Gadgetory

hello everyone this is Antonina from pocketnow.com and today we're gonna take a look at the software on the HTC ChaCha for which we thank our friends over at globe that code that UK for sending us a reindeer unit and you may know that the HTC ChaCha is coming to AT&T soon as the HTC status which is a normal name given that the Facebook button allows you to easily change your status on Facebook or post a short message image video music whatever to your Facebook wall what's particularly interesting is that HTC made a tremendous job in fitting HTC Sense 2.1 to this landscape screen which is a permanent landscape screen it's got an HD GA 480 by 320 resolution and the they nailed it without any further ado let's get to the software tour of the HTC ChaCha aka the upcoming the AT&T status so here we are with the HTC ChaCha which is running Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread out of the box it will hopefully receive 2.3.4 update soon and it's got HTC Sense 2.1 for messenger now it's not HTC Sense 3.0 which you might find on later devices like the sensation Sensation 4G or evil 3d but it's got a great look to it it weight feel HTC adopted the new lock screen which is working very well and they managed to somehow optimize it for a permanent landscape display let's jump right back to the home screen and let's see the lockscreen now when you turn on your screen this is what you get a permanent landscape display with the lock ring at the bottom now unlocking the screen is done like this you take the ring from the bottom and drop it anywhere on the screen and your device will be unlocked but you have these shortcut icons which you can customize let's say you want to jump straight into the mail application you just read the mail icon and drop it into the ring and get you back let's get back let's lock it again let's say you want to quickly take a picture you just grab the camera icon drop it into the ring and it takes you straight to the camera application now the camera is covered but you can see that it launched automatically this is what you get once you unlock your smartphone this is the HTC Sense 2.1 homescreen on the HTC ChaCha it's got 3 + 3 6 shortcut icons on the left and on the right it's got a clock widget with a Facebook aka social networking widget which will automatically update at a certain interval so that you can get a glance of what your friends are up to just by looking at the screen of course these as with any other HTC Sense powered smartphone can be customized we'll take a look at that later swiping to the left will bring you to another home screen for a total of let's see we got right now set up seven aka six plus one which is the last one you can customize to get back to the home screen now you've got this - these two icons on the left and on the right on the bottom of the screen this will bring up your application menu and as you can see it's a little bit different from what you've got even what you've gotten used to in your portrait device you've got the list of applications and your icons here and on the right side which would be normally on the bottom part of your screen you got your shortcut icons for all application frequently accessed application and downloaded applications and this is throughout the system wherever you have a screen which implies shortcut icons you will have them displayed on the right and to give you an example of that we'll just jump into the mail application and you will see your emails listed as a list in landscape mode on the left and your shortcuts on the right floor in box threads favorites unread marked invites attached so on and so forth the other button is for customization and those who are running HTC Sense 2.1 or above maybe even though the three are accustomed to this you can personalize the display by choosing a scene skin the wallpaper or you can change the shortcuts on the lock screen you can add items to your home screen widgets apps shortcuts folder and you can personalize the sunset which implies changing the sound for the ringtone a notification for the alarms and so on let's take a look at how you can set up your home screen we have a blank home screen number seven and zapping this big plus icon allows you to add the widget an app a shortcut or a folder to your home screen let's take a look at the widgets basically there are a lot of HTC widgets approximately those with which you are accustomed to from your other HTC devices running Android with HTC Sense you've got calendars you got clock you've got a face book dedicated widget which looks like this currently refreshing and it will bring your friends status messages to this widget let's read this and remove it and take a look at the others we've got the facebook chat widget which is interesting we'll take a look at this in a minute these Foursquare widgets are coming with the Foursquare once you downloaded you got friends trained Google search HTC likes which is great for sharing applications you like with your friends email Android Market messages the classic music widgets news and weather photo widgets which are the same as with other HTC devices selling tips traffic which comes with the Google weather and YouTube now what's particularly interesting is that there is a dedicated facebook chat application on the smartphone and that's unless instructed to go offline always online and it's a good idea to turn it off when you want to sleep at night because some of your friends might be afraid that something happened to you