HTC Desire Z review

The internet on the HTC Desire Z is as good as HTC can manage, and that's high praise in our book.

The Webkit-enabled browser is one of the best around, thanks to coming with a large number of functions, such as text wrapping, Flash 10.1 support and the ability to share web pages through a ridiculously large amount of sources.

We'll deal with Flash 10.1 first - it's pretty good in our eyes, and nearly all videos played without an issue. We didn't really manage to watch BBC iPlayer without an issue, but other than that nearly everything played smoothly.

We still think this needs some tweaking though, as the HTC Desire Z struggled to display video in full screen without needing to think about it hard, and only sometimes would the option to go full screen appear when you wanted it to.

We actually found ourselves turning off Flash video to conserve the battery, or at least setting the plug-in to only work when we demanded it. This made pages a mite quicker, and is certainly one of the best ways to optimise your internet browser.

We're noted fans of the Bookmark system on HTC Android phones, with large thumbnails for your favourite sites and the ones you visit most often. You can also access history by holding the Back button, which is a nice feature too.

The sharing option is simple - if you want to send the web page link (or selected text) you simply hold the relevant section or open the menu and select 'share'. This enables you to send the link via MMS, Twitter, Facebook or similar without much in the way of slowdown.

In short, the sheer functionality, speed and features of the browser on the HTC Desire Z mean that if you're not too bothered about the slightly smaller screen then you should definitely think about this as the best browser/keyboard combo.