London - HTC has boosted its smartphone line-up by introducing HTC Desire in the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona. And, a quick glance at its specs has made us convinced that it will pose tough competition to the likes of Nexus One and the iPhone.

Spec-wise, HTC Desire is almost identical to Nexus One, the smartphone which marked Google's maiden entry into the highly competitive market.

Like Nexus One, HTC Desire boasts of a 3.7-inch AMOLED capacitive multitouch display (which gives you deep blacks and bright, vivid and rich colours), runs on Android 2.1 OS (thanks to it, users can access Android Market where over 20,000 apps are available and around two-thirds of which are free) and is powered by a slick 1GHz Snapdragon processor that makes multitasking look like child's play.

Like Nexus One, HTC Desire has accelerometer sensor, proximity sensor and comes with bells and whistles like 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash, A-GPS, digital compass, onscreen keyboard, microSD card slot (expandable up to 32GB), microUSB port and 3.5mm headphone jack.

The GSM-based quadband handset is GPRS/EDGE/3G/WiFi/Bluetooth enabled, comes with 512MB ROM and supports Flash, the technical standard that makes it possible to view certain animated webpages and embedded videos when surfing the mobile web. In fact, the inclusion of Flash Lite 4 means that the device can happily play any video for you without the need for external apps, unlike the iPhone.

However, this is where the similarity ends. Why£ Because unlike Nexus One, which uses a trackball for navigation, HTC Desire uses the more precise optical trackpad.

Unlike Nexus One, HTC Desire also has an FM radio and replaces touch sensitive onscreen buttons with hard shortcut keys.

Furthermore, HTC Desire has 576MB RAM unlike Nexus One which has 512MB RAM.

And, most importantly, HTC Desire features HTC's improved Sense user interface (UI) which, HTC claims, has been "created to magnify your ability to create and define your own unique mobile experience."

The improved HTC Sense UI sits on top of the Android operating system and collates contacts in to one central address book, allowing users to contact them in a variety of ways - such as by email, text message or through Facebook - all with a single click.

The new version of Sense, besides offering a new feature "Leap" that lets you access and view all your customisable homescreens as thumbnails, also adds the "Friend Stream" widget to the handset, which aggregates a user's social communication, from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, in to a single flow of updates. Users can also group contacts depending on whether they are close friends, family or work colleagues, allowing separate out real-time information across their wider social circle.

Pretty useful features, I would say, considering the fact that social networking has grown to become a global phenomenon.

HTC Desire also outguns iPhone in several aspects. For instance, it's got a more powerful processor (1GHz versus 600MHz).

Compared to the iPhone, HTC Desire also has a better camera (5-megapixel with autofocus and LED flash versus 3.15-megapixel with autofocus but no flash), more memory (576MB RAM versus 256MB RAM), a better browser that supports Flash-based webpages (thanks to Flash Lite 4 and Flash 10.1 support) and above all, it can multitask unlike the iPhone.

All in all, HTC Desire is good enough to take on Nexus One and the iPhone and we're betting that it will emerge as one of the most lustworthy devices when it launches later this summer.