Gadgetory

hey guys jon rettinger here with a two-part tour for you of the AT&T tilt to this part is going to cover mostly the software so it's going to be windows mobile or Windows Phone 6.5 and HTC's own touchflo 3d the next part we're going to cover some of the coolest hardware things that this device actually has let's go ahead and jump right in this is going to run you to 99 after a fifty-dollar mail-in rebate on of course a two-year contract with AT&T but if you are in Europe or anywhere else in the world this is going to be a very similar experience what you're going to get with a touch pro 2 whether it's a locked or an unlocked device based on your carrier so you're going to see right here is a familiar touchflo 3d interface it's not your typical windows mobile thing that you may be used to seeing so the main navigation is done through this bar across the bottom essentially the way this works it uses a resistive touchscreen put your finger down you can slide across and you can see all the different options that are there now one of the new additions to this version touchflo 3d if you can actually customize in the order of these tabs which is quite nice one of the knocks on windows mobile or Windows Phone spin that it's hasn't been the most finger-friendly of mobile operating systems in the past and it's also not the best-looking operating system in the past it's certainly very functional for professionals or those that are used to or like the operating system but for those that are maybe are new to it it hasn't been the most intuitive so HTC try to fix that and with their skin touchflo 3d you most of the time we never even have to get into typical windows mobile let me show you some examples of that right here from the home screen this is the main screen you'll see you've got calendar if we tap calendar we're taken to a new completely different skins calendar application that we're used to sing for windows mobile flick scrolling through each month and if you want to add something just give it a tap and you get a new appointment window which is very different than what you've had in the past automatically jumps you over to calendar down below you can view it by month day or you know year even if you like new appointment you select that and now you're into windows mobile but to get to that point you at least get some skinned more finger friendly and some would say dumb down view I find it just easier to navigate and certainly a lot simpler to use without a stylist let's go back home we're going to go hit the end key for that so one of the new things that's found in the tilt two and at least for the US market it's one of the first phones that has windows mobile 6.5 or like I said they're now calling it windows phone and the biggest change it you're going to see in there is in the start menu gone is sort of a grid array start menu with a little scroll bar on the side you've now got a honeycomb finger friendly look so you can access that in two ways either hit the start at the top or the start button right here we'll go ahead and hit it at the top now you get a honeycomb sort of you and you can scroll through into your programs much easier now certainly it has a resistive screen so you got to push down to make contact but is a very responsive resistive screen which is quite nice if you can find one of the things that you like you can actually move at the top or drag it anywhere you'd like so there it goes right to the top you know people that really split on whether or not they like this honeycomb view I think it's a much easier way to navigate and view all of your applications personally I think it's a nice easy way to go so one of the other things that's new for windows mobile 6.5 and really one of the highlights is the marketplace let me show you that very quickly so go ahead open it up and I should mention that it's not a thing that's automatically installed when you get a windows mobile 6.5 device it's actually a dot cab file that you have to download and install and then you get this marketplace and most of the programs right now are free and they're tied to your windows live account so you have to register a windows live account if you want to download anything whether free or not so it is a very nice looking elegant interface I think it looks relatively similar to the Android Marketplace I think so you can scroll through and see sort of what the most popular are so we'll hit most popular and you can view what's in here now there aren't that man you speak of right now certainly more than the palm app catalog went when that launched but certainly not as many as say the iphone app store or blackberry app world or even android marketplace but there are quite a few in motifs notice them are free but you get some expensive ones so here Tetris is seven dollars so when you click one let me show you what happens go back up to the top you know scrolling isn't necessarily the smoothest in the world I'm just over a typical 3g connection right now with two bars so it gets a little bit laggy but it's not bad certainly you can navigate through so here's one called took a free one so here's mobile manager for Netflix so it loads certainly and you get some information on it some features reviews or screenshots and you can see what it looks like you know it's a what you'd expect from a mobile marketplace you know there was mobile market places on Windows Mobile long before the App Store the hand dango store for example one of the nice things about Windows Mobile that you could download files directly to the device in a dot cab format and this sort of takes that cab file format and puts it in a better-looking package wow that's easier to navigate and find things and if you want to install it you just hit download and it installs quite obviously let's go back so this is again probably the biggest change 6.5 at least from the end user experience that you're going to see is the honeycomb menu structure if we're using a nun skin device so a windows mobile device that's not using touchflo 3d you're going to see other sort of finger friendly enhancements windows mobile 6.5 seems to me to be a stop gap in between now and what will be windows mobile seven point 0 coming probably sometime in 2010 let me show you some other cool things that the device has I'm not going to walk you through everything down here because otherwise this is going to get to be a 30 minute video but some cool things that you can see are let's say to go to internet this takes advantage of opera mobile so it uses opera to use its web browsing as opposed to pocket internet explorer which my opinion not the best web browser in the world we're going to get into web browsing a little bit more in the next part of the series when we cover some of the hardware and also obviously internet now what you can do here is actually add push home pages what that does is at a prescribed time automatically puts the new version of a web page so if you youtube.com slash John for lakers if you check that say once a day you can set it to every day at noon have it automatically push the page there so there is no lo time the web browser is quite nice so hit no there go back well launch the web browser so just a sort of a standard web page this is the AT&T web page you can view the site in one of two ways so now it's going to load up or give it a second to to queue so here we are you can view it either in standard portrait or you can view it in landscape flat it up it automatically rotate the zoom is done via the zoom bar down here we'll talk about more in part to put the backup role your finger across and it zooms certainly there is no multi-touch to be found but web browsing will be covered more in depth in part 2 so in the interest of brevity I'm going to cut this video and we'll leave the rest of the titillating details of the tilt two for part two for exclusive content be sure to check me out on twitter twitter.com / john for lakers and to learn more about TechnoBuffalo check out TechnoBuffalo comm links to all those will be up in the sidebar hope you guys enjoyed and stay tuned for part 2 of the ett tilts or the touch pro 2 and i'll see you guys in the next one