HTC Desire Ruined by Orange Branding

[Hands0n]

** See Update below **


Well no surprise there I suppose. It really baffles me why Orange insist on buggering up a perfect good handset with their inane branding.

This time the victim is the brand new HTC Desire. Honestly, the folk at HTC must be looking on with complete incredulity.

At first glance the Orange-supplied HTC Desire looks pretty much the same as a standard Desire. The Sense UI is there and seems to function perfectly well. But it is only when you start digging in a bit deeper that you start to find that something is not quite right.

GTalk - the Google Talk app is missing. Yes, on an Android handset, there is no Google Talk app, although if you use something like Taskiller you will see that there is a GTalk task running. You cannot install GTalk from Android Market either.

At this time there appears to be no easy way of getting the GTalk app back. Certainly not without loading up a standard HTC Desire ROM, if you can find one. It won't be a trivial job though. The Desire is not yet rootable (I read so far) and needs to have a Gold Card prepared before trying to load up a new ROM.

Orange have crippled gtalk on their branded version of the HTC Desire. They have replaced it with their own branded MSN messenger. The main problem is that gtalk is a key part of the o/s - so when you click to IM someone on maps, email, contacts etc it just doesn't work on the Orange branded version. They have not done this on previous android devices, so I'm not sure why they have started now, it seems ill thought through. Gtalk and MSN messenger use different accounts so you cannot use your google credentials on MSN messenger. MSN messenger is not integrated to the OS (as gtalk is) so a lot of functionality breaks on the phone.

URL: http://www.adambowie.com/weblog/archive/002925.html

Orange Apps - the handset is littered with lots of Orange trial apps, no doubt wanting you to spend more of your hard earned on their suggested rubbish. And no, you cannot uninstall these using the standard Android means. So your Programs panel is absolutely littered with this junk obscuring any apps that you have installed for your own use.

This is all really quite tiresome.

If you are an Orange happy bunny then you will not be too bothered about any of this. But if you are expecting a standard HTC Desire to match either a SIM free or unbranded handset from the likes of Vodafone, O2 and 3 then you will be very disappointed. T-Mobile also heavily brand theirs.

So the advice to anyone really keen for a Desire just be aware of what you may be letting yourself in for.


**Update**
This has turned into a bit of a de-branding thread
The primary resources for de-branding the HTC Desire (on any UK network) can be located here --> http://android.modaco.com/content/ht...-t-mo-handset/
The above link will give you the basic steps and links to de-brand an HTC Desire back to the factory condition.
There are, however, some pitfalls - see the posting further down this thread relating to ensuring that HTC Sync is installed on your Windows PC before attempting to run the RUU installer. Chances are that the process will fail to work otherwise.