Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from TechnoBuffalo and this is a look at the HTC hd2 which has the largest screen of any smartphone available on the market right now we're going to be taking a look at this device compared to the iPhone in future videos but we're gonna start off by talking about the device kind of on a higher level we're going to talk about the hardware and the premise behind the HTC Sense interface so let's get started the device has a beautiful thin design it's 11 millimeters thick which is actually a little bit thinner than the iPhone the screen is 4.3 inch diagonal at WVGA resolution so that is 800 down and 480 across as comparison the iPhone is 480 down and 320 across so it's about double if you do the math in terms of how many pixels there are on the screen the screen goes from edge to edge and all you really have are just five Hardware buttons on the bottom here and I'm going to zoom in a little bit because they are adorned with a beautiful brushed metal coating let's go around the device a little bit on the left side we have a volume rocker on the bottom we have micro USB for syncing and for charging and there's a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack which is great so you don't have to get a converter Jack or something like that and there's the little microphone there is nothing on the side or on the top turning around to the back we see a beautiful piece of real brushed metal so if I take this off which is kind of difficult let me give it a try and I flick it you can hear that it's actually metal and not plastic as found on a lot of other smartphones out there the battery is of size twelve hundred and thirty million hours this device has pretty good battery life it'll get you through about that day in a corner maybe a day and a half with moderate amount of usage I should mention that this device right now is only available in Europe but you can import it get it unlocked and put it on AT&T and t-mobile but it's gonna cost you a lot right now this device is about $700 but it's coming to the u.s. in quarter 1 of 2010 rumor has it that it's coming to t-mobile but we haven't heard yet exactly where it's coming on the top here we have a speaker next to a 5 Meg pixel camera and a dual LED flash so you really get a lot of light from this device when you're taking pictures with the flash and then there's a nice rubbery coating on the top of the device up here and down here which makes the device feel very firm in hand okay so let's turn on the device this device is running windows mobile 6.5 Professional so right off the bat you get this unlock screen that is characteristic of windows mobile 6.5 and it's great because you can tap the little lock icon and you get a drop-down of any area that you can action on so if you have a new SMS you'll have a little SMS indicator a new email like I do here you'll have an email indicator missed calls voicemail and so on and what this will do is if you unlock one of these particular notifications you'll actually be taken to that respective application so it really saves you some steps I'm just gonna unlock the whole device and be taken back to this screen so let's do a bit of an overview of the HTC Sense interface you know that the Sense interface first made its debut on the HTC Hero it's comes in a very different form on the hd2 but the concept is the same HTC has kind of put together these multiple panels that are customisable really and you can kind of get to them by sliding your finger along the bottom and the graphics on this device is beautiful it runs on a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor and it has a tremendous 448 megabytes of RAM of which about 200 is usable so you can really multitask a lot on this device here on the main screen we have some pretty cool things we have the weather clock and so what it'll do is reach out with GPS to find out where you are whether you're in New York or Paris or Australia in a particular city it's going to show you the weather in the city that you're in and it will also animate the background with a beautiful weather animation let me demonstrate sort of what that looks like by going to the weather demo so if it's sunny you will see a ray of sunshine kind of go through the time if it's raining you'll get a windshield wiper that comes down and takes the droplets off the screen if it's snowing you get frost on the screen and so on and so forth let me try to get the weather animation to go let's see there it is so right now it's cloudy and clouds are sort of filtering in from the sides very nice now some other things that are useful on this main screen we have a link right to our calendar right here which takes you to actually the calendar tab in HTC sense also we have a very useful row of icons down here and if you flick upwards you get an additional four what you can do is customize these to either be a website or a contact or a program so you can really access the things that you like to use on a regular basis right from this main screen if I tap on the plus button and I say I want to add another program I can flick down the list it as beautiful flick scrolling so you want to add the marketplace and there it is going over to the right we have favorite people and what this will do it'll actually synchronize with Facebook so if you see a little F in the bottom left corner that means I've synchronized that person's contact with Facebook so it's pulling their information and as we're going to talk about in a future video it'll actually pull down their birthday their Facebook updates and their entire photo album or albums if they have more than one so it's a really smart way to sort of bring together all of these people that you call on a regular basis the next tab is email and they make it really easy to flick through your email quickly and sort of see who has emailed you without actually drilling into your email application and we're going to talk about this experience compared to the iPhone in upcoming videos jumping along a little bit we're not going to cover everything here but we have an integrated Twitter tab right now so you don't actually have to launch the Twitter application or download a Twitter application you can use the one that just comes built-in and it works quite well so if you want to tweet something new you tap up here what are you doing you can attach a picture you can attach your location if you want and you just tap update when you're done you can also see your mentions your direct messages and your favorites from the screen if we go to the right this is the full weather forecast which again makes use of that gorgeous background animation and we can add additional cities so I'm gonna add Paris let's say I'm traveling here it is and here is the weather for Paris right now and I could flick between where I am now here in Pennsylvania or I can go back to Paris with beautiful screen animations going over to the right we have a stocks tab which is very simple and if you want to see more about a particular stock you tap on it and you tap there for details right now I am over edge if you import this device from Europe you're only going to get edged you're not gonna get 3G coverage but of course you do have Wi-Fi if you want to use that here we are in the photos and videos tab which makes really good use of the powerful Snapdragon processor watch this if I turn over into landscape I get this beautiful animation that lets me flick through pictures and let's say I want to see this one it comes forward in a beautiful animation and it has pinch-to-zoom like the iPhone this is the first time Windows Mobile has been able to do multi-touch and it's really implemented very very well I think thanks in part to the really fast processor so let's go back into portrait so that was just a quick look at the HTC hd2 the screen is absolutely gorgeous on this device and it's a very good contender for the iPhone if you ignore the fact that the iPhone has a hundred thousand apps that you can download it's seriously a very close contender in many different ways as we're going to find out in future videos where we talk about the internet browsing experience the multimedia experience and some other things like that more coming soon on the HTC hd2