Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe for pocketnow.com and a while ago we did a review first boot an initial impressions video on the HTC Desire HD and it just came out miserably the reason behind that is the screen on the desire HD is just so ridiculously reflective that it really didn't matter what kind of lighting setup I tried to throw at it it always had reflections now a lot of that was my fault in the way that I typically like my videos and some of that was a new tripod set up that I had going on that I didn't realize was causing a problem until after so what I'd like to do is go back and show you again the initial first boot and so I've gone ahead and factory reset the phone and let's go ahead and look at that now okay so what I'm done is I've gone ahead and done a factory reset on the HTC Desire HD and hit the power button which is up here at the top of the phone and this is the initial boot first of all you get a field of light with the HTC logo in the middle and a vibration to tell you that the phone is powering up from there you get the HTC quietly brilliant animation and I'm going to call that their trademark sound and then it'll wait on this screen for a few seconds now while you're doing this remember that first boots and initial boots usually take longer than other boots and of course we're not talking about just sleeping the phone by hitting the power button and turning the screen off we're talking about actually physically powering it down like you do if you remove the battery or if you completely ran out of power and had to reboot the phone from a cold State so this screen right here usually stays for about 30 to 45 seconds again depending on when you recently booted it up now this phone does include something called fastboot on in all honesty I didn't see much with that I'll see if I can show you something here regarding that fastboot where basically it writes the current state into memory so it can boot up faster it's kind of like a hibernation rather than a boot but again I didn't see much difference here like some other people have been noticing so we've gone ahead and got to our lock screen and I don't have my sim card in it at this time so let's unlock this and we're back to the HTC logo screen which is a little bit unusual for an initial boot sequence you'd expect once you unlock to go right into your into your desktop and be able to look at your launcher screens this will stay here for another several seconds and from that point it will start to paint the desktop for us okay so what we've got is the setup and configuration screen this is not an American phone this is a European and an asia-pacific phone so you don't have American English in the list that's okay i can understand queen's english so we're going to select english united kingdom and say next okay it tells you how to remove the backplate and how to put the sim in which is really neat that you know the phone is telling you this is how you do it just in case you don't know because this is a different way of of a phone manufacturer doing it I haven't seen anyone do that partial removal of the the back with a cover tells you how to use the on-screen keyboard and the keyboard that it comes with is the HTC ime which is a very nice keyboard it's not quite as nice as skype which the phone does not ship with but it is a little bit nicer than the stock android keyboard we'll skip that tutorial it wants me to transfer my data via bluetooth so that I if I've got an older phone i can transfer over contacts and texts and whatnot via bluetooth so i can start using this phone right away that's a very nice thing that i haven't seen in any other phones where it says hey this is your new phone let's get the stuff off of your old phone to make things easier next it wants me to set up an intricate internet connection i want to be able to use my mobile network or Wi-Fi now over here I'm limited to edge only when I have a sim in because of the bands that the phone uses whether you're on t-mobile or AT&T or a similar carrier that uses the same bands you're only going to get edge not 3g unless you are over in Europe or or Asia or England or somewhere over there has those different bands where you go ahead and say next okay how do we want to sync well we want it to automatically sync rather than manually sync which is the default will say next and then ask me if I want to set up a Wi-Fi network and very quickly finds my network right here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and take this off camera really fast and type in that access key now the keyboard that it comes with lets you do both if I can type it lets you do both letters and numbers on the same keyboard which is really nice you don't have to switch between views to be able to do it it does however take a little bit more time because you have to long press on the key to be able to make it be a number instead of a letter and I think I got that right and it says it's connecting and you have no idea how hard it is to type that in while also talking now I've got a check mark over here if I wanted to add other networks I can do that at the same point but we're good I'm going to say next I'm going to choose to let Google know my location next and if I wanted to set up an HTC Sense account I could now HTC Sense is not only the UI but there's also a website now called HTC Sense calm which is really kind of cool it's a way to help unify all of your contacts whether their Facebook Twitter of course you're your google contacts and any other context that you get on your phone and synchronize their information all together by linking them through this common service it's really easy to set up an account and there's lots of other stuff that that the website does including the ability to locate your phone and whatnot so it's really kind of cool to see HTC getting into the services industry rather than just the the handset industry so kind of neat i'm going to skip the setup for right now and continue on through the process at this point i can set up my google account my exchange account or some other email account again we'll skip that because you've seen that before it wants me to linked with facebook flickr and or twitter very easy to do that and then at this point because i don't have a sim in here it wasn't able to get the date and time and time zone from my carrier so it wants me to manually provide that we're just going to accept the default and finish that that would all be automatic if your carrier provides that and i don't know of a carrier that that doesn't provide that service anymore so what it's doing is it's taking that information and the reason why you go through that first and foremost rather than getting the desktop right away is sense is very very much a social interface if you will and this is kind of dark on screen for you so let's go ahead and bump the display all the way up to maximum so you can see a little bit better say ok on the m back home so what do I mean by a social thing well you've got all these really cool widgets and I wish that these widgets were available for for the stock launcher other people are trying to do that but HTC really has an advantage with having their sense UI being the launcher in that they can have these widgets that are scrollable you can scroll up and down it's not just a static view or a timed rotation view you can actually scroll through them and those of you who have seen since you I in the past know what I'm talking about so you can do stuff like friend stream now this is a stream of all of your friends activities from all the networks that you have subscribed you can easily go over and launch into the full app and see everything you've got there I don't have anything so of course it wants me to sign in we'll just go back away from that here you've got your text message widget it's just that unfortunately i don't use text messaging i use google voice for text messaging and it does not tie in with that so usually remove that widget loading up whether this is probably one of the cooler things about the device you've got this weather thing it knows where I am based on my geolocation and it says and then of course this is all Celsius it knows what my weather is what the forecast is and I can refresh it from there but it also exposes that right here on the flip clock and this flip animation is really cool i love it again sense UI has just lots of spit and polish that i really like but when you get weather changes you'll have weather animating across the screen and it's kind of really cool it gets right in your face and lets you know hey you've got some weather going on it's starting to rain or starting to get windy or whatever so that you're prepared when you go out of that office building outside you know what kind of whether to expect so kind of cool so overall not bad let me show you really quick the way that you add widgets because I think sense UI does a really good job of this to or anything not just widgets let's go ahead and add the calculator so I opened up the drawer which is this button over here I'm going to long press on calculator and now if you look it's got this little green outline around where I can drop it so let's go ahead and put that there and now let's put a widget in and we'll just you know add a normal widget and in this case hey how about a calculator widget and we'll select that one I don't have enough room on the screen so let's select a smaller one how about the FM radio widget again that one's too big see what else we can find here we go let's choose the market widget and it goes up there now when you press and move around can you see that that great out area around the screen that shows you what part of the screen is occupied by a widget and it lets you know I can't drop it over here because great out so it's kind of nice to help you know where you can drop widgets and if you're not familiar with with Android or or or making screens look the way that you want them to this is a really really nice user interface element to to show people hey this is how you do it