HTC announces the Desire Z and Desire HD

Today, at a special event in London, HTC finally took the wraps off their two newest (and long rumored) Android devices. The Desire Z and Desire HD, both destined for Europe and Asia. Both phones should look familiar to American readers, as both have counterparts here already (or coming soon). The Desire HD is nearly identical to the Evo 4G on Sprint, and the Desire Z is, of course, nearly identical to the G2, launching soon.

For full specs, be sure to check out the links below, but here's a quick overview. The Desire HD has a 4.3" screen, 8MP camera, 1GHz processor, and runs Android 2.2 with HTC Sense. The Desire Z has a 3.7" screen, 5MP camera, 800MHz processor, QWERTY keyboard with Z-Hinge design, and rund Android 2.2 with HTC Sense.



Remember that these are the models for Europe and Asia. The corresponding products in the US are slightly different. For example, the Desire HD doesn't have a kickstand, whereas the Evo does. Likewise, the Desire Z has slightly different keyboard layout on the bottom row. But for the most part, they are nearly identical. The European market has been anxious for a large-screen device like the Evo for quite some time, so this is great news for them.

HTC also announced a new version of their Sense overlay. It brings features like remote lock, caching maps, ebook store, new camera, etc. It also features one of the fastest boot times in the buisness, at less than 10 seconds. Learn more about that here.

For more coverage on these new devices, be sure to check out Engadget's coverage and videos of the Desire Z here and Desire HD here, as well as the coverage by the other great Android blogs listed on the side of this site.

It's great to see nice, high-powered devices for the rest of the world. We've been able to get the Evo for a while, but it's CDMA and won't work overseas. So now they have a comparable device, and they're also getting the Z, which looks to be one of the best QWERTY devices on the market. The more the merrier, I say. Keep the awesome phones coming! :-)

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Whoa, 10 second boot time! Now I'm kind of sad that the G2 won't be running Sense....  That's incredible. Other than that, it's cool to get a sneak peek at what the G2 will look like since we've only seen a couple of pictures so far, and I liked seeing them use the hinge in the videos. It looks really smooth and I'm excited to get my hands on it.