Gadgetory

what's up everyone John rhett endure from TechnoBuffalo here with a full review for you of one of the latest flagship phones and Verizon's ever-growing android lineup this is the HTC built resound and for all intensive purposes it's the spiritual successor to the not-so-old HTC Thunderbolt let's go ahead and dig in and see if this guy's worthy of resounding reviews and bad puns all right so before we jump into the full review let me talk about the specs of this guy and there's a lot of specs in here to talk about all right so what's our price right now from the carrier it's $249 although perhaps by the time you're watching this review we're going to the holiday season that price is gonna fluctuate so you're going to want to check on that it's running Android 2.3.4 with HTC Sense 3.5 sitting on top of it we'll talk about all this stuff more in the review let me to mention standpoint it's 5.0 eight inches by 2.5 eight inches by kind of chunky 0.5 four inches the display though is where most of the action happens that's what you're looking at right now this guy is a 4.3 inch which we've seen many times before s LCD panel with the resolution of wait for it 1280 by 720 that's right this is a 720p display and for those of you that can view quick math or have a calculator watch handy that's 342 PPI which is absolutely insane we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about this display in the review what's gonna keep this display up and illuminated is a 1620 milliamp hour battery all being powered by a Qualcomm built dual-core 1.5 gigahertz chip it's got a gig of ram 16 gigs of internal storage expandable of micro sd on the backside dual LED flash with a camera that can shoot 1080p video it's got a 2 megapixel shooter on the front Verizon LTE which we'll definitely talk about as we go through the full review bluetooth 3.0 and BAM beats audio all right so now we ran through the really ample specs of this device let's go ahead and talk about call quality if it's not gonna make good phone calls it's not gonna be overly useful to you like most Verizon phones I've reviewed recently a call quality was relatively good on this guy I did have about 3 dropped calls in notorious Verizon dead zones where I am in Southern California during about a twenty call test my testing period with the resound was probably on the shorter side around the 15 call tests so whether that typical or atypical is gonna depend on where you're located but when the calls were there and not dropped there crystal clear I had no popping noise and ebony white noise and oftentimes a caller thought that I was on a landline by the caller's I mean I mostly just called my wife to see how I sounded we were or as I was driving through certain areas I did have a bit of an issue though pairing it with certain Bluetooth devices a job where in particular I dropped the pairing twice before it finally held onto it all right so now as promised let's talk about this guy this display is worthy of several minutes of a review so it's 4.3 inches 1280 by 720 342 PPI when you compare that to what was considered one of the best displays in the business that Retina display that's just over 320 PPI on the iPhone 4 and the 4s so you can really appreciate the amount of pixels that this guy packs in and it packs a tremendous amount and it does it without being a pentile display uses a standard RGB matrix so what's that gonna mean for you not all that much but images and videos are going to look outstanding you're not gonna have any pixelation at all with the naked eye but don't take my word for it let me go ahead and show you so I'll jump ahead into gallery I've got some images here queued up go ahead and move it over I believe that is the bye skyline and it is just absolutely gorgeous here no pixelation at all and images things really really really pop the only thing that's gonna make the viewing experience not so pleasurable is the fingerprint magnet display I know a lot of devices are oleophobic or can sort of get some of the grease not to show somehow this one it all tends to sort of pool it's a gross word to say but it definitely shows the grease there see I pictured the New York skyline or at least in New York City streets absolutely beautiful let me guys show me some video cuz that's really where the 720p display shines are one of the many ways 720 he really shines so go ahead and jump into video go ahead and pick this guy good here some of the audio coming through it as well and it's gonna be tough to appreciate the video coming from the phone to the camera to YouTube no matter what resolution you're watching it on but take my word for it it is absolutely gorgeous watching videos on here is a pleasure as you'd expect from a screen with this incredible resolution you can see it evenings by looking at the home screen let's go and take a look at some text and by the way you can be doing a lot on this phone I was looking at websites or reading so let's go ahead and look at Netflix shares dropping so we're on TechnoBuffalo comm and right off the bat because the high resolution you might notice that the text is a little bit on the small side it's so crisp that the text becomes a little bit smaller it's the naked eye on because of that higher resolution so I found myself at least having to do a little bit of zoom action to read now this is really gonna depend on your eyesight if you have tremendous eyes and you're not gonna have any trouble reading the smaller text you are going to love this phone if you've got slowly fading crappy eyes like me you're gonna find yourself again doing a lot of zooming and maybe wishing for a little bit of a