Gadgetory

hey what's the good word everybody I'm know from technobuffalo and this is the inspire 4G from AT&T and HTC it arrives ATT 4g HTC it's the newest android phone it drops i believe on februari 13th ironically enough the same day you can start pre-ordering the motorola atrix 4g which you know frankly in a nutshell here this is a really nice phone but i would imagine that atrix is going to overshadow it in the stores because it's all was banging laptop dock craziness stuff but that being said 100 bucks on contract gets you a lot more these days than it did five years ago when i started in this business nine dollars on contract of course we all know that the contract part cost you way more than the upfront cost and also a lot of times you can get these ones cheaper from a third party that from the carrier store but you know so what for the sake of the review nine dollars on contract and try to point to the newest version HTC Sense 4G is it any good let's find out you alright so here's the phone the inspire 4G again ninety-nine dollars on two-year contract when it drops i believe it's Deborah thirteenth and you know in a nutshell it's a really really solid Android device if you like the form factor the big 4.3 inch screen really what the only thing you're missing here that might I think be really important right now is a front facing camera if you'd like to do the video chat and self portrait and stuff otherwise you know it's a single core processor and their dual core phones coming out but most people aren't going to need that this one is plenty responsive you know everything that I've done with a web browsing and email and everything else you know works just fine the HTC Sense system is nice it's got the hspa+ 1880s first quote 4G HSPA+ device which I get I'll talk about that in a second it's got Wi-Fi on the back that eight megapixel camera 720p HD video dual LED flash I just did a little bit with it didn't have a chance to you know do a whole lot of video recording and all that kind of stuff but it works you know it works well the photos are solid I've got a photo here that I I took this morning and some new sneakers I got unfortunately there are a half size too small Nike change their sizing since last time I got shoes but anyway just to show you you know the pinch and zoom it's very responsive and the photo came out well i emailed this to a friend and then you know saw it in my sent folder when i looked on a big monitor on a computer and you know a pretty good photo from when I just took quickly you can see kind of the detail there in the cardboard box you know I'm not a photographer per se but definitely pretty good phone you got the GPS I mean pretty good camera rather for a phone the GPS built in with geo-tagging you know all that stuff you're used to it from a high-end device HTC Sense you know works really well you've got your multiple home screens and you're kind of overview you can pinch in to get your overview thing and then you know click on what your screen you want to go to all the widgets the HTC widgets as well as the Android widgets here's the HTC clock with the animated weather that kind of stuff you know it's really good there their new new version the sentence is a few little few little additions including the find my phone service online backup tight into the web's website you can log in to remotely to manage your phone and find that if it's lost or stolen that's pretty cool got this personalized button which gives you kind of quick access to the settings and customizations that people you know most people will want to use and this something that's nice if you're you know kind of a power user you can get it set up quickly you can set up your own scenes in your own you know a scene is a combination of a wallpaper apps and what app shortcuts and widgets on your home screens and then you've got also you know sound sets which are similar but for sounds and so that's cool you know power users can set this all up to jump between different you know sets and settings and then for a novice user you know this is cool because it makes it a little bit easier a little more user friendly than stock Android at least in my opinion and i'll talk more about that in a second because i have a gripe still out there just some things about android i just really bugged me let me talk about that in a second one thing i like about android is the notifications bar and then you've got also the customizable LED notification light not on right now because I've ignored my new emails for long enough so not anymore but again you know overall solid saw device I think when the atrix comes out like I said it it may overshadow with all the the dual core and and all the the hdmi out and the accessories and all that and you know probably more of a marketing blitz but but this is a solid device and you know it's not super lightweight but it's not overly heavy it's thin enough solidly constructed the battery cover was a giant pan the neck I've always been a massive fail at battery covers my whole lust rias half-decade career covering the mobile industry I for some reason battery covers and I did not get along but this one particularly bad and I've talked to other people reviewing this photo said the same thing as you can see i mangled this thing trying to get it open i used at a coin and a fingernail in a screwdriver and everything I