How-to: Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread on HTC Desire – Stock
At the moment it is almost impossible to get Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread on your HTC Desire directly from HTC or any one of the operators. In South Africa I would reckon that this will never happen.
Now what to do if you want Gingerbread on your phone? If you not interested in the stock HTC ROM which included Sense then you can install the CyanogenMod Rom and the easiest way to do that is via the ROM Manager which you can get in the Android Market.
Now if you want the stock HTC ROM with Sense then I have found only one worthwhile ROM and that is the one by XDA developer, teppic74. I have been using his ROM for the past year (FROYO one) and have not had any issues with it. The Gingerbread one is even beter than the Froyo one.
You can find everything about this ROM on the XDA forums at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1200261 and all the downloads are also there.
Note that to flash this ROM you will need ClockworkMod Recovery v 2.5.0.7 and not the version 3 or later. The scripts do not run in the never Recovery. Also you will need to wipe your existing phone incuding apps and data. So make a backup with something like Titanium Backup.
The one big advantage in this ROM is the better functioning of standard move to SD card. I do not make use of a2sd so depend on this functionality. In Froyo I ran out of memory soon and on Gingerbread it seems a lot better.
Happy flashing and hope you will like your new Gingerbread ROM.