White used to be the cool colour, but now red is making a break for it, and it’s not even Valentine’s Day.

HTC has teamed up with Vodafone to create a red version of the company's recently released HTC Desire S. Wondering whether that red is a blood orange red, a fire truck red, or even Ferrari red in the flesh, we’ve called one into the Pocket-lint office to check it out, snap some photos, and share the results with you.

As the pictures show, it’s a fairly orangey red rather than a blood red with HTC changing the colour of the metal exo-skeleton to get the desired affect rather than change the fundamental way the phone is built. This colour is built into the process rather than just painted on it seems. 

Like the metal casing, the plastic aerial plate and battery cover also get a red colour scheme with HTC going for a matte rather than gloss red finish.

We’ve noticed the red drastically changes appearance based on the light sometimes being close to Vodafone’s branding colour (that's red if you hadn't already guessed) while other times being completely off.

Aside from the colour there appears to be no difference to the HTC Desire S we reviewed back in March. The phone sports Android 2.3.3, has a  3.7-inch Super LCD display, and a 1GHz MSM8255 Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 768MB RAM.

The red colour variant is exclusive to Vodafone.