Gadgetory

it's brand a minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the software tour of the AT&T Samsung propel Pro it should have been called the blackjack slider for obvious reasons but instead they went with the name propelled Pro and we're gonna take a look at the software now so let's get a little bit closer to the screen so here we have the standard Windows Mobile sliding panel panel interface which a lot of people like and I like it a lot too it really helps to put all the mainly used device functions right at the main screen so you don't have to drill into programs so of course we have the time we can flip through email or missed calls or voicemail or text messages we can see our next calendar appointment or make a new one and we can change the profile do other things like turn on Wi-Fi and change the ringtone and things like that from the screen now there are many different home screens that come on this device I'm actually gonna go through all of them now and the way you get to them is by going into the Start menu and we're gonna go to settings over here and we are at display home screen and here are the choices for the home screens there are many of them so we've sliding panel which is the one we just saw sliding panel media which will allow you to play music right from your main screen let's take a look at some of these Samsung home screens see what they look like okay so we've seen this one before on other samsung devices and by the way this is a email pop-up notification I find it to be the most annoying thing on the planet I'll show you how to turn that off and actually you can change the visual style of the email thing basically it will pop up anytime that you go back to your home screen and the way you get rid of it is by pressing on the home button there so here we have Samsung's one of their home screens and the way it works is that you can flip through you can see missed calls new messages how many emails you have it's kind of like the sliding panel interface just kind of condensed right onto this screen so let's go and check out the second homescreen alright and this home screen is called the Samsung pop-up home screen and again that silly email notification keeps coming up and the way that this one works is that you basically move along you can open various programs or you can quickly go to messaging or email or missed calls you can go to your next appointment again it's a very similar concept to the sliding panel interface and the one we saw previous to this just kind of arranged differently and you can hide everything if you just want to have the date at the time let's check out that other one okay this one's called whizz pro and I think it's one of the more usable home screens that is included on this device so what we can do is we can you know check our email check our messages we can quickly launch a program that we've opened recently or we can go to the bottom here and we can go to contacts and we can have people assign their people that you call on a regular basis we can go to over to the right where we can see our calendar appointments and we can kind of move around on the screen this is actually quite cool to the right of that is a photo viewer and we can actually flip through pictures this is really cool so if you take a lot of pictures on your device this is a good way to flip through them if we go to the right we have music and I don't have any music on this device and if we go back to home we are taken back to the the main screen so this is probably actually the best I think that Samsung has come up with for non-touchscreen windows mobile device home screens this is a keeper okay let's move on let's go into the Start menu and see what we have there so we've standard stuff like messaging we have all the typical AT&T stuff here such as median at AT&T MA we have Ozzy messenger so you can log into multiple IM accounts at one time which is terrific gps although you can use Google Maps mobile if you like our windows live my stuff allows you to see certain see the files on your device going into organizer we have usual stuff we have a tip calculator what phone doesn't have a tip calculator we actually have something pretty cool here called IO OCR which will allow your your device to take a picture of text and convert it to editable text so if you have a business card you're taking a picture over you see a news article it works pretty well on will more about this in the review we've other things like stopwatch world clock so that you can keep track of what time it is in multiple places and of course calculator and smart converter going down the list we have applications and in here we have Adobe Flash Lite we have some Java based trial where you're gonna hear me say that a lot through the rest of this review we have this thus full suite of office mobile programs which is good wiki Mobile which is a Java program doesn't work terribly well on this device if we go back we have games and surprise surprise we have a lot of Java based trial where all of these games except solitaire and bubble breaker you must pay for and 18t really likes to include Java based trial where you would think that when you buy a smartphone they would give you the full version of a game for free but no they're trying to nickel and dime you never a fan of that we have Microsoft voice command which is good so you can talk to your phone and say call Bob and you don't have to train it and I put Skyfire on here because internet explorer is not a good mobile browser so checkout sky fire or Opera Mini to get a better browsing experience on your device ok so let's take a look at the settings there are some settings associated with the slider and some other things let's go into there ok so if we go into message ticker this is that that's that annoying email pop-up that keeps keeps coming up and you can change the style of the notification the idea here is that it's an in-your-face notification when you have an email but your phone will ring or make a sound or vibrate when you have an email anyway so there's really no purpose in using this as far as I can tell here is slide settings which will tell the device if it should lock when you close the slider which is a good idea and also for an incoming call should you slide up to answer the call or should you also press the end the send key I think it's quite convenient to have it set up so that you just slide it open and you answer the call immediately this phone is video share which is a TTS one-way video teleconferencing program not many people are using it but this phone is video share capable if you want that to work now if we go into key settings we can actually program the keyboard to launch certain programs so if we go to show list we can assign what happens when you press function C or function C what the other ones are function H and so on so that's pretty cool one of the problems with this is that you have to open up the keyboard first to get or you have to slide open the device first to get to the keyboard to type function so you may bet it'd be better off just having just going through the Start menu to opening that program that you're looking for so overall I think the software on the Samsung propel pro is actually a step up from what we're used to seeing on a teensy smartphone devices yes there's still a lot of java-based trialware but I'm really liking this new home screen that allows you to kind of flip through it reminds me of touchflo 3d actually a little bit and how it it arranges things by these these panels and you can have favorite people or you can look through your photos and almost a 3d kind of way I think that one of the best parts of using this device is the taller screen as we mentioned in the as we mentioned in the hardware tour the screen is 80 pixels taller than a device like the black jack and you can see that visually here or if we go into certain screens such as the settings screen you can really get a feel for how how that differs you can just see so much more on the propel Pro than you can on the black Jack thanks to this taller screen so it really is helpful there coming up soon is the full review of the profile Pro where we're going to talk about battery life performance and everything else that we didn't cover in these last few videos that's it for now