger is nearly impossible - offset by a whole finger! My own site utilizes flash for microphone input so I was disappointed when I tried recording from the phone and it didn't work; neither does audio sampling/mixing.

Other then that, the phone is awesome - not many complaints here. As the basic user experience is a hell of a lot more responsive (thanks to JIT), I was curious to see how the G2 compares to the notebook benchmarks in our database. I focused on web benchmarks because the web is decentralized; enabling us to compare performance across platforms. I also decided not to run the mobile version of the benchmarks because I wanted to run the same benchmarks as I did on the notebooks. I used the stock Android browser; Firefox got similar results (but no Flash):
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As you can see, when it comes to the intensive web, this phone ain't gonna cut it.

I really want to see real-time audio mixing in on these Android devices (in HTML5) . Is it feasible? Supposedly yes, but for the most part, the HTML5 audio experiments don't work. Not for the stock Android browser anyway. Firefox worked a little better: I was able to get basic (generated) HTML5 audio to work consistently, but anything more sophisticated doesn't work (e.g. filters, mixing etc...).
Here’s some HTML5 audio experimenting links for anyone that’s interested:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API
http://acko.net/blog/javascript-audio-synthesis-with-html-5
http://www.julianwong.net/blog/2010/09/a-play-with-html5-audio-mixer-with-canvas/
http://www.phoboslab.org/files/html5audio/
http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/pocket_full_of_html5/#presets/colormunch.js
http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=1092
http://www.codebase.es/riffwave/
http://www.jplayer.org/

I'm also looking into flashing with Cyanogenmod 7 (Android 2.3++), both for my phone and my wife's Nook. I'll update this post if I do anything with it.
Comment 

Comments (9)

Steve 5/23/11 at 10:41am
i didn't know you could run peacekeeper on phones.

I'm gonna do that with my phones.
Shaun 5/26/11 at 7:57pm
yeah, it runs fine but peacekeeper warns about running on mobile phone.
dougadamsfan 5/30/11 at 7:10am
To be perfectly fair, the G2 came out last September. So not only is it not one of the best Android phones of 2011, it's not even an Android phone of 2011, it's an android phone of 2010 (and it was really quite good for 2010). My advice would be for you to return it before your 30 day trial is up and get the Sensation in a few weeks (drops 6/8/11). Only drawback is the lack of a hard keyboard.
Shaun 5/30/11 at 8:37am
@dougadamsfan good point. I consider it.

I'll definitely be at a loss without a hardware keyboard.

dougadamsfan 5/30/11 at 8:50am
I know what you mean, I'm also a hard keyboard guy myself and it sucks that they don't have much of a selection for those atm. I'm still sporting the TP2, my contract is up in 4 months and I can't decide whether or not to jump the t-mobile ship. That AT&T b/o doesn't seem like a very good deal for anyone but existing AT&T users. I'm hoping that for some reason it doesn't happen, but with the amount of money and resources AT&T will have to pay T-mo if it doesn't go through they've got a lot of incentive to bribe whoever they must to get that deal through.

I would suggest (if you haven't yet, and as you alluded to) heading over to XDA and trying out a gingerbread rom on there. Just make sure there's a stock rom available to reflash if you do decide to exchange it.
dougadamsfan 5/30/11 at 8:52am
oh and a relocker so it doesn't look like you've rooted it.
dougadamsfan 6/1/11 at 9:57am
FYI it looks like the blurb I read from HTC about the launch of the Sensation was incorrect. I't's going to be sold exclusively at Walmart for 3 days starting 6/12, and then will be available at T-mo stores starting 6/15.
dougadamsfan 6/3/11 at 11:21am
There's also the MyTouch 4g Slide hitting in early July, has hard keyboard and roughly same specs as sensation except the screen is only 3.7" according to what I've been reading.