HTC Desire HD, 10 years later: My first Android phone! By Android Central

My first-ever Android phone was the HTC inspire 4G back in 2011, when this thing was first released. I was a junior in high school I had an iPhone, 4, and I really loved it, but I was already starting to get a little bored with iOS. I saw some of my friends had Android phones, they looked different. They looked interesting, and I wanted to try them out, so I got on Craigslist I started looking for people that wanted to trade, their Android phones for an iPhone that wasn't very difficult back then, so I managed to trade. My iPhone for an inspired pretty quickly, and this wasn't just my first Android phone. It was ATT's first 4G phone.

This ran on the SPA+ network and I, remember having to call AT&T and specifically asked them to add 4G onto my data plan. We already had a 3G package and I. Don't think the 4G even cost any extra on the monthly bill, but you had to ask for it or else he would just keep getting 3g on to inspire. I think this was a perfect starting point for Android for me, because even coming from the iPhone 4, which I still think has incredible hardware, with a glass front and back and the metal railing in between this phone has really remarkable hardware. It's got an aluminum unibody design with these little plastic bits along the back that help make sure it can still connect to its various networks without a problem and those plastic parts serve sort of dual purposes.

So if you slide off this little bottom section, you get access to this really cool-looking transparent bit. That lets you see the internals of the phone, and then you also have access to the SIM tray and the micros tray. That micros is really important, because this phone only had four gigabytes of internal storage and 768 megabytes of RAM and then there's this guy. This was the battery door and I. Remember almost breaking my fingernail trying to try to rip it open sticking like quarters and house keys into this little tiny notch to try and pry the door open.

Luckily, on this one that I got from eBay, it's a lot easier to just pull it off like that, but inside you get access to the little slide-out battery, which is kind of hard to pull out, because the battery has apparently swollen just enough over the years, and if you ever used to inspire in the past, you already know that it had terrible battery life, maybe not quite as bad as the HTC Thunderbolt that was released around the same time on Verizon. That was their first LTE phone. Anybody that used that phone knows it was just the worst, but this was pretty bad in its own right and that's largely because of this twelve hundred and thirty million power battery that sounds hilariously small by today's standards, but even back then it was pretty rough for context. The galaxy s ii had a 1650 William hour battery and the Motorola matrix had a 1930 William hour battery both were released around the same time as to inspire, but it was kind of okay back then, because at least batteries were still stoppable, and this one was so small and slim that I'm pretty sure I kept one of my wallet and a few and my backpack, so I could at least get through the day without much hassle. Something else I remember about to inspire is just how giant the screen felt to me at the time.

This has a 4.3 inch, LCD and coming from my iPhone 4, which had a three-and-a-half inch screen. This just felt like impossibly giant who could ever need a phone with a 4.3-inch screen and now, of course, by today's standards. It's just hilariously small, but back then it was a lot I remember going into a Best Buy and looking at the Dell Streak and just thinking there's no way a five-inch screen like that would ever catch on. But the inspired screen wasn't just big. It was also colorful and bright and vivid and combined with HTC's Sense UI, which was also colorful and vivid.

It made to inspire really eye-catching in a way that other Android phones at the time, just weren't. In fact, back then HTC Sense UI, was actually a huge selling point of its phones. Everybody has seen the clock widget that takes up half your screen. It's got the weather just below the actual time. I put it on every phone four years after to inspire, and it's really to see it natively on here again now, because to inspire is still running, android version, 2.3, Gingerbread I couldn't get any of the apps that I use on a daily basis, running or even installed on the phone, and even my Gmail account I had to sign in to an older account that I haven't used in like a decade, because to inspire with Android 2.3 doesn't support Google's 2-step authentication, but the apps that come pre-installed on the phone actually still work pretty well for the most part like asphalt 5, and there are some old, hidden gems like Blockbuster and Yellow Pages on here now the camera on this thing, I, remember being better than it is, and maybe at the time it was fine. There's a single 12, megapixel camera on the back and there's actually no front camera.

So instead you had to jump into the camera tap the menu button. That was still a thing back then hit self-portrait mode. And then you turn the surrounding camera beeps when it sees your face and eventually one day, uh-huh there you go, things were fun in 2011. Look I'm, obviously not going to switch back to to inspire and make this my daily phone in 2020, but it has been a lot of fun revisiting my first ever Android phone, and it kind of makes me want to give the 12 plus another, go just to relive the HTC experience. Some more now, I want to hear from you in the comments down below what were your first Android phones and did any of them have a really lasting impression on you that really made you stick with Android I honestly, don't know if I would be doing what I'm doing right now, if it weren't for the inspires, so I'm really, really glad that I made that trade all the way back in high school.

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Source : Android Central