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HTC Aria Review: Pocket Android

2010-07-08
what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here's a full review for you of the HTC aria from AT&T wireless so as I like to begin all my phone reviews no matter what a phone can do or can't do it's not going to serve its primary purpose if it can't make phone calls so let's talk about color quality call Claude it on the Aria as it generally the case with all HTC bills phones is outstanding I actually experienced no dropped calls as soon as my daily driver for for many many days call quality was very solid I had no white noise on my end o crackling her pops or snap and I also didn't have anything on the other end of the call when I had people call me from the device so call quality was very very very good again as we've come to expect from HTC so no worries there so let's talk about this size this device first I will talk about sort of the specs it is a very small screen clock mean a 3.2 inches the thing is downright diminutive and if you look at it next to some other phones you can really appreciate it sort of the size so here it is next to the iphone 4 for example you can see that there is definitely a difference if you bring in some of the larger phones you can clearly see a difference here we have the droid x for example i mean which takes up the whole top part of the camera this phone is very small and i think has a really really nice place and a good niche in 18 keys lineup it's got a 600 megahertz processor which is by no means are gonna set any speed records but it is very very very capable 600 megahertz processor and phone this size is really aimed i think squarely at the traveler or the light business user when i was traveling this is a great phone to bring with me doesn't take up much space maybe we'll do everything that I needed to do and the phone didn't show a single sign of slow down a battery life fauna is extremely strong it's packed me twelve hundred million power battery you're going to get six hours of talktime and about three hundred and seventy-two hours on standby time so let's talk about some specs a little bit more this is an android 2.1 device quite obviously with HTC skin on top of it called sense which adds a lot of functionality and you are getting full android too what one we really one glaring exception you don't have live wallpapers here so if that was a concern for you that you had to have you gotta have the mario wallpaper the area is not going to be the best advice but if you can live without the live wallpapers are you really going to get a very very nice a well-rounded a full-featured phone so let's back up a little bit and talk about the screen a bit more it is an LCD it's got a resolution of 320 x 480 so it's a TFT screen case you were wondering it's got a hundred three megabytes of onboard memory but it's going to come with a 2 gigabyte microSD card and of course you can put in whatever size card you want up to 32 gigs really up the storage now don't be fooled by the small size of the phone as I was I expected sort of subpar performance I what I got was a phone that really step for step kept up with the more powerful android devices certainly if I didn't have many applications writing the background if I just had two or three things running if I had email and web browser this thing was just as fast as the Snapdragon processors it was when I start to have many many many applications open I notice a difference so if you're looking for a sort of a budget fast phone this really is a great choice the browser is full-featured and actually does play flash content it's got multi-touch so you can certainly pinch and zoom and do what you like I don't plan on watching any hulu on here though you're not going to get that but sort of for general content the web browser does work really really nicely so backing up one of the concerns that i had look at the phone sort of this size how is a keyboard to make sure you guys are the keyboard looks like on the HTC re n so you can see if it's a concern or not so it is HTC skinny keyboard that's not the stock android keyboard you can see the accelerometer sort of kicking in right there typing on this is sort of a mixed bag the first day that i used it i was completely inaccurate words didn't even make sense and that is even with androids outstanding autocorrect feature actually found myself relying on the text-to-speech to do most by typing however after using it for a few days i got much better with it the keyboard is gonna be something you're going to have to get used to because the phone is so small i noticed when you type your fingers you're going to take up a lot of space it's a bit better in landscape it certainly it's a bit easier to serve I've been navigate here but now using it in porter it's going to take some getting used to I've also enough said in many videos I'm not the biggest fan of capacitive buttons on the bottom generally the not start responsive not so with the re ethic HTC may have fixed some of their issues the capacitive buttons here were very very very well I had really no issues one button that I really never used at all but it does have in case you're wondering is this track pad which you can use serve scroll from screen to screen or scroll through applications I can push it in if you want to select it's nice to have I suppose but I really haven't had much need for it this is capable of playing really almost any of the games that you like from the android marketplace so if you've got your concern to that aspect no need to worry like I said it overall it's just a nice package in a nice phone it's got a five megapixel sensor on the back does not have an LED flash but you are going to get served HTC's outstanding photo options let me show you really quickly what those are because camera quality was actually pretty good and again I expected much less from a phone this size and really was pleasantly surprised you guys to probably see me demonstrate this camera stuff quite a bit but you get a lot of options here so certainly take the video as well you can choose your brightness or white balance you can choose all kinds of different options if you like four different effects grayscale sepia a negative I really a ton of other things to pick out whatever makes a picture look best for you this does our record video and a VGA resolution which is you know not too bad it's going to get the job done before you need but again for a phone that's sort of gonna cost you about 130 bucks all you are getting a lot of bang for your buck and if you're an Android fan on a teen scene you're not looking for a huge screen but if almost really going to do everything and fit nicely in your pocket that aria is going to be a tough phone to beat you
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