could think of try get this thing open I finally did but I messed it all up then you've got a separate mechanism down here for the sim card a microSD slot you know most people won't have to access these things very often and that's good because solidly constructed you know feels great in the hand stays in place once it's there but man just a bear and not in the good way to to deal with those things another thing I really like about HTC is their on-screen keyboard so I'll show you real quick i love android voicesearch one of my favorite things voice commands search for a big pizza I look at that search for a big pizza pie I mean it that's fantastic so when you're typing I think I think HTC's keyboard on-screen keyboard is one of the best ones out there it works in you know in landscape and portrait modes I really like their predict system which as you're typing you know gives you the options right there and it's easy to customize the dictionary of course that one was so far off you know it gives you your auto complete options and everything and just really nice easy to type in the nice big screen the 4.3 inch screen makes it even easier to type on which is great but a couple of the negatives so for me AT&T store was notoriously you know lots of complaints in the San Francisco Bay Area and my office where I work in an Oakland California where I feel most these videos and everything has really bad cell phone service across the board but 18 TM t mobile the gsm carriers are worse than the cdma carriers right here so i know it's kind of a dead spot that being said this phone dropped three calls got the same call three times actually this afternoon and another call once when i tried to call call somebody i got to fail right away and I'd to call again so that's not you know necessarily the fault of this device but just to say you know 18t still having his problems in some parts of the country and other in other parts it's great but out here the problems continue and the hspa+ you know I've got two bars of hspa+ right now so not you know particularly great but the speeds where I am haven't been all that great but again that's you know the issue more with the coverage right here and in my home office I was using it earlier today had to go somewhere and not using a wall on the car because don't use your phone while you're driving but I used it you know when I got there and the speeds were a little bit better obviously it has Wi-Fi the Wi-Fi works great so there you go a couple other you know little niggles which are as about androids anything else I androids just too complicated still it's too complicated for the average person to really get the most out of i knows you know for tech enthusiasts for android fans for all that absolutely i know this doesn't necessarily apply to you and you know it's so customizable it's great with the widgets and you know the notification customizations and everything and the shortcut apps and all that stuff absolutely fantastic notification system is great you know all these widgets you can add but you get a device like this and you know on the one hand HTC has done a great job making things easier to use on the other hand it's more complicated for instance I've got the HTC mail app and then the gmail app also now this didn't come with the gmail app widget you know or app shortcut rather on the homescreen add that myself because I couldn't set up my company email via the mail app it's just I couldn't get it to work and so then I went into the gmail app and it was able to parse it no problem and so you know why do I need both or you know even worse somebody's not as tech savvy as me the average consumer is going to see this and think you know why are there both of these here maybe they won't ever find the gmail or maybe they'll try the mail and it won't work with their account and then the wonder what's going on so you know things like that other things up even more egregious I think because that's kind of a specific example where my account you know my email account wouldn't work with the HTC mail app but the personalized menu right so this is great and everything two things that I tried to change right out of that one my notifications were set up where the phone would make noise there would be a notification tone when I got new email I wanted to turn that off immediately because I get so much email there's no point in having that happen it took me so long to figure out how to do this again I'm tech-savvy amused two phones but I haven't used an android phone I used one the galaxy s for a little while but not many in the last several months and not an HTC android phone in a while so it was kind of like starting from scratch but being a tech savvy person and I was like well how do I do it I went to sound set that's not going to do it that's a whole bunch of prepackaged sounds and you can't change it up there you can set up I could set up a new sound set I create a brand new one but I never thought to actually do that you know and that's I don't want to create a new sound set I just want turn off the email ringer so then I went to ringtone not there then I went to notification sound you'd think oh that would do it right so email great sorry I'm going to go in and will default alpha get more but where's the 14 off or silent not in there what I wound up having to do was I had to go all the way back into my