Gadgetory

what's up fellow tech head jon rettinger from technobuffalo here and i want to give you an overview of the sense UI found on the HTC hero now this device that I'm using is an unlocked device with no US 3g bins as of now it has not been picked up by a US carrier but the operating system and the skin on top of it is really unique so I'm looking forward to sharing with you so first let's go ahead and unlock it those you that maybe don't know this operating system or the skin on top of it it's again called sense UI made by HTC which is a hardware manufacturer and it's sitting on top of the Android operating system some of you might be familiar with other HTC devices and this may even look familiar to you as cues from touchflo and touchflo 3d that are found on windows mobile phones have taken some cues from that let's go ahead and get started this is a widget based interface and I'll show you what that means in just a moment so in typical Android devices you've got three home screens that you can slide around two and this really takes that three home screens and more than doubles it actually give you access to seven home screens I'm just scrolling around here you can see that there are a lot of screens to use so let me show you what you can do with these screens this is what I have set for my home screen I've got a big clock widget with a wet weather widget down below you can see i'm in irvine and that'll actually automatically adjust per your location which is actually quite neat i needed just shortcuts that i have on what i consider to be my mobile desktop you can move these shortcuts around just by holding it down and you can tap and move them around you can see that little square glows to let you know where you can put an icon if you want to delete it when you're holding it you just drag it down to remove it'll glow red and you let go and there it is so let me show you some of the widgets that you have a choice of putting on here and some of the customizations that you can do so the big one right here is clearly the clock and below that the weather so if I tap it I get much more clock information now i'm in the pacific time zone i can add a city here some cities that i've added for some global times you've got alarms you've got a stopwatch and then you've got a timer with a very familiar-looking dial interface let's go back home we'll go over to the next screen here in fact let's go go to blank screen I can show you some of the widgets that you can add so you add widgets quite simply by using this plus button and it pulls up a list of what you can add to the home you can add shortcuts and here are some already pre described shortcut so bookmark school mail mail inbox and program to go ahead and just select whatever program you want and put an icon right in so I'll show you what that looks like let's say I want to put in my mail inbox for example just standard shortcut I don't have any mail setup your actually except with a bad choice let's say I want to set up music player music playlist will add a playlist and I go and hit back now you can see what sort of these options look like for you so going back to the added shortcuts you've got HTC widgets and this is where well the HTC customization comes into play let me show you what these are these are really the most exciting ones on here you've bookmarks calendar clock footprint so I'll show you about in a minute mail message music people photo album photo frame search setting stocks Twitter and weather Thank You me just a sampling of what you can do here let's say I want to pick bookmarks go ahead and tap that go ahead and tap it and you can choose different layouts that you wanted to have so grid layout or the four icon I 24 icon so I'll select it and now there is on one of my home screen says I slide there is my main home screen there's one on the side and out here is that bookmarks and I can tap it it's not really much that I can move it but you can provide this a little bit if I want to erase it go ahead and drop it down let me show you some of the other widgets that you can add here and some of them are very cool so you got a calendar you can choose to have a view a big calendar i notice that this calendar looks quite different actually then the standard android calendars example of HTC sort of going below the surface of Android really putting some other customizations into the core functionality you can view it sort of a small piece that you can move anywhere you want that shows you when your next appointment is and those are your only two choices so go ahead and use the back button and go back now we've got clock and there's a lot of clock options you've got text like 12 different clock options some analog clocks is a big old digital clock just a ton of different choices and some of them are actually pretty neat how they look you can really customize this any way you want and that's one of the nice things about Android in particular the sense UI is get complete customization over your home screen which is certainly not found on other popular capacitive touchscreen devices that I'm not going to name so we'll go back it is one called footprints which is actually kind of new let me give you a quick overview about what that is you can select a wooded style let's pick the big one then it select such what footprints does it's quite simply it does geo-tagging there's a sample picture that I took you can see it says Irvine 01 it picked up my location using the built-in GPS and it'll geotag your pictures if you want to email them out or post them to Twitter whatever you want it's just HTC's own version of geo-tagging kind of neat so I'll show you just a few more of these widgets that you have the option of putting in your home screen we're going to remove that and you'll see that things are very fluid they look nice and they work quite well off the sense UI let's go ahead and add a few more HTC widgets you can add people and you can pick your favorite people photo album you go ahead and scroll through all your photo I'll show you what that looks like let's select it and select an album we'll just use all photos you get sort of a shortcut in a snapshot to all your photos actually quite neat you can scroll through them following that you like let's say this one that sort of looks like Katie Holmes going to open it up and that takes you to the photo viewer and you can take advantage of the multi-touch that actually HTC put ominous you can zoom in with two fingers and zoom out and you can scroll to the next picture and this will also use the accelerometer if you want to turn the device on another note so those are some of the HTC widgets you can add it can spend probably another 15 minutes looking over these with you but in brevity's interest I won't do that so let me show you some of the other options that we have the back button one more time okay go to a new home screen and you also have the ability to add the standard Android wouldn't set people are used to and one of the cool things about Android that you get the ability to again customize your home sweet you can put folders there you can drag down folders any way you want and I really liked it about the operating system so get some of your standard ones here is a battery widget that I had downloaded analog clock that's kind of standard on most Android devices this will look pretty familiar you can move it around just like you can on other Android devices you'll see that little square that follows it around to help you put your icons wherever you want and to further show that if i select say google maps here you can see that follows me around to let me know where I've got room to put icons and you can really customize this any way you want and you've got all these home screens one thing I will say though if I'm all the way on the left most home screen I want to get all the way back to the right there isn't a home button that i can use they'll take me go back to the side or that'll help me move along you got to scroll through each screen individually so i can like i said if i hit home it'll take me right back to that home but if I want to keep scrolling I got to keep scrolling all the way through I wish there was an easier way to navigate through these screens you can use the trackball as well to scroll through these but it's not the quickest way to do it if you notice right here as I'm scrolling there's a little bar that's moving with me and I wish towards a way to sort of tag that bar and move along but there isn't unfortunately so some of the other things about this operating system it's very social network friendly meeting when you first set it up it'll ask you if you have witter account Facebook MySpace all these social networking features that integrate right into these widgets you'll see right here for example I've got a Twitter widget that really came comes built into the device and takes advantage of the notification bar so let's say how many new tweets I have it uses a client called P which is very nice and practice but i'll say that this client peep crashes on me not seeing one out of every three uses so it's great in theory not so great in practice look go ahead and scroll that right up so again like all Android devices you can change the background here I've got a map of the world thought it was kind of neat and you can just put their whatever you like anyway guys I wanted to give you an overview of the sense UI it really is a great user interface although it is very processor intensive and also RAM and ROM intensive rom meaning it takes a lot of program memory and ram it use it a lot of well the free memory to run it so it does get a little bit boggy an HTC hero has a well over a 500 magnet or processor but it's severely taxed using this sense ey so things can be a little bit slow I think that this user interface is going to be perfect when processor speeds gets a little bit faster or perhaps as HTC learns to optimize it I wouldn't be surprised to see this make its way on other Android devices perhaps even backwards compatible for older Android devices I would also expect to see this possibly take some cues onto the new version of touchflo 3d that's going to be on windows mobile devices this really is a great implementation I've been really happy with it up using it from my primary phone for the past few days and it's been very fluid and really easy to learn so guys hope you enjoyed for exclusive content be sure to check me out at twitter twitter.com / john for lakers and if you want to learn more about technobuffalo go ahead and check out technobuffalo I TechnoBuffalo com or twitter com / TechnoBuffalo anyway I'll put all those links in the sidebar and i'll see you guys in the next video bye bye