Knight And Day

Director: James Mangold
Stars: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Saarsgard

DIRECTOR James Mangold has taken the zest and sass of a 1950s Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie and paired it with the high-octane thrills of a modern day action movie for Knight and Day, rescuing the film from the bucket of saccharine-laden relationship pap that clogs our cinemas.

Patrick O’Neill’s witty script focuses on keeping the obvious attraction between the two leads realistically suppressed—just like in the real world, where tact, ego and the to-and-fro of the male-female dynamic creates sparks. And he does a great job.

Similarly, Tom Cruise is very enjoyable as the titular super-spy Roy Knight—part Cary Grant, part Jason Bourne. Cruise moves through the demanding (and impressive) action scenes with total confidence and not even the occasional awkwardness between himself and onscreen love interest Diaz can’t be (mostly) smoothed over with his roguish charm or via dazzling fight scenes.

Diaz is the Doris Day to Cruise’s Grant: part ditz, part self-assured woman in charge; but, disappointingly single faceted and low-lit against the mega-watt Cruise, who deserved a better partner to romance in an albeit light and fluffy female role.

The plot is thus: June Havens (Diaz) rebuilds classic cars and is on her way to visit her sister In Boston for her wedding. At the airport, June’s path crosses that of secret agent, Roy Knight (Cruise), who is on the run after a failed mission. Once June is dragged into Roy’s plans, he realises that her involvement—no matter how accidental—will most likely get her killed, so he is forced to monitor her actions from afar in an effort to keep her safe.

Monitoring her actions at times uncomfortably resembles a Crime Channel date rape recreation where Roy almost constantly drugs June with  Rohypnol-like substance and increasingly creepy sexual overtones (such as changing her clothes for a bikini while she’s passed out) with “hilarious” repercussions.

However, as slightly creepy as this is, the regular drugging mirrors June’s increasing bubble-headedness, which grows incrementally concomitant to her unconscious states. Coincidence or heavy-handed plot-point coping mechanism?

Anyway, back to the plot: Roy is pursued by his former partner, Fitzgerald (Peter Saarsgard, in a very Keifer-Sutherland-in-24 turn) and his former agency, both believing that Roy tried to kill an asset that he and Fitzgerald were tasked to protect, and both on the hunt for the zephyr, a new form of perpetual energy created by bookish wunderkind kid, Simon Feck (Paul Dano), that is stored in a capsule the size of a vehicle cigarette lighter.

Whoever owns the technology will change the power structure of the world, and so Roy’s fight to keep both June and Simon alive forms the crux of the film as the trio jet, drive and boat across the globe, pursued by the American government and unnamed drug cartels, represented by the dead-eyed Antonio (Jordi Molla, channelling a delightfully crazy Latino Fisher Stevens).

In between the elaborate car chases, helicopter attacks, exploding buildings, and rapid gunfire lies the kind of witty banter not heard nearly enough in modern Hollywood movies, and in this case the combination of ADHD action with old-style cinema dialogue rescues Knight And Day from being just another churn-and-burn rom-com.

Knight And Day is released in cinemas nationally on July 15

Brothel owners fear that sex workers will flee underground when prostitution is legalised in Western Australia next year.

In a bid to increase standards of health and safety for sex workers, WA Attorney-General Christian Porter will introduce legislation to regulate the sex industry.

The new legislation will require brothels to be licensed and restricted to designated commercial and industrial areas, keeping them out of residential suburbs.

Sex workers will have to register with a central agency and undergo mandatory health and blood checks.

While brothel owners welcome the regulation of sex venues, they have expressed concerns about workers having to identify themselves and share personal details on a register.

“This will lead a lot of workers into going underground,” North Perth brothel owner Donna McGuirk told The West Australian.

“We are quite lucky in WA in that we don’t have girls working with organised crime, but the sensitivity of this information that they want the girls to hand over means that many will try to work outside the system.”

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 10 WINNERS

J. Coad, Glenorchy, TAS.
C. Ward, Morwell, VIC.
K. Gray, Fullarton, SA.
D. Hicks, Geelong West, VIC.
D. Garret, Doncaster East, VIC.
T. Glover, Templestowe, VIC.
V. Huxley, Carindale, QLD.
A. Fowler, Valley View, SA.
E. Coyne, Glebe, NSW.
A. Webster, Noble Park, VIC.

