The HTC HD Mini

The HTC HD Mini is to the HD2 what the iPhone Nano would be to the original iPhone. It's well-built and charmingly small, but its OS is too dated to ever enjoy very much. Window Mobile 6.5.3 is an albatross hanging around the HTC HD Mini's neck. With the HTC Sense interface, the phone is somewhat usable. But with the wondrous Windows Phone 7 , you can't seriously consider the HD Mini right off the bat. The OS is the dark flip side to the beautiful hardware.

The hardware is great. It's what we've come to know and love from HTC, scaling the HD2 to a more accessible size. It's an industrial one, the HD Mini. Certainly not sleek and sexy like the Legend, nor curved like the Desire. Exposed screws on each corner of the rubberized back plate give it a very masculine appearance—which I loved.

Underneath the cover lies a bright yellow inside, a hidden secret which I showed off to countless friends while testing it. The size of the phone is perfect, proving easier to handle than the 4.3-inch HD2, with the 3.2-inch capacitive HVGA screen more than big enough to browse and type on. It's bright until you hold the phone in the sun.

The screen is responsive, with haptics providing feedback—though I found it more difficult typing on the HD Mini than I did the Legend and Desire, often pressing the wrong letters.

Predictive text exists for a reason, but it did have me pining for my usual BlackBerry.

Few buttons live on the phone's case, with the left side containing volume keys and the top of the phone the on/off button. Five soft-touch keys are down the bottom of the phone, for calling, home, menu, back and hanging up.

A 600Mhz processor with 384MB of RAM should be adequate to drive a modern smartphone OS, but the lag was infuriating. Switching between programs, heck even scrolling through the sideways menu bar through Sense was a real hassle. Trying to read the Twitter feed, scrolling through the messages but encountering an almost-frozen screen resulted in me just not bothering after a while. The HD2 a Snapdragon processor and 448MB of RAM, which was "unbelievably fast," but with the slower processor the HD Mini is almost crippled by WinMo.