lower resolution so the text would appear a bit bigger I know I sound like my grandfather when I say I wish the text was gonna be bigger but often times that was true but as you zoom all the way in you don't see any sort of pixelation at all the text here is absolutely beautiful it's probably the best display that I've ever seen you don't have any sort of blue tint that you get with some AMOLED panels it's just absolutely gorgeous this is a phone that you have to look at in the store to appreciate so I'll go ahead and jump back the next thing that I wanted to talk about is speed how fast is this guy well the answer is pretty fast I didn't have any memory issues at all as I was running through using applications on first or second generation Android devices oftentimes you had to install memory killers or memory management applications to control how much memory you were using not so the case with the modern vices androids done a really nice job and of course we're running Gingerbread 2.3.4 here managing memory you have built-in memory management if you use it but scrolling through applications you're not gonna have any sort of issue at all from a quadrants core which is what I generally use to gauge my phones I didn't put a blazing numbers this is a stock rom and put up a score of two thousand two hundred and sixty nine and this is probably one of those instances - we can see how high the pixel resolution is I had a squint all the way and to read that number really very tiny but that was the score again 2269 speed on this guy and one of the best things about it is Verizon LTE network and again it's gonna vary depending where you are but I was pulling in blazing numbers so I'm gonna go ahead and make sure the Wi-Fi is disconnected you can see one of the cents three point five settings so Wi-Fi is turned off I want to run a speed test live on camera I don't generally do this but I want to show you how fast these speeds are you can see some my previous results they're absolutely blazing and I'd wager bet this is faster than most home networks getting now in the in the tens I was getting the 13s down pretty regularly and I was getting about five up which we're seeing right here is absolutely incredible speeds to get from a mobile network so my hats off to Verizon again this is gonna depend on where you are and whether or not you get LTE I'm in Southern California but those speeds are incredible so on this test I got 11 down and about four up and oftentimes my speeds were even faster than that LTE definitely gets to giant thumbs up if you're looking to get a Verizon phone right now for sure only get one that offers LTE but what's gonna make all this data speed show you stuff and that's the software and this is running HTC Sense 3.5 while running and show you that it's actually the second phone to run HTC Sense 3.5 the HTC Rhyme being a previous one so since 3.5 Android 2.3 point four you can see all kinds of other software there there's not that much to report and since three point five to get some niceties you get slow motion video capture you can remove home screens but the rest of the stuff is all pretty standard HTC cents that we've seen in the past including one of my favorite features it actually made its way to the official build of Ice Cream Sandwich this does not have this is the ability to sort of drag applications so ice cream sandwich has the camera there but it's nice you can drag applications right in there and it will quick launch for you so there's the camera for example go ahead and close out of here the next big selling point and one things we mentioned in our specs overview is the be on the back not the buffalo this is Beats Audio and unfortunately it's is something that you're gonna have to take my word for it cuz I can't really show you what it sounds like but I will say that it comes with a pair of eye Beats headphones can see them right here with inline mic built in all kinds of controls and management and that kind of stuff do the microphone there's the little pinhole mic and all your controls here the eye beats these do come in the box and are about $100 value so essentially their beats technology it's kind of a skin to music player with beats enable it's got a special sound profile it sounds good I definitely noticed a difference with the eye beats but it wasn't a giant difference I use the eye beats in a non Beats Audio official device and I think it sounded pretty good the Beats Audio is a fun logo it wouldn't be a compelling reason to go out and buy the phone unless you want a really good pair of headphones you're looking to buy anyway it's sort of wrapped them all into one package so let's talk a little bit about the design kind of interesting and I do like that these buttons are painted on here they're not back but they don't disappear your capacitive buttons across the bottom pretty standard Android fare here got your HTC home button which is sort of like a what kind of shape would that be so it's a I don't know look like a house you've got a menu button a back button and a search button on the left hand side a device that's where sharing is gonna live on the right hand side is a sort of hard to recognize with your thumb and difficult to push volume rocker up and down you'll also notice that you don't have a camera button here just one designed cue I really wish this head on the top three point five millimeter headset jack when you're holding it like you would a phone my favorite position the power and lock button there is in the upper right hand corner you've got your microphones and such on the bottom and top you've got this rubber back I really do love the HTC