Gadgetory

pocketnow.com and this is a look at the new sense interface for the Android based HTC Desire we've already seen this new sense interface on the HTC legend but the designer makes the experience much better because it has a faster processor more RAM and a much higher resolution screen 800 down and 480 across compared to the legend which is 480 down and 320 across so let's zoom in on the screen a little bit and we're going to talk about these various widgets and various home screens and you get to see how they actually perform we're also going to look at that new leap feature which lets you go from the first home screen all the way to the last within a quick second okay so right now we have a widget configuration that is called travel it's from HTC you can flip to the right and to the left see the various widgets but I'm going to go back to the center here and show you a really cool way widget configuration that I came up with I'm going to go into menu click on scenes and go to best layout ever and it's gonna load up okay and a new background should apply and take a look at this background this is one of the wide wallpapers that you get in Android 2.1 but it's exclusive to HTC devices it's actually called HTC Sense let me show you what it looks like if I go to wallpaper here and live wallpaper you can see that HTC Sense live wallpaper has been added now this does use up a little bit of battery life but I think it's worth it it's just beautiful to have the colors sort of moving in the background and as you slide to the left and slide to the right the colors will change just as if you were to have a static background so let's talk about some of these widgets so that I've put on the scene that I call best layout ever so here at the clock and of course I can tap on the clock and I'll get this beautiful HTC Sense like interface and I can set the alarm and everything like that let's go back I can tap on the weather there to get the weather in my area let's go back home and if I turn off the device turn it back on you should see a weather animation based on the conditions there it goes this comes from the hd2 where you can see clouds or you see raindrops or you see snowflakes depending on what the weather is in your area so it's great that they brought that back to back to their Android devices right here I've got a little widget for my next calendar appointment today's tax day I hope you filed your taxes if you're in the u.s. tapping on that will bring me into my calendar and I can from here add a reminder delete the event or share and so on down here I've got some quick links to things that I things that I do on a regular basis so I like to check the battery use to see what is using my battery life go back home I like to go to pocket now calm I like to call Alanna and I like to use the xda-developers application so just things that are within reach if I go over to the left I'm taken to my text messaging widget and this is really nice looking so I can flip through with my finger I can see the text message I can see the picture of the person if there is one and I can reply right from the screen or go to my text messaging list or even deleted over there in the corner then I can go to this widget which is for Twitter and it's going to take a second to load because I just turned on my device after leaving it off for a little bit and I can flick through and see all of my different tweets or I can tap on where it says Twitter and should we're actually the arrow and it will take me into the Twitter peak application which is HTC's full-fledged Twitter client and I can slide to the right to get this really nice HTC Sense interface I can see my mentions my direct messages and so forth all in beautiful 800 by 480 resolution let's go back and all the way to the left I have a picture carousel here and I can flick through and see all the pictures on my device now let's say I want to get back to the center screen well in older HTC Sense you would have to go to the right like this and then you would get back to the center or you could actually press the home button but let's say I want to jump all the way to the right new gesture called leap you pinch and then you can tap all the way to the right I can do that again and I'll go back to where I was before I find myself using this a lot it's a very very fast way to jump around from home screen to home screen additionally another way to use this is by tapping the home screen when home screen button when you're on the home screen and you get the little leap view okay now that we're back in the center let's go to the right and see the widgets that I have on the right so over here I've gotten mail and I can flick through my mail and see what's going on so the right I have really a lot of different things going on here I've got two stocks that I'm watching up here and right now they're updating and I'll wait a second till they update there they go so I can tap on one of them and I get into the stock screen and the stock screen is made by HTC so it has that fantastic Sense interface built right in also I have quick switches for Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS and I can go into airplane mode and then I have some links to some things that I go to an irregular basis so Facebook and Opera Mini the internet browser camera a cool game called raging thunder and of course Google Maps over there swiping to the right I get favorite people so I can quickly dial and so what I typically do is say I'm on the home screen and I want to quickly dial someone I pinch tap and tap again then i dial the person and over to the right well it looks like we're actually all the way over to the right so that is how I have my widget set up and let's go to one of these and delete one of these widgets and see all of the other widgets to see how they look in this beautiful 800 by 480 resolution somewhat it's happen hold go to widgets then we look for ones that are made by HTC because they're always much better we have the friend stream which will pull from a variety of social networks we have footprints which you've seen before the music widget you've got to get a few choices for this you get this full screen look or the small look let's go full screen and I can press play it plays music if I tap on the album I I'm taken into the extended HTC music application which is really fantastic it has album art you can go over to the the library view here and get again this fantastic Sense interface congruent throughout the entire operating system so I'm going to go back to the music widget and delete it and let's see what else will we see what else we have here all of these widgets are the same that you get on the HTC legend so you've probably seen these before if you seen the ledge in the video we can add a stock's widget Twitter we can add one just for weather and we can add one of three different widget styles kind of medium-sized very small or large let's go with the the medium-sized and current location so it knows where you are and you can tap it and drag it around really a fantastic array of widgets and I love the way that you can pinch to go to any of this of the screens and as you can see from using these widgets the device is not slowing down something that I found on the legend to be the case is that after adding so many widgets the device would get quite slow but that is not the case on this device so I think that the story here is that the widget experience is so good on the HTC Desire that I really don't go into applications anymore but rarely the widgets are so functional so useful and so well performing that I spend all of my time on these home screens which means that I can zip around extremely fast with a huge level of ease so coming up soon we're going to talk about the web browsing experience compared it to the iPhone and to the HTC hd2 if you like this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and we'll be back soon with more on the HTC Desire that's it for now