Gadgetory

hey guys its brand a mini myth from pocket now calm and in this video we're going to talk about the software on the AT&T motorola backflip we've already talked about the motoblur interface and if you want to see that I'll put a link up at the end of this video in this video we're going to talk about the web browsing experience the settings the camera performance call quality and battery life so we're going to go through all those things now let's start on by turning on the device and we're also going to talk about by the way the keyboard on the back of the touchpad I'm going to unlock the screen now I'm going to open up the keyboard and you're going to see the widgets reflow when I do that so here goes takes a minute but one of the great things about the backflip is that when you reflow the widgets when you slide out the keyboard the widgets actually move on the screen and not become all jumbled and sort of disorderly other Android devices have a big problem with this it's really hard to go from portrait to landscape without the widget sort of bumping into one another but here on the backflip they reflow very nicely ok so let's open the application tray and we can navigate the application tray by the way you saw the little lag of it coming out several ways obviously we can tap on the icon we want we can use the d-pad to select or we can use this touchpad on the back of the screen to sort of move right left up and down it's a little bit awkward especially if you have sort of short fingers to have to reach around behind the screen very uncomfortable in some cases but you get used to it and you can also select so let's see if I tap in words sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't there it goes it will select the item kind of like a traditional trackpad on a laptop computer so let's go back here and open up a program let's go into the web browser and it looks like I've already have a page loaded here let's go to pocket now calm we're over a fast Wi-Fi network right now so I'm gonna click go and a note on the keyboard the keyboard feels a bit awkward to me I think it's because everything is everything is spread out so much I'm going to go back into the key into the browser the keys are very spread out and they also don't have a good bit of tactile feel it almost feels kind of artificial not like a real keyboard like you would get on say the HTC touch pro2 or even the palm pixi it's not really designed for ergonomics it's designed for well designed and to look good and I really don't like that about it so let me go back to pocket now calm here we go and let's see how long that takes over this Wi-Fi network okay we're watching the progress bar up there to see when it's done and take some more time so i can actually move around on the screen now a little bit laggy it doesn't have pinch-to-zoom of course so you have to use the manual zoom controls which is a bit annoying you can also press these arrows here which will give you this magnifier like glass but again it's a little bit laggy not the best browsing experience but here we can really see how the touchpad can come in handy you can reach around the back and sort of just swipe down the page like so the idea behind the touchpad is that you don't have to put your fingers on the screen to scroll but I think that's kind of silly because when I'm scrolling I'm not reading anything on the screen i don't care if i cover anything up its when it stops that i want to read the text on the screen so i don't think it really makes sense to have the trackpad and even after getting used to it and using it a lot it just it's not something that i use i much rather you know use the d-pad here or even flip it into portrait which takes a little too long and just manually swipe with my finger like you would do on any other smartphone so let's click on a link and sort of drill into this website see how long things take overall it's a capable web browser it's just a little bit slow and to give you an idea of how slow it is and maybe this is an unfair comparison let's take out the google nexus one which of course has a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor a lot more RAM and it's an overall much better tune device with a newer version of Android but just for comparative purposes just for fun let's let's do this so here we are with these browsers side by side they have different browser layouts because they're different versions of android and let's go to say let's go to engadget's homepage so we'll type en and we're going use the on-screen keyboard this time here they are and one two three okay and this came up extremely fast almost instantly although it seemed like it was cashed so let's go to a page Sony's ultra concept camera ultra-compact concept camera and you can really tell the difference in screen resolution here the the backflip has 480 down and 320 across whereas the nexus one is 800 down and 480 across so you get to see a lot more on the screen at one time so let's click on this one down here okay that loaded almost instantly this wasn't too far behind so we can flick down we can flick down it seems that the scrolling of the google nexus one is obviously faster and you've probably noticed by now how much more clear the nexus one looks then the the backflip and that's of course because the nexus one has an AMOLED screen but let's not do that comparison any longer it doesn't really make sense to compare apples to oranges here okay so let's get out of this browser and by the way just like with any other Android browser you can click on new window you can see multiple windows open at one time but you saw how cruddy that a man that animation was it doesn't really handle multitasking of browser windows very well so I'm going to get out of this and let's go into some other things so let's go into the settings menu and see what we have there there's actually a CPU throttling feature and I'm going to zoom in on the screen save a better view okay so we can weave standard android stuff here like managed Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and call settings ringtones display and security let's go in there and see what we have so if screen timeout orientation so we can have the accelerometer automatically switched the the screen rotation show anime animation when opening and closing windows definitely want to keep that off it helps to increase the performance just a little bit backtrack I'm not sure what that is I think it's probably pressing the back button will go into the previous applications that you are working in we have brightness and it does have automatic brightness although right now for some reason it was down all the way very strange I think that's because I changed the power mode visible passwords kind of standard stuff let's get into the the battery settings this is where you can do a little bit of CPU throttling so battery profile that's not what I wanted here we go we in a performance mode smart mode and battery saver mode I've tested all of these modes I can't tell much of the difference between these two modes but when i go from battery battery saver mode to performance mode the battery life goes down a lot and the performance doesn't really increase that much which doesn't really make sense overall keeping this on performance mode you get about a day and a half of battery life out of this which is quite good for a smartphone especially smartphone with a lot of back lights especially for the keyboard and these buttons down here so pretty good with with battery life in terms of quality I found call quality to be fantastic the speakerphone was very loud and very clear in fact probably more loud and clear than some of the higher-end HTC devices that we've tested at maximum volume the speaker phone did not distort which is really refreshing to see let's take a look to see if we have any other noteworthy applications here one of the theories on why this device doesn't have Android to point our 2.1 whichever one has the google navigation is because 18t wants to continue to push their AT&T Navigator service the word on the street is that this suit will soon get an upgrade to the newest version of Android so if you're considering the back foot know that you will be able to get an upgrade in the near future and let's go into the photo gallery application I've taken a few photos here and of course we can flip into a landscape hopefully it'll go there we go there's always a lag and going into scape so we can swipe to the right pretty smooth zooming isn't so smooth so if we tap slow it's choppy doesn't look too good of course we can't do multi-touch because it doesn't have multi touch capability so you get the idea there you can swipe and swipe and go through all the pictures and sometimes you get that throw animation I think when you go all the way to the left side you get a little funky animation there so that was just a quick look at the software on the motorola backflip overall it's pretty much a basic android install with some motorola and AT&T stuff slapped on top in terms of performance and web browsing it's not so great it's not up there with some of the other higher-end android phones but i don't think that the backflip is intended to be a high-end android phone that set it has great call quality in as good battery life and it's only 99 bucks on AT&T if you are getting a new two-year contract so it's an affordable device that works generally well unless you're looking for something that's really high performing and really has the wow factor so that was a look at the software on the motorola backflip that's it for now