because you're not answering your HTC ChaCha or future AT&T status will be connected all the time to your Facebook jet let's take a look at the Facebook chat widget it currently allows us to choose from only one out of one but hopefully there will be a shorter widget let's select this one and we will see who is online our colleague Adam is online let's jump into the chat application and this is how it looks we can type a message and we can send it to Adam let's take this down from here and what I want to show you is that some widgets have the ability of being configured let's say the People widget if you drag the People widget and you drop them to the remove button they will be removed from your home screen but if you drop them to the edit button you can edit them and you can select a group for widget or rearrange group members which is great if you want to take somebody like Brandon and drop him at the top of the list save and there we go Brandon is number one favorite let's take a look at some other scenes with that on the HTC ChaCha we go to scenes now we are using the current scene which is unsaved but you can also select a social scene you can select a work scene with the dual clock if you are traveling a lot for two time zones and it's the same also with the travel and you have also a place in basically what changes is the wallpaper and the home screen number one bringing you the widgets most appropriate for that scene ok let's jump right back and let's take a look at what's really specific about the HTC ChaCha and the future AT&T status the Facebook button the Facebook button is this little fella here at the bottom and I'll try to zoom out just a little bit to show you what happens if you are pressing the Facebook button and several different mario's let's say you are right now at the home screen and you are pressing the Facebook button it will automatically bring you up this window which will allow you to post a message and you can post this message either to a your wall or tapping on this little button here somebody else's wall this is great if you want to post a short update on where you are what you are doing or you want to say something to a friend let's just post a short message to our wall let's say testing from cha-cha whoops typo there cha-cha great once we had hit the post button our status will be changed and you will see that once you jump into the facebook applications Facebook application and all your friends will see your new status newsfeed it's currently refreshing and there we go testing from cha cha and as you can see the social widget on the home screen has already updated to reflect the changes another thing you can do with the Facebook button is when you want to share a song from your music library let's say you got a song which you like in particular like this one and you press the Facebook button it will automatically bring you the album art the title of the song and a link to Amazon and you can tap here a message like hey check out this great song I discovered and you can post that message another thing you can do with the Facebook button is share pictures if you have a picture on your smart phone which you have taken with your camera or you have synced with your computer you press the Facebook button and it will automatically upload to Facebook it says one photo selected you can select which album you wants you upload your picture in if you have any people you want to tag in your picture you can do that here you can add tag and description and once you've done that you just hit the done button and the picture goes automatically up to your Facebook album now another thing you can do with the with the Facebook button is sharing a webpage if we go to pocketnow.com and we are visiting a certain page let's just take a second until it loads and jump into the latest article on the front page and go to the desktop version you will see the Facebook button below and I'm not sure you can see that right here once the page fully loads let's zoom out you will have the chance to post it using your Facebook button whenever your HTC ChaCha recognizes content which can be shared your Facebook button will glow and hopefully we will be able to show you that and there you go it's pulsing it shows you that this page can be shared on your Facebook now let's go to another address here let's try to go to let's say Google and see how it works again you can see that it's glowing whenever a web page which can be shared or another content which can be shared on your Facebook is present it's glowing and once pressing that Facebook button there you go let's go through the settings and see what's new in the settings we have the personalization menu which we have shown you before we have the wireless and networks airplane mode Wi-Fi Bluetooth personal hotspot the hotspot settings VPN mobile network so on and so forth USB tethering cool settings which are basically your settings you'd find on any other Android powered HTC smartphone same here nothing out of the ordinary display with the notification flash because this Mart phone features a small LED right up there in the speaker grille you can select which actions trigger the flash of the LED you got sensor calibration search privacy so on and so forth what's interesting here is that there is a power saver and when your battery is at 15 20 25 30 % according to your choice of the total charge it will automatically do one of these disable background data Wi-Fi Bluetooth save screen brightness down to a custom amount