SEGA and Australian Penthouse are offering 10 readers the chance to get their mitts on a copy of hot new RPG Alpha Protocol on either PS3 or Xbox 360 format (SRP$99.95 each).
Continue reading “WINNERS! SEGA’s Alpha Protocol on PS3 or XBOX” »

GOLDEN GIRL

She’s young, free, fun-loving and any other description you might attribute to the girl of your dreams. Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, she’s…
Continue reading “Web Exclusive Gallery: Janelle” »

Mr. Sin
Director: Hugh Piper
Cast: Richard Roxburgh, Alan Saffron, Jim Anderson
Ovation

This fantastic documentary from Hugh Piper charts Abe Saffron’s meteoric rise to the highest echelons of Sydney’s underworld, while exploring the effects it had on his personal life. There are interviews with his children, grandchild, mistress and right-hand man, as well as a few fringe characters and the writers who’ve since studied his life. The story is seamlessly illustrated by a rich gallery of photos, dating back to the days before he owned the Roosevelt Hotel, and footage of the interviews he did when he was alive.

The overall picture of Abe is complex and hard to place. He was a manipulative, reptilian man with the capacity for great kindness, who lived and breathed the rush of deal-making and backroom politics, birthed the systems of organised crime that endure even now in Sydney and went to his grave with only one substantiated criminal charge to his name.

On paper it seems pretty easy to label him the bad guy. But Mr. Sin is compelling enough to make you wonder, and by the time the last images of Abe’s life are flashing up on the screen, it’s hard to resent all the love and contentment that surrounds him.

NEW South Wales police raids on Sydney adult stores across the long weekend is proof that the Federal Government is beholden to the interests of the Christian right, according to Australian Sex Party President, Fiona Patten.

“I challenge the Premier, the Police Commissioner and Independents in the parliament to deny that their religious beliefs are contributing to this moral crusade,” said Ms Patten.

In the past three weeks, police raids have been carried out on two Kings Cross adult shops and an X-rated DVD warehouse in the Sydney inner west suburb of Marrickville. The raids closed the shops, and 90 per cent of stock was seized. Though the sale of X-rated material has been illegal in NSW for some time, it is a ban that has rarely been enforced by authorities.

Fifteen officers spent a day breaking open tills and safes and commandeering shop records, at an estimated cost of $100,000 to the taxpayer. The raids are the most recent move in an intensifying backlash against adult entertainment.

A Sydney adult shop owner was sentenced to jail in May for selling federally classified X rated films judged by Commonwealth censors as suitable for all Australians.

“The NSW police have spent millions of dollars this year pursuing adult retailers, where this money should have been spent on solving murders and dealing with assault and property crimes,” claims Ms Patten.

Greens MLC Lee Rhiannon has also spoken out against the current state of legislation in NSW. “I struggle to think of a less productive use of NSW Police’s valuable time than having fifteen officers spend an entire day confiscating material that is legal for the public to own,” she said.

Ms Rhiannon said the currently ambiguous regulation of X-rated material was needless, and forced the material out of adults-only premises and into places like newsagents and petrol stations. “It doesn’t make sense for the sale of non-violent erotica to be illegal, given that it is legal to possess it. Non-violent erotica is classified as containing consensual sexually explicit activity between adults. It does not contain violence or coercion, nor does it depict people under 18 years of age,” she said.

But the Attorney-General’s office, and the Christian Democrats MLC Fred Nile, do not consider the ban to be ambiguous or unnecessary.

“This approach maintains the position against pornography, but avoids the outcome of criminalising visitors from the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory,” an Attorney-General spokesperson said.

Mr Nile said he wanted to take it a step further.

“Pornography, especially material that is currently illegal, is exploitative, disempowering and degrading to women and children, not to mention the significant harm it can inflict as a conditioning catalyst for sexual assault,” he said.

Mr Nile said he would be introducing a Bill to have the possession of X-rated material banned.

By Hand Solo

I jumped at the opportunity to test the new Jesse Jane Fleshlight from AdultShop.com. I’ve heard a lot about the Fleshlight or “pocket pussy” from TV shows and magazines but I had never tried one and I was intrigued to hear if the product was as realistic as it claimed it to be.
Continue reading “Review: Jesse Jane Fleshlight” »

Madam Lash
Sam Everingham
Allen & Unwin

Some stories write themselves. They unfold seamlessly, with all the hills and all the valleys shifting in to place without a struggle or a strain.  And though it seems the miasma of tall tales linked to the fabulous Madam Lash would fall in to that category, it is just not so. When left to its own devices, Gretel Pinniger’s (Madam Lash) story comes out all wrong. The arcs are too big, the inclines too steep. People confuse Gretel with her creation. People exploit Gretel to get to Madam Lash, and they exploit Madam Lash to get to their audience. Then, after the spectacle of the alien amongst the peasants has evanesced, and all the novelty has slipped away, they leave two thirds of the story untold.

