Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look of the droid DNA from HTC this is called in other regions the butterfly J but there are a couple of changes that have been made most notably the removal of the microSD expansion slot so this is something that has caused a little bit of ire but if you're like me and you've never actually gone over the 16 gigs of space on your iPhone then it's probably less of an issue for you so for starters we are going to go ahead and open the box because that's apparently what we do on this channel now you'll notice we've got our dual cam setup but we've made some improvements so we're hoping that you guys will appreciate them number one is there's no audio clicking that is something that we did figure out a way to resolve number two is we've got the colors matching better on the cameras and number three is you shouldn't see any weird motion blur as I'm opening up the box here the box is extremely tight so you can tell this is a fresh non deflowered phone that has never been used before in a way that would be undesirable to the upcoming owner of it so here we go just pull a little tab open here the phone comes out the first thing you'll notice about the droid DNA is it's absolutely huge the second thing you might notice if you did any reading about it whatsoever is that the screen is actually not 720p like most phones these days yes it is a 1080p screen that is actually in an area that is smaller than a galaxy note 2 so that's the one that I have here for comparison that means you have a massive 440 pixels per inch of pixel density which actually just well demolishes pretty much everything else for comparison and iPhone 5 is 326 pixels per inch so let's go ahead and open up some more stuff here there's a Verizon start here there's a sim tray removal tool handy dandy I'm not really much of a phone guy but I'd imagine you need that if you're going to change your SIM card which has something to do with connecting to the interwebs or something like that start here guide aha Spanish because this is not a Canadians phone global support information in calling card consumer holy crap look wasn't it look at this it's like the end it's like a clown car of stuff so there's a SIM card that presumably would be included if you were an actual Verizon customer which I'm not and finally a couple of HTC stickers let's go ahead and pull this out like the packaging very plain black which of course makes it easy for us to show you all the black products against the black packaging on the black table includes a charging cable so there's your mini I rather micro USB charging cable okay also includes a wall wart and that is pretty much it once we power up the phone obviously the first thing you're going to notice about it is that 1080 screen another thing you might notice is that HTC has altered the UI the stock UI for Android a little bit so they're calling it their sense 4 plus UI some people are familiar with this some people aren't I am not so I don't really have any comments on it right now in terms of the overall layout of the phone on the top you've got actually look at that everything is labeled on this handy-dandy little thing that I pulled off without actually looking at it more than once so this is a power and lock key on the top you've also got your headphone jack here that's how you get access to the SIM tray on this side you've got volume up and volume down as well as a gorgeous-looking red accented speaker grille so this is actually look at that that's a metal button it feels very nice on the bottom you find a USB oh there we go USB charging port and that is pretty much it so there's not much in terms of buttons on the other side you find another red accented speaker grille on the back you find the camera so the rear camera is 8 megapixel the front camera is 2.1 megapixel the rear camera will take 1080p video and the front camera will take 720p video there's an included LED flash one other thing that you guys might care about about this particular phone is that it actually has two indicator lights on it so there's one on the front of the phone as well as one on the back so that just means that if I were getting some choppy framerate there but we're not so that just means that no matter how you put the phone down on your nightstand if you have a missed notification or whatever else then you're going to be able to check it out and make sure that you don't well not being able to check it out so other things that are included oh right actually I should talk about this so HTC has acquired the rights for the whole Beats Audio thing so that's no longer going to be that's no longer gonna be available on sort of such a weird variety of products HTC owns that so this phone as well as the Windows Phone 8x which will be checking out soon actually have Beats Audio so what does that mean Beats Audio inherently doesn't necessarily mean anything because dr. Dre does not actually use beats by dre headphones when he's recording in the studio I hope you guys know this I really hope you know this but what it does mean in the case of this particular phone the Droid DNA is that it does have a headphone amp built into it so if nothing else if you are using headphones or earbuds that are higher impedance than normal you're going to actually be able to drive those at a reasonable volume compared to phones that do not have a headphone amp built-in so hopefully once I've had a chance to actually try it out a little bit I'll be able to say a bit more about that looking closer at the screen again I just want to take a moment to talk about the difference between Super LCD 3 & Ammo LEDs such as what's used on popular phones like say for example that one that everyone buys the galaxy s3 from Samsung so amo LED has the advantage of giving you deeper blacks because you can actually turn the pixels