It would be easy to write off the Desire HD as simply a version of the original Desire with a larger screen, but unofficial testing of the new handset and its software are delivering outstanding results, showing a phone that is noticeably faster and more powerful in a few key areas.
Reports from the XDA-Developers forum is that the Desire HD is benchmarking extremely well, pulling a score of 2000 from the popular Quadrant benchmarking tool available through the Android Market. Quadrant, which collects user results to form a chart of average results across all Android devices, had previously named the Nexus One as the best performer in this benchmark with a score of 1300. This shows the Desire HD handles a variety of processes, including 2D and 3D animation, almost 50 per cent better than previously released phones.
The other area of the user experience where HTC owners will see a major speed bump is in the start-up time of the phone from a cold start. Phandroid.com has posted a video to YouTube showing the Desire Z booting from a power-off state in a matter of seconds. This is a massive improvement on the 30 seconds or more a user would have to wait for Sense to boot up in previous HTC handsets.