Sam Everingham’s book doesn’t walk out at intermission. Though the thread of reality tying Gretel Pinniger to this world at times becomes tenuous and waifishly thin, he follows that thread through to its end.

Madam Lash chronicles the saga that created the masterpiece. It’s the first story I’ve seen on Gretel that makes sense: it begins with an introverted, isolated child and ends with an introverted, isolated woman. It documents the amazing things she was able to pull off in her heyday, as well as the failures she, and those she inflicted them on, managed to endure.

It doesn’t do the done thing–the easy thing–of painting her as an entertaining sideshow, and making that the story. It is a quieter look at Gretel, possessed of more empathy, and it shows us that her spectacular, strange exterior is just the obvious symptom of a fractured, battered interior. It strips back all the bullshit and the theatrics and shows us a picture of a woman who never found the acceptances she craved, who was rarely taken or approached as a whole and who gave so much to wind up alone. It is incredibly sad, and sadder still because she seems oblivious to that.

Everingham does a remarkable job of sketching the outline of Gretel’s tragedy with understated prose, and allowing her words and those of the people she surrounded herself with to animate the rest. His approach captures the delirious realm Gretel has lived in all these years, and in doing so allows us to finally gain some understanding of the woman in leather.

In short, I love Gretel Pinniger, and I love Madam Lash, and this book taught me how.

MR FOOTBALL

SBS TV presenter Les Murray has been the face of soccer in Australia for 30 years.
With the World Cup finally here, Penthouse chats to ‘Mr Football’ about his passion
for the world game, and asks him to rate the Socceroos’ chances in South Africa

After all these years, do you still get excited going into a World Cup?
Absolutely, especially when I support a team, which is rare for me because I’m a journalist and I can’t afford to be a passionate supporter of teams. I don’t have any club teams that I congenitally support; I just love the game. But the one team I do follow passionately is the Socceroos, so if they score a goal, I jump up and hit the ceiling just like any other fan.

Even though the Socceroos have been successful under Dutch coach Pim Verbeek, he has been criticised for not promoting attacking, entertaining football. What do you think of his style?
I think it’ll do for now, but I don’t think ultimately there’s a future in playing so cautiously because everybody’s dream is not to be the underdog, but the favourite. And that’s the long-term dream, whether it takes 10, 20 or 30 years. I believe Australia should strive to be a top international football nation. Another thing is the Australian mentality is very different to most cultures, in that Australians not only love to have a go, but they have the bravery to have a go, and I think if you play too defensively, you are putting the brakes on a natural instinct which can be a very powerful resource. I think [Guus] Hiddink understood that very well, and he did on occasion unleash the Australians. Notably, we attacked Brazil in the 2006 World Cup; we lost, but I think unluckily. I’m not sure whether Verbeek has that kind of bravery, but hopefully he can do something in the World Cup.

How far do you think the Socceroos can go in South Africa?
Out of the three games we have in the group – against Germany, Ghana and Serbia – we’re going to have to win at least one of them, if not two. I see it as a very similar group to the one in Germany, and I don’t think to suggest that this is some super-tough group should be an excuse for us not to get out of it.

Who are our key players?
Harry Kewell, Brett Emerton, Mark Bresciano, Vince Grella, Scott Chipperfield, Craig Moore and Mark Schwarzer are all key players, but this World Cup will be their swan song. As Pim [Verbeek] likes to point out, they’re four years more experienced than they were in Germany, but he neglects to mention they’re also four years older. Obviously, Timmy Cahill is a bit younger, so he might be around for the next World Cup. The one we’ll be missing big time is Mark Viduka. If we play the Dutch way, which is essentially a lone striker with a couple of flankers coming from behind and a deeper midfielder, then that centre-forward role is very specialised. It’s not so much a goalscorer’s role as it is an instrument of bringing other people into play, and Viduka understood that very well. We don’t have a replacement.

What’s the Socceroos’ greatest trait?
It’s the old Australian quality of never giving up. Guus Hiddink said to his assistant Graham Arnold after we came back against Japan in Germany to score three goals in eight minutes that only an Australian team could have done it. It’s that character and self-belief that’s an enormous resource for coaches. That’s our biggest asset.

