The HTC desire S is the 5th phone I have owned and the first ever smartphone. Initial impressions when I got it out of its box, wow! What a phone. The screen is bright and interface is quick. Even now, over half a year on its features impress me.

Straight after I got it as we all do with new phones I had a play around. The camera is good enough to take photos in low light and clear shots at a distance of about 10m. Obviously I don't expect to get a top of the range digital camera with my smartphone but it does the job well and will be fine for all your party camera snapping needs. The next thing I had a play around with was the phones interface. I had already looked into this phone before I bought it and knew about HTC's customisable screen. It really is a USP because I loved changing the theme of my phone to suit my preferanc and adding all the widgets that I wanted on my phone. You think if your going to spend so much money on a phone it might as well be suited to me and that's exactly what this does.

The online features on the phone do what you expect a smartphone to do nowadays with the app store and email both being easy to use. As far as the internet goes it works fine but I found it a little difficult to use with the small spaces for typing and clicked on the wrong thing time and time again.

Now the bad stuff. I got this phone last November and for the first few months it worked faster and better than any phone I have owned but recently it has started to slow down and malfunction. When it started slowing I wiped it's memory to see if that would help and it didn't. Now I could be wrong about this, it could just be my phone that has begun to malfunction but I began to talk to other HTC owners a lot of whom have have the same problem as me. The phone works great for a few months then begins to malfunction. I also looked at online forums where many more people have had the same problem. Whatever is going on though it is not just localised to the HTC desire S. my brother had the same problems with the HTC hero, the first successful HTC smartphone. It leads to suspect that HTC's are generally faulty and what makes this review a 4 instead of 5.