GPS
We did not do any advance test with the inbuilt GPS in Desire HD , but we have at least taken a small turn in the neighborhood to get an idea of how the GPS works in the Desire HD and if it stands up. We have chosen to use the application My Tracks instead of example CardioTrainer simply because My Tracks don’t even out and beautify the coordinates of the phone and its GPS report. To summarize it we simple want to know how good the GPS is "raw", without software that act as an artificially makeup which remove deficiencies by using clever guesswork.
As you can see on the route above, the HTC Desire HD presents a nearly perfect route, almost without any shred of zigzag pattern, without software help.
After a loop of 1.13 miles, through urban environments and parks, we can say that Desire HD performs very well and reported a distance of 1.21 miles, only 80 feet (7%) over the actual distance. This may sound like a large margin of error, but we must not forget that we didn’t use any form of embellishment software who straightens out any zigzag pattern.
A few weeks ago we tested the Sony Ericsson X8 on a loop in a similar environment, which gave a margin of 500 meters error over a distance of 2.6 kilometers, or approximately 21%.
It may also be possibility that Desire HD round out the GPS results in the same way as the iPhone 4 does in the hardware, but if we look at how the two phones record 90-degree turns the iPhone rounds them while Desire HD recording them in much higher grade, just like the map above illustrates. A significant feature of software makeup is that all sharp corners have a radius, and this is clearly apparent in the results from our test of the Xperia X8.
It should be noted that we can use applications such as CardioTrainer to at least partially overcome shaky GPS devices such as the Sony Ericsson X8, but the optimum is to have a GPS that performs a correct route regardless of software, which we feel that Desire HD does with panache.