build quality whether or not they use metal or rubber plastic and always feels really high quality no exception here this is sort of a kind of an HTC incredible look with the different layers of height on the side as you can see that and all this makes for a very heavy phone especially you compare it with one of the other flagship phones and horizons lineup here this is the of course the Droid Razr of course at the thinnest end and the thinnest end you can see a huge difference but even in the fattest end to the fattest end you can see that it's still even a little bit thinner so this is by no means a thin phone it's also by no means a light phone away five point seven eight ounces I do wish that the bottom was all one was at one altitude I guess about the right way to say that but I do wish that all had one perhaps it would have made it for a bit of a thinner experience but does stay pretty flat it's not gonna have rock that some other older HTC devices had so the praised a pretty solid as you're using it if you want to to type speaking of typing the more I use it the less of a fan I become of the HTC keyboard here I don't know why it feels cramped maybe it's the screen size but I just didn't like using especially with the C of other great Android keyboards out there even the stock Android want to really enjoy but one of the nice things about open-source operating system is you don't like the keyboard you can replace it with one you like I know there are a lot of swiped fans out there from the camera standpoint it's that's pretty average camera nowadays takes decent pictures it's got some well some average a little light visibility it was pretty good in direct sunlight nothing to write home about you're not going to necessarily want to replace this with your point and shoot but when you do want to snap a quick picture - it's going to be fine for you I'm not that much of a camera snob or even a camera expert pictures looked at decent I wasn't gonna blow him up and make posters of him but if I wanted to share him on Facebook the camera quality was all right the battery I didn't want to talk about it's a one thousand six hundred and twenty million of hours which sounds like a pretty big battery but when you factor in a 4.3 inch screen with that high of a PPI and dual-core and LTE you're in theory you're gonna have a recipe for battery drain and disaster and while certainly not disastrous I had a difficult time getting through a full day with the HTC Rezound and my day may differ than your day but with two emails constantly being pulled in about an hour and a half to two hours of phone calls pretty regular web checking on here I barely got home around 8 o'clock and the battery was just about to keel over so you may want to keep a spare handy and one of the things that this offer is that something like the Droid Razr does not is that battery go ahead and turn that off I was actually using replaceable it's got kind of a cool red look to it on the back as well I'm go ahead and get this off it's harder than it looks peel there we go that's where the batteries gonna live it's also where your 16 gig extra external carton is going to be as well so you can put an extra battery you can get that extra charge if you need you are gonna want to be judicious though if you're traveling and they're not gonna be near a charger for a full day so do I recommend this phone yeah I absolutely recommend this phone if you're on Verizon and you're looking for a really solid option especially if you are looking towards Android I'd be hard-pressed to not recommend that resound certainly if size is a concern for you I may be better off looking at something like the joy razor with its Kevlar back and sort of thin design but if you're looking for sort of raw specs it's going to be very hard to beat the display of the HTC Rezound if you have tremendous eyesight and I started to mention this more and more in reviews because this blaze get better and better they're coming more important you're going to really like this phone if you wear glasses sometimes and your eyesight might not be perfect 20/20 or even better this is a phone you're going to want to try accidently in the store to make sure you can read the text when you're browsing a website for someone like me again with not the best eye sights I could live with it and I could be very happy you're reading text doing my little zoom action but it wouldn't be the most ideal I prefer a lower resolution however if you watch a lot of video or you look watch a lot of media pictures or what-have-you on your phone it's gonna be really hard to beat that resolution so you sort of get both sides of that coin beats audio is a nice sort of addition but it's by no means the reason to go out and get this phone I get those headphones included which is you know great so this phone would definitely get recommended if size is gonna be a concern you want a bigger display you're gonna want to look at some of the other options in Verizon's lineup but I'm looking for 4.3 inches really incredible resolution fast phone us is going to be a great choice HTC is said Ice Cream Sandwich will be coming no official data Stu when that's going to be what you will expect to get some cold tasty dessert on this sometime in 2012 and if you're looking to get this again Galaxy Nexus is also coming out so you might want to do some cross shopping I am John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo sure to check us out for all your tech news reviews and boxing's and the rest of the gossip and grumbling from the tech world be sure to check us out and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye you