Gadgetory

hey guys jon rettinger here and i want to give you an overview of the sense UI found on the HTC hero for sprint we first took a look at the sense UI back a few months ago when it was released in europe as a gsm-only version but since its come to the US and come to the US with friends the eris for verizon will be a very similar experience however with the sprint version here you're going to get some things that you won't get with verizon so let me show you what this looks like there's been a lot of talk over android 2.0 android 1.5 well the hero is running android 1.5 but it's running a completely new skin on top of it done by a company called HTC that traditionally makes windows mobile phones but it's moved over to make a tremendous amount of android phones as well it's a complete skin that goes all the way all the way down and what the skin means is it adds functionality and put sort of a fresh coat of paint on the operating system now with Android to point out of cool new features like turn free turn-by-turn directions but with the sprint version with they're simply everything plans you get a better turn-by-turn navigation option which I'll show you guys a little bit later let's go ahead and get started and for the record HTC and sprint have both said that android 2.0 will be coming out to this device that was a concern of yours so with the typical Android device you're going to get three home screens with the sense you why I'll show you is a little bit different so the unlock screen is sort of unique to take this and you throw it down so we actually get seven home screens here you can navigate them with your finger using the capacitive touchscreen or this touch bar right here so everything on the home screen is completely customizable so what I've got right here is the time the weather which automatically updated so I'm an Irvine it's mostly sunny 66 degrees Fahrenheit it's gorgeous here in Southern California and one of the nice things about Android is that it's completely widget based and with the sense UI you get a lot of more widgets and increase functionalities let me show you what some of those are to access the widgets on a blank home screen or any home screen simply hold your finger down so you get your shortcuts your Android widgets your folders and one called HTC widgets and that's completely unique to the HTC devices running the sense UI let me show you what's these are some of them are very useful bookmarks I'll show you that calendar clock footprints which is a very cool geo-tagging application so let's say you're traveling with a friend you want to take a picture of you in front of the world's largest ball of twine take a picture and a lotta matically know where you were you can add notes to it so that way you never lose track of where your pictures were taken I've got a male plug in a Methodist plug in music people photo album photo frame search settings stocks Twitter and whether pneus does have a pretty decent built-in twitter client let me show you a few of these I can't walk you through everyone this would be probably a 45 minute video but i will show you some of the highlights so let's take a look here and go to calendar I forget what I've got going on an hour from now let alone in a week from now so I rely very heavily on calendar so let me go ahead and select that I'll put this on this blank homepage and we will choose what we wanted to look like what you want to belittle and tell you what you have tomorrow whether you want just a massive calendar there that you can select the dates let's go ahead and select the massive calendar so i can go through and see what I got going on the next day I can select different dates I can go ahead and add new appointments and the sense UI skin goes all the way down to the calendar as well it really is quite handy and very easy to use and if you want to get rid of any one of these widgets you tap it down right down there turns into remove and you judge drag it to the trash let me show you some of the other functionality here the sense UI and some the other widgets that you're going to get and things you might enjoy those you that follow me on Twitter you know that I use it quite a bit so there is a built-in Twitter functionality and you can sort of select again how you want it to look we want just to be little with your recent tweets or big will go for the little one this time all you do is you login with your twitter name not going to do that right now and all of your tweets will show up right there and you can see that it's very easy to use and simple to navigate as is all I enjoy I think it's very easy to learn there's a bit of a learning curve at first point to get to hang up the gin navigation it's really quite simple so one of the cool things that HTC has added that really no other US released android devices have is a multi touch especially multi-touch in the browser so let me show you what that looks like I'm going to open up a web page here we'll go ahead and open up technobuffalo calm and you get a chance to see how quickly this loads as well and this is over a Wi-Fi connection although sprint's 3g is very fast that's of course over evdo rev 0 the browser has been completely revamped and redone for HTC a and it's been done by HTC as well so I think it's something that separates the hero from the rest of the Android devices so actually when you think of Android now a lot of people are thinking of the droid but the hero really is a nice middle ground so let me show you what this looks like so here we are on TechnoBuffalo and you can advocate just as you could on other Android devices you can scroll around still finishing loading here but no matter scrolling is pretty smooth it's not resizing to the whole page but you can pan around and see what you'd like so one of the very cool things like I mentioned is multi-touch I can pinch and zoom my way around this phone I want to zoom in and zoom out it works exactly like you'd expect pinch and zoom to work you can double tapped on an area and it will zoom in it won't automatically fit the text that area but it will bring it up I've gotten very used to this functionality of pinch and zoom and I think it really adds the utility of a browser so actually a very fully functioning capable browser like the one found on the HTC hero now the hero doesn't have a built-in physical keyboard it relies exclusively on a wireless keyboard or a virtual keyboard rather so let me show you what that looks like as well because it's HTC's own keyboard not the standard default keyboard that you get with android devices to the browser here is very smooth so go ahead and close this will go into mail after let's go to messages instead open up messaging and will compose a message so this keyboard is extremely useful and very accurate and certainly will take advantage of the accelerometer for either portrait or landscape there's a bit of delay with the rotation times screen will gray out a little bit and then change the keyboard how it works you get haptic feedback feedback and love to vibrate and then you get the letter showing up above which makes it very easy to type I found this keyboard to be one of the best virtual keyboard I've ever used and I think HTC has done a great job tailoring your device for that so if you're wondering about or worried about not having a full qwerty keyboard don't worry the soft keyboard or virtual is fantastic let's go back to the home screen and we'll keep taking a tour of the sense UI there's a lot to show here I'm going to highlight some of just the the biggest features so something other things that you're going to get are these built-in sprint functionality so I mentioned earlier with android 2.0 you get access to Google Maps navigations beta what was sprint you have access to their complete sprint navigation which is just a talent app service which is available for for AT&T t-mobile it's a great turn-by-turn navigation service which generally comes at an extra cost except with sprint and the that is very nice you're getting a lot of value for your money with HTC and sense UI you're also getting stocks so you get a very nice stocks application and pulls it in from yahoo finance you're getting the same Android YouTube viewer that you've seen in other devices and you've got some weather functionality and some accelerometer games you've got quickoffice and this will sync up with exchange servers as well okay this is just a short tour of the sense UI found on the HTC hero in this case for sprint hope you enjoyed there's a lot more in depth at we could go but I want you to get an overview of what you can expect when you go to a sprint store you think about picking one of these up I really am a big fan of this ncy I think it's implemented very well the combination of capacitive touchscreen and physical buttons really is a very nice combination and having seven home screens for all your added functionality is great you can use one for Twitter 14 calendar 14 application shortcuts 14 contacts really you can use them for as many things as you like and it really makes a for a very usable device so guys hope you enjoyed for exclusive content checking out of twitter twitter.com / john for lakers and for all of your tech news be sure to check out technobuffalo comm links all that will be in the sidebar and i'll see you guys in the next video bye bye