And their greatest weakness?
The weakness has always been tactical sophistication, and even technique. This is a so-called ‘golden generation’ of players, but let’s not forget that even they grew up in a technical culture where ball technique was not considered important, and it’s a malady that is only now being addressed with the eight, nine and 10-year-olds. And it’s also about tactical sophistication. Our technical knowledge is entirely based on experience at professional level, whereas in Europe kids are taught technical nous from 12 or 13 onwards. So that is what Hiddink found when he first came in, and that’s what he worked to correct. I think the players learned a lot from that, so it’s not as bad as it used to be.

Which team is your pick for the Cup?
There are two that stand out head and shoulders from the others, and they are Spain and Brazil. Spain has a fantastic generation of players and a fantastic development culture, and the most potent way to win is the way Barcelona and other Spanish teams play. If they can carry that into the World Cup, without cracking under any mental pressures, then they’ll win it. But I’ve seen too many roaring favourites fail, going back to the 1954 World Cup when Hungary was beaten by a very ordinary West Germany in the final, so if you forced me to place a bet, I would put money on Brazil before I put it on Spain. Brazil has won five World Cups, so they’ve got the experience and they know how to do it.

Who are the players to watch?
Obviously, the one to look at if you’re not a regular viewer of football is the diminutive Argentinean Lionel Messi. Some people are now saying he’s the greatest player of all time, but the problem is I don’t think Diego Maradona, who’s Argentina’s coach, has been able to harness for Argentina what Barcelona has been able to harness with him at club level.

Should Maradona be the Argentina coach?
No. Maradona is an iconic legend and the best player I’ve ever seen, but as a coach he’s almost in the amateur ranks, in my opinion. He should be a figurehead and have seriously competent assistants calling the shots when it comes to tactics and selection, but he refuses to do that because he’s Diego!

Are you confident South Africa can host a successful World Cup?
From what I’ve seen, yes. I’ve been there twice in the last year and the national enthusiasm for the World Cup is fantastic. At the draw, they closed off the main street in Cape Town for a fan fest and expected maybe 5,000 people to turn up, but 30,000 arrived. The stadiums are ready, so the only question marks are things like security – the police presence has been beefed up enormously already – and some infrastructure issues like transport.

What are you most looking forward to in South Africa?
To me, the World Cup is always flavoured by the host nation. My favourite memory of the first World Cup to be held in Asia in 2002 is of the Korean fans and that sea of red. The world became enamoured by the Koreans and Japanese, and that’s what it will be remembered for, not for Brazil’s victory. So I’m hoping that the rhythm of Africa, in a human sense, will reverberate through this World Cup.

Was the 2006 World Cup in Germany more special to you than any other because of Australia’s involvement?
Absolutely. You know, five World Cups before that without Australian involvement was extremely painful and frustrating, and that equaliser by Harry Kewell against Croatia to take us into the knock-out phase was probably the most satisfying football moment of my life.

Is it too optimistic to believe Australia can host the Cup in 2018 or 2022?
No, I don’t think so, but it’s more likely to be 2022. Particularly if Europe gets 2018, there’s every reason why we should get ’22. There are nine bidders for the World Cup and every one of them will be capable of holding it, but two things will come into play: one will be politics, and the more important one will be the legacy. FIFA wants a legacy out of every World Cup, and I think an Australian World Cup would leave a far bigger legacy than probably any of the other applicants. We are in the biggest growth area for football in the world. If you look at the top 10 television audiences for the 2006 World Cup, four were Asian countries – China, Japan, Vietnam and Indonesia – and they are all in our region and time zone. FIFA is not unaware of that, so if you’re going to propagate the beautiful game, you have to take the World Cup to this region occasionally.

What are your thoughts on other football codes protesting about us hosting the Cup?
I think it’s just a lot of public posturing and sabre rattling. There is this rather archaic, caveman mentality still lingering in Australia, where sports are rivals to each other and if you’re a fan of one game, you’re not supposed to be a fan of another game. That is utter rubbish. In 21st century Australia, you and I can follow four or five different sports at the same time. Like Frank Lowy says, the World Cup is not just for football, it’s for Australia. It supersedes just being a sporting event, it’s a festival of cultural diversity which has a massive impact around the world, so everybody benefits, including the other sports.

