HTC Desire Gingerbread Update Is Out–Comes With Big Caution Sign

August 03 13:21 2011 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

The HTC Desire – 2010 Phone of The Year. And yet, had so little app memory that you only had a hundred plus megs to install anything. And given the size of apps these days, including Google’s own Maps (10MB), GMail (5MB), and Market (4MB), in the end you won’t be left with much. Such was also the dilemma for HTC’s own development team when they wanted to bring the new Gingerbread update to the phone. In the end, they couldn’t manage it without culling some of the HTC Sense features. So the good news is that the new Gingerbread update for the HTC Desire is now out. The bad news is that you lose a lot of the Sense features – for which HTC is throwing a big caution for upgraders.

As such, the update isn’t designed to be delivered Over-The-Air. A traditional OTA update is an update that will show up in your phone when it checks for new firmware. It is designed to subtly bring your software version to a higher one that should improve performance and usability without requiring you to factory reset your phone or lose all your data. This Gingerbread update, however, does things differently. For one, since the whole Sense interface plus the new Google firmware wouldn’t fit the memory on the phone, some sacrifices had to be made. Supposedly, while most of the user interface graphics are intact, a lot of stock apps, wallpapers, and other built-in apps have been removed to fit the storage space. Another thing they caution upgraders with is that it also will reset your phone to an out of the box type of experience – with zero contacts, messages, and other account options.

With all those niggles, HTC has decided to only recommend this upgrade to “expert” users. We’d like to call it more like adventurous users who understand the consequences of the upgrade. So, if you’re the adventurous type, you can pick the upgrade up here. Be sure to read up on most of the information available as there will no doubt be a lot of questions in your minds. We have a Desire unit ourselves, and we’re considering the upgrade, but we’d like to wait around a bit more for early adopters’ experiences. Plus, there’s a rumor that an OTA update might actually still surface, despite the FAQ saying that this will be the official update. (And hence, supposedly final.)

Upgraders, let us know what you think! Thanks.