HTC Touch HD2 featured a brilliant screen, gorgeous design and build, but not the most practical or easy to use. Its huge 4.3in screen is nothing short of glorious, boasting vibrant colours and a high resolution of 480×800 – the match of anything in this group and easily besting the iPhone 3GS.

The display also boasts capacitive touch technology, which means that browsing, typing and navigating is effortless – a big improvement over the original Touch HD’s resistive screen. The danger in including such a big showstopper is that other aspects of design could have been neglected. This isn’t the case here. The HD2′s chassis is super slim, measuring just 12.7mm from front to back, and the screen surround is as narrow as can be.

So, while the HD2 is too large at 67 x 121mm to stuff into a jeans pocket comfortably, it isn’t as bulky as it could have been. Thats not all, though, for beneath the glitz and glamour of that screen beats the heart of a beast. The HD2 boasts a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor, which ensure that, most of the time, the HD2 feels snappy and responsive.

Highlights include a decent 5MP camera with dual LED flash and touchscreen focus control, and a digital compass. Despite of this HD2 is an impressive kit on paper, but there are two blots on the HD2′s copybook. The first is that it runs Microsoft’s patches-up mobile OS, Windows Phone, and although there’s and attractive front pasted over the top of it, it still isn’t as easy to use as iPhone, the Palm Pre or most Android handsets. The second is battery life, which after 24 hours had only left 40% remaining.

If you can cope with the size and those 2 blots and you’re Windows person, you definitely won’t disappointed with this HTC Touch HD2.