Could Australia win the World Cup in 2022?
If we produce players of international quality by 2022, and you mix that with our winning mentality and home support, we should be able to win it. No bullshit about not being disgraced and all this crap, we have to aim to win the World Cup in 2022, and we should be genuine contenders to do that. Look at what happened in 2006; we got robbed against Italy! If we’d won that game, we would’ve played the Ukraine, who were crap, and then we would’ve been in the semi-finals of the World Cup. So why shouldn’t we do it in 2022?

Do you think SBS has been given the credit its due for popularising football in Australia?
Generally, I think so. I’ve never met anybody in the football world who denies it. We live in an age which is very different from when SBS started, where now we have serious competition for television football content. It’s new money in this country and big business wants to cash in. SBS has the World Cup not just for 2010, but for 2014 as well, so we are still big players, and we have other big properties like the Champions League, which is the highest-quality product in the world on an annual basis.

What is the future of football at SBS?
Football is very important to the identity of SBS. The fact that it’s a free-to-air network which is dedicated to football gives it an edge because so long as you want to promote football in this country and build its markets, you need free-to-air television that will give it generous air time and news coverage. To that extent, SBS is still the only game in town. The pay TV networks, as good a job as they do, don’t build brands, they just service the existing customer. I’m prepared to pay whatever it is a month to watch football on Foxtel, but I don’t need to be converted. It’s the guy done the road who’s not a football fan who needs to be converted, and he’s not going to pay until he’s converted. Who’s going to convert him? Free-to-air television.

How about your personal future?
Well, SBS apparently still wants me, and I’m there because I still enjoy it. I don’t like to talk about things like retirement any more than I like to talk about death. It’s something that will happen at some point, probably at a time when it’s out of my control.

Have you been tempted to join Fox Sports?
No. The reason I enjoy SBS is that the top brass believe in football, always have, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So long as my employers take that position, I’m happy to be there. I’ve never dreamed of a move to another network.

You and the late, great Johnny Warren used to talk about ‘the mission’ of making Australia a genuine football country. Is it mission accomplished, or will it ever be?
It’s more accomplished than it’s ever been. If Johnny were here, he would not believe some of what’s happened, but there is still this mindset that we are not a football nation, and I think we need to chip away at that. The dream is not so much to bring the World Cup to Australia, but to win it. Australians don’t like to lose. We’ve won everything else, but we’ve never won the football World Cup. The Socceroos are at the core of this. They are the one medium in football that galvanises and unifies the country. So long as they perform well, we are on the right track to achieving those aims.

How many World Cup games will SBS be showing?
Every game – 64. All of them live, except where kick-off times coincide. But SBS of course have a second channel, where it will place all the replays, so it will be wall-to-wall World Cup. It’s a great time for football. I’m pretty happy with the way of the world at the moment.

Tune in to SBS on Friday, June 11 at 10:00pm EST for the Opening Ceremony and first game of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, live from South Africa.

HTC Desire

Within 6 months of its 2007 launch, Apple’s iPhone became one of the world’s most ubiquitous communication tools. Subsequent market share challenges by competitors such as BlackBerry and Nokia failed to shake Apple’s stronghold. And this is how things have been ever since.

Until now.

Tech giant Google released its own phone operating system (Android) in 2008, though it filed for phone-related patents as far back as 2005. The Android system seeks to do everything the iPhone OS can do, but with a far greater potential for customisation and open source development. Fantastic goals, in theory, but in practice there has always been problems (in Australia, at least) with the flawed handsets that ran the Android OS.

HTC DESIRE -WHAT IS IT?
A touch-screen handset that plays to the strengths of the Android OS.

The unimpressive handset problem is resolved with the HTC Desire.

HTC Desire: Rubberised back, 5MP camera

Its 3.7-inches AMOLED screen provides a slightly bigger and definitely crisper image quality than the iPhone. The handset is long and thin and feels substantial, but not weighty, in the hand. The rubber backing is a kinetic comfort and a basic pragmatism, and the phone is fashioned with a rounded top lip, making extended calls more comfortable than many other touch-screen smartphones.

The Desire features a 5 megapixel camera (flash included); a beastly 1GHz processor–aptly titled the Snapdragon, which provides superior and effortless performance at incredible speed; and it has an easily-accessible microSD slot.

It is necessary to emphasise the importance of this last feature.

iPhone users are limited to the storage space the phone comes with. The price of the phone increases along with storage capacity, which makes sense given the value of storage on a multimedia device.

The HTC Desire’s microSD slot allows for easy microSD upgrades, so Desire owners can expand memory by up to 32GB, on top of the 576MB internal memory.

When you consider how cheap microSD cards are these days, the microSD slot is an undeniable boon for HTC.

