Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe at pocketnow.com and we've already shown you the unboxing and the hardware walk around of the HTC desire s so today what I'd like to do is show you the software that comes with it particularly HTC Sense UI 2.1 so let's go take a look all right before we get started another big thank you goes out to our friends over at negri electronics who have graciously offered up the use of this device so we could run a thorough set of reviews on it now this is an HTC Sense UI advice just like any other HTC Sense UI device except that it is running sense UI version 2.1 as evidenced by this right here it's also running Gingerbread the latest version in fact two point three point three which is really really cool now let's get back into this just like any other sense UI device it's got sense widgets it's got the nice HTC dock bar down at the bottom with your app drawer with your phone and with your personalized button which is now a little painter's palette and paintbrush still has animated widgets and it still has proprietary widgets now by proprietary I mean you can only run these widgets like friend stream like you know this cool weather widget and whatnot on an HTC Sense powered device with HTC Sense set as the the launcher on the device now you can go ahead if you like for example launcher pro or ADW launcher or whatnot you can go ahead and install that and use it and it'll work just fine but you're not going to have all these cool transitions and animations and whatnot like you see here so what's different about this phone than any other it's really just an incremental upgrade HTC doesn't like to go out and make a lot of radical changes to their OS or to the apps that come with it so it's pretty much everything that you have become used to just polished a little bit more more smooth for example here's the app drawer and it's divided up into these three sections now downloaded frequently used which I really really like that I think should become standard on every android-powered device you know if I have a thousand apps in here but i only use ten of them i don't want to have to sort through a thousand to find one of those ten that i use so that's where my frequent apps come into play but if you want to see all of them here you go now one of the things that I like about the the samsung touchwiz UI is that it's paginate 'add now what I mean by that is you launch the launcher and usually on Android it's this huge list that you just flip through and it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and unless you're watching you don't know where you know why if I look through this whole thing and I know what I want isn't on that screen then I go to the next screen and well is it on that one well there aren't really screens it's just a row row row row and it gets kind of confusing well TouchWiz has a horizontal pagination so you view one page of icons really and you flip to the next one and you view another page of icons you flip to the next one and so on and so forth it's a little bit hard to get used to for somebody who's used in android-powered device in the past because usually you've got this vertical scrolling going on not really pagination was scrolling so when you pick up a Samsung device and try and use it it's kind of kind of jarring to not be able to use it just right away you've got to rethink how to use it not difficult to do but just one of those little hiccups well this is HTC's take on that so here is your app list and if you scroll down you'll notice I've got this little bar Raider you see that little horizontal rule if I let go it will snap to that and now i'm looking at another full page if i scroll some more it will snap up and i'm looking at another full page and on and on i even have a little indicator down here on the side that roughly tells me where I am in my pages so very nice i like that quite a bit again frequently used is very very nice i'd love to have this on stock versions of Android as well but very well then HTC so other than that there's no an awful lot that I can show you as far as what software comes with it because it is all HTC Sense stuff it's great it's wonderful it comes pre-loaded with adobe reader it comes with their own version of the chrome web browser with some new benefits and features let me go ahead and fire that up really quick so it just looks really nice you don't have any more of these plus/minus zoom in zoom out because they're focusing on the pinch to zoom and whatnot since you do have flash pre-installed you can very easily tap to load up the flash stuff and it looks like I'm not going to be able to do that on this one to show you really easily but you've got flash right there inside your browser the camera is probably where they put the most work into now I know it's a camera what does it do it takes pictures right well let's take a look at this go ahead and pull over my t-mobile g2 it'll be my spokesmodel for the day with its finger printing stuff and let's say I want to take a picture of that well normally I can get glare out of the way normally there's something called shutter lag if I touch this take the picture I have to wait a second before it takes the picture this is immediate so again I want to take a picture great stamps done same thing with video there's none of that lag that you'd experience before with you know with other roms and whatnot where you have to touch wait snap and by then especially if it's fast motion the pictures lost you know your subject has moved on to other things so very very impressed with the progress that they've made their just fabulous and it defaults to to high-definition video recording right out of the box so really great messaging and mail are still the HTC Sense versions of the app so a little bit more polished than what comes with Android come back over here and do mail again the same thing in this case it's asking me to set up either a pop3 or imap or exchange notice we're still missing gmail from this they don't really have a gmail feature for that you'd use pop3 or IMAP most of the time gmail is an imap client so you disconnect to it that way or use the gmail app which is what I have ended up because gmail isn't real email but that's a whole topic for another day just to kind of close that thread though it's a threaded conversation rather than traditional email which is one in one out one in one out so lots of different stuff of course you've got the other widgets fact let's go ahead and show you some widgets over here I'll get to a blank screen and