mail program and then from inside my account I had it the menu button on the bottom which android users will know you know you can always hit the menu button and and half the time you'll get you know more options sometimes you won't but then from in there I had to go to more and for more settings and then inside of settings there's email notifications where you can change the ringtone the vibrate notify wants and in ringtone there now I have a silent option that's you know drilling down way too far in general for such a I would think a highly important thing that a lot of people are going to want to mess around with especially when the phone set by default out of the box at least mine was to ring ring ring every time I get a new email and who wants that just wait it's buried too far and it's not what the rest of the sounds and that just doesn't make any sense similar thing with turning off the haptic feedback when i was typing on the on-screen keyboard not where i expected it to be just there are too many things like that that and it's not just android you know its technology in general and gadgets and stuff but android in particular in the mobile phone space there's so much you can do with it but but it's like they need to run it through the common sense filter one more time to make it easier for the for just you know smartphones are becoming such big business so many people are buying them and they're getting it's like that saying that you only use ten percent of your brain i think people only use like five percent of their smartphones because they're just they're just too complicated and too hard to use anyway my little rant being over you know that's kind of my two biggest negatives here on the device are you know the difficulty of certain setup and customization features and then AT&T service the hspa+ you know Iran where is it I ran speedtest earlier and again you know where I am is not good right so I know that it was just kind of funny here i'll run it side by side just for fun with an iphone for both you know with Wi-Fi off and sorry i just got text message both of them with Wi-Fi off just off the cellular network and you know these results your mileage may vary and I hope it does because these results were just pitiful that being said HSPA was faster sorry about the glare here overhead Wow we'll begin test on both of them and this you know not the devices fall and not the fault of HTC and you know where you live even for me if I went you know four blocks away probably be better but I'm just going to show you this because it's kind of funny so this is a little bit better actually than I was getting earlier I got 983 down I got 1.5 down on the iphone interesting earlier the results were reversed but much much worse I got 300 up on the inspire point 9 or 90 to say you know 1.5 up point nine down but 15 down point I not sorry with 387 milliseconds ping on the iphone and then ninety a three-down 307 up a 307 ping latency on the inspire so the inspire faster all the way around except for download interesting try that one more time just for the heck of it again don't use these these results as anything other than just may as well test because I'm doing the review because the coverage like I said is really bad where I am so are we getting now there you go a little bit better 1.4 down on the aspire you know this being said just to be fair on verizon using their 4g modem the other day in this same exact building where i am i did I I was consistently getting at least 12 down and at one point I got 21 down I got basically uh you know 10 times as fast so anyway I'm talking about 21 megabytes down it would be like 21,000 set of 14 for whatever that's worth anyway so alright iphone one point oh eight down one point oh four up and then on the aspire one point four down point three up so again you know where I am it's very sketchy there you go enough of that though just kind of recap here spire 4G 99 bucks on contract it's a solid solid Android device I like HTC's customization I still think there's work to be done on Android in general and even HTC in the personalization there's some things are too hard to find but all in all it's a nice phone very responsive big screen makes it easier to type on solid camera with HD capture and you know if you don't need a dual-core processor and you don't need a front facing camera and you don't need a slide-out QWERTY keyboard this is a great option to look at for an android phone and a lot of you know this is basically the the US version of the HTC Desire HD so if you're not in the US and you're interested in this check out the desire HD there you go you know what for a not full review that sure was 15 minutes plus of me yapping but what can I tell you it's how I do things hope you enjoyed it thanks for checking it out don't forget to check out techno buffalos coverage of the palm HP palm webos event and and then you know Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is starting on Sunday februari 13th I'll be over there a bunch of press conferences sunday evening Barcelona time morning and afternoon us time but I'm headed over there friday it's a long long flight from where I am so John will have more with the atrix or the atrix the inspire the HS comes in all that stuff till then my name is Noah thanks for watching I'll buy oh by the way thanks AT&T for loaning us the phone buh-bye