HTC Desire: Home, menu, optical trackpad, back and search buttons.

Internet browsing on the Desire is fantastic. The large, sharp screen makes viewing sites a simple and satisfying venture, particularly as web pages load in full super-quick and without glitches. Though I have been told that the phone has a rare tendency towards jumbling page elements, throughout my test period I did not experience this.

Multimedia playback–both online and of the files loaded to the handset–is good when it works, but there seems to be a few video formats that just didn’t register, and even though the phone has a capacity for Flash it’s not always a sure thing. Though it’s not clear why Flash playback was inconsistent, once the offending files were viewed through YouTube or converted to .mp4, there were no problems.

Music and video handset playback is markedly improved with the simple addition of media applications, such as Meridian Player, as the bundled multimedia programs are quite basic.

One of the areas in which the Desire excels is the Android app system. But unfortunately Android Market–the iTunes of the Android world–is the greatest shortcoming associated with the Android OS.

While there is great variety in the applications available on the Market, and though the majority are free, the act of finding and downloading what you want is a restricted one.

HTC Desire: Home screen, time and weather widget.

There is no native computer-to-phone transmission of applications, and the official Android Market site is just short of useless for computer browsing, with no keyword search function and no information given about the applications you can find. Thankfully, third parties stepped in to create Android Market alternatives which allow you to research available apps from your computer, but the issue of computer-phone application transfer remains untouched, and Android applications must be downloaded over the air, directly to the handset.

As for Android applications, they are open-source, have the ability to interact with each other and can mine handset information that the iPhone won’t allow third parties access to, which paves the way for interesting and useful utility applications, such as Wave Secure.

HTC DESIRE – WHAT IS IT LIKE?
Smooth, quick, accurate, personal.

Although the HTC Desire runs on the Android platform, what you’re really seeing when you use the phone is the HTC Sense user interface. HTC Sense offers full social networking integration via the Friend Stream widget (which aggregates feeds from Facebook, Twitter and Flickr into a single and never-ending torrent of Web 2.0 awareness), as well as a nice little top-down summary feature called Leap, which looks a lot like the Apple Expose function; when activated with a multi-touch pinch to the screen, Leap provides a thumbnail view of your home screens, enabling swift transition between them.

There are seven home screens—similar to the 11 offered on the iPhone–on which you organise and customise wallpaper, widget and program presentation. This is where the Desire leads the way in customisation with its notion of Scenes.

A Scene is described by HTC as a personalised home screen layout, and the phone comes with six customisable presets (Work, Social, Travel, Play, HTC and Clean Slate). The idea behind Scenes is that you use your phone differently depending on environment and purpose, so HTC Sense allows you to move quickly and conveniently between role-specific phone set-ups.

HTC Desire: News widget.

For example:

During the review process, my ‘Work’ Scene consisted of a dedicated news feed screen, a screen with the calendar widget and task application, one for train timetables, one for GPS and maps, and note application. For social, weekend use I had the applications and widgets that would help me find food, entertainment and platforms on which to share intimate details about the minutiae of my life (The Facebook and Twitter applications on Android are more to my personal taste than those on my iPhone, being cleaner and faster).

For some, a broad selection of Scenes is preferable. But for me, accustomed as I am to the iPhone and its more static arrangement, my preference was a custom Scene with the scope to cover everything. And The HTC Desire can give me that, too.

The combination of Scenes, screens and Sense—and the abundance of integration and personalisation that creates—sitting astride the Android’s native Google service syncing, makes the Desire ready for some serious business, right out of the box.

Amongst the awe, there are some flaws. The widgets that flesh out the Sense skin can lag, meaning it is often quicker and more effective to use a straight application for content-rich platforms such as Twitter.

The stock multimedia options are competent but uninspiring—which seems short-sighted when you consider the ease of storage upgrade (via microSD), the meaty processor and the huge AMOLED screen. But for the basic media players, The Desire seems primed to compete with the iPhone in its own backyard: as a multimedia player. More attention to those players will go a long way.

While the enormous AMOLED screen is beyond pleasing to look at indoors, like all AMOLED screens it is prone to visibility issues when used in direct sunlight.

WHO SHOULD BUY IT?
Come one, come all!

Anyone, and that’s the whole point. The HTC phone is not geared specifically to any type of person, it is a device of great potential for everyone with the desire to break away from the iPhone and customise, customise, customise.

VOTE

Two sweaty thumbs up, four and a half stars, a testimonial, a blessing and my unrestrained techno-lust.