reduce the screen I'm at a timeout time to a custom time disable animations and disable vibration jump right back here we have fastboot you can enable or disable fastboot now what is fastboot HTC has demoed fastboot on several new smartphones including the HTC ChaCha it's basically the of the smartphone to startup boots in a very very good time now let's take a look at the fast mood but what we will do right now is turn off the HTC ChaCha and see how fast it boots back up let's just hold for the menu power off it will power off with a power off animation and once it's off when you hit the power button just it will start up in a matter of seconds now it's completely turned off let's turn it on and there you go because I think a couple of to three maybe four seconds and you're back to a usable normal State HTC Sense is let it lagging a little bit but it will load from the memory and it will take you right back where you left it it will update your widgets and there you have it this was HTC space boots now if he wants you kill the applications in the memory while rebooting you need to restart which will actually close all applications and we start upon the shutdown the power of or shut phone down option does not kill your applications but what we think it does is that it saves the state to either phone memory keeping them hibernated or to the SD card and when you power it back on it just restores let's take a look at the applications which are pre-installed this let's take a look first at the applications which I've downloaded the barcode scanner Facebook Foursquare Google related applications were downloaded by me all the other apps came preloaded with the HTC ChaCha and this one is Google Books which doesn't need any introduction at all it's your books application you've got calculator calendar call history camcorder camera and so on and so forth nothing really out of the ordinary nothing we you might not find on other devices we got an interesting mirror application which will basically fire up the camera application switch to the front-facing VGA camera and it will allow you to see if your hair is okay continuing we got HTC hub HTC likes HTC ChaCha is featured on htcsense.com and if you have an account created or if you create an account you can set up your HTC ChaCha or future HTC status to be used with the HTC Sense comm account we've got the market application we've got the peep which is HTC's Twitter application an application for contacts people we've got Google Talk voice search Wi-Fi hotspot and a transfer application which allows you to transfer your quote stuff from a phone to the other let's take a look at the internet browsing experience on the landscape screen because the landscape is the shape of the Internet you've got basically a close to desktop like display on your smart phone and if we go to Google English and let's try to load up the desktop version classic and let's pinch to zoom out this is what it looks like on the HTC ChaCha now some applications can be taking advantage of the accelerometer and flip the screen to portrait mode which would be kind of awkward using a QWERTY keyboard and let's I think the market application has support for portrait display so this is the market as it looks on the HTC ChaCha stock right here it's basically your landscape marketplace and if you flip it to portrait it will display like this but it's kind of awkward it's small the screen is 2.6 inches and it really doesn't help you plus you cannot type you'd have to switch it back and then it will come back to landscape now let's get back to Internet and see how fast it loads we are over Wi-Fi right now and speed should be really good we got the mobile version pinching completely out will allow you to flip through pages like in tabbed browsing you can add a new page with a new URL let's do that right now and go to the desktop application you can notice straight from the start that it's not in a zoomed out position it's rather zoomed in which makes it impossible to read as it is right now but if you pinch to zoom out you can have a glance at the whole page but the text is very very small so you will not have a decent chance of reading this text let's see if we can zoom in focus in it can't the camera can't even focus on this one if you have great eyes great sights you will have a chance of reading it but if not you will have to double tap and read in a zoomed in position now speed of the internet browser is what she would expect from an Android browser browser the processor is 800 megahertz and we didn't find it to be lacking in speed or in other terms it does its job and it does it pretty well you don't have any lag at all when flipping through the home screens you don't have glad when you are flipping through your applications so the HTC ChaCha really delivers a solid performance and if you are a facebook addict or a social networking addict at that little bit Facebook or Twitter this is the smartphone for you because it's got a great party keyboard the software is fantastic HTC managed to tweak sense for an optimum display on the permanent landscape screen a tnc will have it as the HTC status we like it we recommend it the price is good stay tuned for our full review coming up of the HTC ChaCha for which we thank our friends over at Club that collection came for the week news minute and if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and follow us on pocketnow.com for the review of the HTC ChaCha this was Anton denied thank you very much for watching you