all I can so we'll just tap and remove and we will tap and choose widgets now one thing that HTC is doing is they're removing an awful lot of the apps and widgets that come pre-loaded with their device and they're doing that so that you can go out with your HTC dot-com account or HTC Sense calm account and download more stuff whether that's widgets well that's apps whether that's whatever now I can't do that because i don't have my sim in the device right now but it's very easy it gives you a list that you can select from and download very very fast you can see down here it's categorized this is an android widget this is an HTC widget HTC HTC yadda yadda yadda so basically the same widgets already used to I'm not familiar with the FM radio widget but I am familiar with the FM radio app so we'll go ahead and add that and if I have my headphones which you do have to have headphones because that serves as a an antenna so here's my my android headphones and that's all they are is just my my headset but now I've got that antenna in there I can now come in here will choose which widget style we want I like that first one so or I already have done it anyway so what it'll do now is it'll scan for the next radio station that it finds and its past and a bunch of them by for some reason but anyway if we wanted to stop and listen to the radio we could and then of course we want to turn it off we just hit the off button so just very easy like that there we go what's turning on now and we can drag this all the way out here so there's my station you can see I've got full stereo on it I've got this little FM radio icon up at the top and I'm even getting some information about the song that's playing there on the radio so kind of cool lots of cool stuff that you can do we'll go ahead and turn that back off and then we're back looking at the widget so really kind of neat cool stuff alright so here are a few programs that don't come with the device but will help show you what the device can do from a software standpoint so first of all I want to run speed test now this is an edge only device on my carrier and especially since I don't have a sim in it so I'm just going to run through an 802 11 n speed test and we're going to wait for that to pop up while I'm doing that this is running it's got full HSPA on it so it should be a very fast device if you've got the right bands to cover it but it's also powered by a 1 gigahertz processor with 768 megabytes of RAM so quite a bit now with my with my internet this is a very good speed I usually get about 15 megabit per second down and about 3 megabit per second up so you can see I'm doing really good there we go ahead and toggle this over 2 megabits just so it's easier to see we'll run a second test ping raid is really low which is good there's not a lot of overhead with the the Wi-Fi or the radio built into the device but again about 15 megabit down and over for megabit up so very very good there obviously I'm not going to get that if I walk outside and and do this test over edge but you know that depends really on where you are where Wi-Fi is a little bit more standard especially home Wi-Fi so next let's go ahead and run linpack pro and again we're doing this just so you could see how fast this device is going to run stuff so over here you can see we've got 41.5 02 mega flops took about two seconds to run all kinds of cool stuff so for those people who follow linpack and know what these numbers mean and are really interested in them this makes a lot of sense for everybody else just normal casual users like you and I there's not an awful lot to see just there's your numbers okay so we got a few of them run next let's go in and run quadrant quadrant takes a little while to run so we're going to go ahead and run a full benchmark on this and we'll see what the ending result is in just a moment so here are the results of my tests right now it's testing at about 12 10 for some reason which seems a little bit low but again these are just benchmarks to get some numbers from the the nexus one running android 2.2 is up to a little bit higher than that but it's still testing really nice and really fast right in the same range as the other one gigahertz power devices and quite a bit higher than the standard HTC Desire in the standard nexus one let's go ahead and run another app now run smart bench and get those numbers and the reason we provide these benchmarking numbers isn't to say hey this device is faster than this other device but it's so you can know relatively how fast your device is going to run certain applications calculating pi for example is a good way to test its math and whatnot but let's let the test run through and we'll see what the scores are on smart bench 2011 alright so when interpreting smart bench 2011 results you have two numbers to look at in the green is the productivity index and in the red is the games index productivity is what you're looking at if you're just a regular business user who doesn't play a lot of games and of course if you do play a lot of games you want to look at the games index so over here we're at about a thousand three for our productivity and 1288 for our games index now compared to these next devices these are super high-end devices it looks like you know the desire s isn't all that great but it is this device is not meant to be a super high-end gaming rig this device is really meant to be like the nexus one replacement and I mean look at this it's small it's sleek it does everything that it needs to it's fast and it does it all in a package that we can all get behind and it's just a beautiful beautiful device so the HTC desire s running Android Gingerbread and HTC Sense UI 2.1 definitely gets my vote of approval if it had bands that got me really fast 3g this would probably be my daily driver and I'd probably go out and grab this phone right away if you want to grab this phone right away you can do so over at negri electronics head over to pocket now and we will give you a link and current pricing on it know that that might change as time progresses but we'll go ahead and give you all the information that you need to go ahead and pick one of these up for yourself so if you're in Europe or Asia especially this device is going to be fabulous and if you don't need super high speeds or have the 3g bands that this phone supports you'll love it it's absolutely wonderful so again thank you to negri electronics for showing this device to us and letting us play with it for a week or so we appreciate it a lot for pocket now i'm joe levi you