Some smartphones are designed for quick glances, for momentary updates and flashes of important information snatched from a variety of sources. Other phones, of which the HTC Dream is one, are designed for users who like to be deeply engrossed within their mobile world, to extend their brains into the display screen and use its landscape to lay information out, to solve problems, and get a bigger picture. Here a kind of harmony between the hardware and the software is needed and with the HTC Dream, Google’s captured just that, leveraging their array of Google services and their signature charm and simplicity into a likeable handset.

 

Design

The Dream feels like a hockey puck and it’s shaped like a brick. It’s a hockey brick. It won’t win any major design awards, but it has its own rubbery matte charm. The screen slides out, triggering the display to switch to landscape view, and a physical QWERTY keyboard appears. You rest your fingers on it, deep within the shelf and the screen offers three different desktop screens for you to lay out application shortcuts, widgets, and access notifications. Aside from typing you can also swipe the touchscreen with your finger to access hidden menus, switch desktop screens, and drag-and-drop icons. There’s a trackball for navigating finer points, picking out specific objects in a web page, moving through a string of text, etc. There’s also a back button, and a menu button, all to quickly pull up contextual menus and option screens.

Like a typewriter or desktop computer, it has a sit-and-think feel to it. Fingers hovering over the keyboard, eyes drifting across the data on the screen, thinking and wondering what the next line will be.

This offers weaknesses rather than drawbacks. The keyboard is too flush to the surface to find keys unconsciously and with so many input options, well, it seems too much. The HTC Magic, nearly a twin to the Dream, drops the keyboard in favour of just a touchscreen and trackball and seems, by its very simplicity, better.

Android

The phone runs Google’s own operating system, called Android. It’s an open source piece of software, meaning that it is not tied specifically to phones made by HTC, that it can just as easily appear on phones made by other brands including Motorola, Nokia, or Samsung, for example. The Dream then is just the first of what will soon be a large selection of phones running Android.

Android runs very quickly and smoothly, even when supporting multiple applications at the same time and maintaining notifications from multiple services and apps. Its look is clean, simple, and often transparent, always giving you a view towards the base display image on the screen. Menu systems are large and friendly, always at hand. You can pull out the main menu of app shortcuts like a drawer by just swiping a tab on the screen. Tap the top of the screen and pull down a similar tab, but this time like a window blind to access a list of notifications, so you can clear them without having to open the associated program first.

By far its best trick is its synchronization with Google services. Just log into your Google account once, through any Google tool, and the handset will automatically download all of your content from all Google services and leverage it throughout its software. Instead of having to go into your contacts menu to look up a persons’ phone number, you can merely type it in, right into the keypad and it will pull up the info for you, already grabbed from your Gmail or Google Talk account.

Digital Compass

Like most of the top smartphones today, the Dream is laden with sensors. A light sensor to turn on the keyboard backlight, a proximity sensor to turn off the touchscreen when you bring it up to your face, and an accelerometer to help it sense changes in the phone’s position to switch display modes and interact with apps. It includes built-in GPS for use with Google Maps which, as you can imagine, works extremely well.

The sensor that’s a new one on the market here is the Digital Compass. It allows the phone to sense direction. Combined with the GPS and the accelerometer, it allows it to not only know where it is, whether its facing up or down, but also which direction, east, west, north, south.

The app that best uses and demonstrates this Google Sky. Point your phone at the sky and these sensors will position a star chart on the screen to show you exactly which stars you’re pointing at. You can even use the app to search for specific celestial bodies. You type in the name, and it directs you to move the screen to the right spot.

Full-Featured

Here’s where I really warm up to the Dream. It has a full feature set. It is a quad-band phone, meaning you can travel with it anywhere. It offers both 3G data speeds, matching the speed and performance that I get from my iPhone 3G, and Wi-Fi. Bluetooth 2.0 with support for data transfers, and a 3.2 Megapixel camera with autofocus that yes, does video.

Unlike its launch in the US as the G1, the HTC Dream in Canada includes support for Microsoft’s ActiveSync, offering support for those with business e-mail accounts.

 

Android is open source software and with that comes a certain freedom. Freedom in formats, the Dream can play AAC, WMA,MP3 and MIDI files and that’s just with ringtones alone. You can use a MicroSD card to add video and audio content, playing them through a vibrant 3.2 inch screen and using the built-in speaker.

The only thing missing from the Dream, and it such a small thing to be such a sad omission, is a standard headphone jack. Instead you’ll need to use a special headset with mini USB adaptor.

Web Browsing And E-mail

The Dream offers a full HTML browser, allowing you to access pages similar to your experience on a desktop computer. You can use your finger and the touchscreen to quickly scroll down a page and to place a zoom frame to select a section of the page to make fullscreen. You can quickly navigate through embedded links in the page using the trackball if that’s more comfortable, and in addition to supporting home pages, bookmarks, and different font options, you can also have four windows open at the same time. The controls can take some getting used to, but surfing the web is an enjoyable experience.

The e-mail interface is clean, simple, and a breeze to use. I love the built-in option to grab a web url from the browser and include it into an e-mail for sharing plus the option to apply labels to messages for sorting. This makes e-mail one of the best features for the Dream.

Battery Life

The specifications list a talk time of 406 minutes, close to seven hours which is about right. With internet usage, Wi-Fi turned on, and a full charge in the morning, I found it made it just to the end of the business day. Not enough to keep me from having to charge it everyday, but slightly better than what I’ve gotten from the iPhone 3G and BlackBerry Storm.

The Android Market

Similar to the iPhone 3G and Blackberry Bold, the HTC Dream can download and run applications from an online store, in this case one run by Google called Android Market. At launch there are 3,200 apps with categories including games, finance, communication, shopping, travel, and many more. As Android supports open source software, there is a larger selection of home-made applications than you’ll find from Apple and RIM, including emulation software for Nintendo games and creative clients for a number of services including Facebook and Twitter. It also means that such software can often have a rough nature to it, poorly supported with proper instructions or assurances that it will work well. This is find if you’re tech savvy, but casual users may not be invested enough to do the research to fix these problems or understand obscure requirement references (many apps refer to Cupcake, a pre-release version of Android).

 

With thousands of apps to choose from, and more coming, there’s plenty of easy-to-use apps to find, many from Google themselves including Google Sky Map, My Maps Editor, Scoreboard, and Google Finance.

 

Tap The Android To Begin

The mistake I’ve continuously encountered with touchscreen smartphones in the past few years has been a hackneyed attempt to assemble all the latest features and components with software incapable of doing so with any sense of flow or harmony. Both the HTC Dream and its touchscreen near-twin the HTC Magic are the rare exceptions, joining the ranks of the iPhone 3G and Blackberry Bold as the strongest smartphones in Canada who deliver the features most desired in a way that makes them worth using. Although the flush buttons of the keyboard will be an issue for some (and one reason why I’m leaning towards the Magic) this is a handset worth getting very excited about.