off they can stop emitting light however the disadvantage is sometimes text can be not quite as sharp and not quite as crisp because it doesn't use dedicated sub pixels so it's just a slightly different display technology I also suspect that the availability of screens that are capable of running out of 440 pixels per inch density and at 1080p resolution for mo LED would be less and that that would also be a significant expense to add to the overall phone because at the end of the day you can produce as exciting a piece of technology as you want but if absolutely no one or their dog or their dogs fetch etai or whoever else if no one can afford it then it's kind of a nonce non-starter as far as that's concerned so other cool cool features it's got wireless charging which I personally think is freaking awesome because the first thing I would have complained about on a phone like this is the fact that it has micro USB like all other Android phones seem to have an hate micro-usb it just breaks all the time it does support 4G LTE but not for me see there's that 4G LTE logo on the back not supported here in Canada with this particular phone I think I'd have to get a different version oh yeah right so the hardware that's running on this guy s4 pro the s4 pro platform so that's a crate s4 pro is actually the most powerful mobile capable platform so normally you would actually see one of the lower end chipsets in a phone because of power draw concerns but they've gone with not only the s4 pro but also the fastest Adreno 320 GPU to pair with it partly I think because a it's a multimedia style device it's a larger phone so if you look at it in my hands you're gonna notice that it's actually probably a little bit too big for me I can only reach about here to here but this phone is going to be used by my wife anyway and then the other thing is because of the 1080p resolution you're gonna need a powerful GPU just to draw basic things like Android animated effects and have them not lag out at all so it's running jellybean which means that you do have the project butter experience with everything being smoother but without a decent GPU even that could potentially be compromised so let's go ahead and just kind of check it I don't know if I ever showed you guys the back in detail so it's just I got a matte soft touch finish on it looks great feels really good what else am I missing here ah yes back here 2.0 aperture lens so that just basically means it lets in more light a lower aperture is better it means less light is lost through the lens which means that in regardless of because you can only put so big of a sensor inside a device like this you can only put in so much processing power before it just doesn't start to make a difference at all so you have to have excellent clarity to the optics in order to deliver as much light as possible through the lens and onto the sensor itself so that's actually part of HTC's entire platform on this guy that is called image sense so that is quick image readiness so they're claiming 0.7 seconds from nothing to being ready to take a photo they're also they've also added things like burst shot subject tracking you can record a video and then you can actually record still images while you're recording a video and have them saved separately which I also think is kind of cool and they're basically just saying it's kind of one of those beats by audio beats by dre audio beats branding things where they're going okay we don't we can't just list all of these features on the phone so we're gonna call it image sense and it's going to include the 2.0 aperture lens as well as all that extra functionality in the photo taking software itself I don't think we've actually missed anything this particular phone has two gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of storage space unfortunately like I said before it is not upgradable with micro sd it does support NFC which is great as more devices support NFC you might be able to do things like whip your phone out and unlock your door or I mean if you're like me and you're lazy you could just have the phone in your pocket just be like yeah I just kind of jump up to the door like that trying to unlock it that way again I can't emphasize enough how gorgeous the screen is the the text that's overlaid right now that's showing sort of pull down to see notifications press and hold an empty space to add widgets and shortcuts drag an app over another to create a folder and drag your favorite apps to the launch bar to customize it it almost looks like like a Inc over top of continue to show quick tips sure why not continue to show quick tips so let's go ahead and see if we can see if we can get the brightness turned up a little bit here Beats Audio it's not available on the phone speaker okay well that's interesting makes sense I suppose brightness there we go nope no automatic brightness I want to crank it aha there we are so it probably doesn't help that it's kind of a dark background there but you can see it's extremely bright I'm gonna go ahead and have you look at it from the side so the colors do not change at all from the side and in terms of just sort of whipping around inside the UI here it's extremely snappy I guess if we wanted to zoom or do whatever else okay so there's Google ringtone oh okay I bump the ringtone there we go so we want to sort of zoom around maybe let's go to I don't know NCI XCOM and it would help a lot if I hit the X correctly never liked the Android the stock Android keyboard as much as I like the iOS keyboard button since there's lots of options that you can change it to the it should be fine so absolutely gorgeous quick scrolling there we go I think that pretty much concludes our unboxing of the Droid DNA from HTC don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our boxing's reviews and other computer videos