Gadgetory

hey guys it's bran a minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the software review of the HTC Desire Z the one that happens to have the bands necessary to do AT&T 3g let's get to it now you heard me mention that this has AT&T 3g benz it's not sold over the AT&T network you can actually buy unlocked from negri electronics it's actually the bell canada version which happens to have the same 3g bands as AT&T here in the united states so it works very well over AT&T network i might add getting about 2.6 megabits per second down on hsdpa and about 1.6 megabits per second up so let's talk about the software we're not going to talk about the hardware the hardware is identical to the HTC g2 that is on t-mobile so we've got the z10 Z hinge here and they caught a Z hinge because if you look at it like this you can sort of see how there's a Z design and something that's very interesting about this hinge design is that there are two supports here but on the other side there's only one support that is because when you open up the desire z you're probably going to be using your right thumb to flick up the screen and so it needs a little bit of extra support over there this mechanism is really fun to open it's very different than what you get on side say an HTC touch pro2 or any other device out there with a slide-out keyboard it's just a lot of fun to pop this keyboard open to reveal this nice court to keyboard now this keyboard isn't as good as the one on the touch pro two it looks very similar but the keys are smaller the feel of the keyboard is quite nice they have kind of a softness to them I think they're made out of a rubbery material and they've good tactile feedback the keys are large enough to where someone with with big hands won't find a an issue with using this keyboard so a very good keyboard and of course you have the on-screen keyboard too but it's nice to have this physical hardware keyboard for long emails but then this is not a hardware of you as a software review and we're going to talk about software in this video because the t-mobile g2 didn't have the new HTC Sense interface it comes with a stock installation of android 2.2 so we're going to cover all of those new things that HTC has brought to the table in the latest version of HTC Sense okay so there's a lot to cover starting with the notification tray if you pull down the notification tray you'll see immediately then it's been redesigned for this version of HTC Sense we actually get a little row of icons here that will allow you to jump in and out of applications recently used it's basically the same thing as tapping and holding the home button and getting the recent apps button but it's just another way to sort of access that list of items now of course you have the leap feature that was present in the last version of HTC Sense lets you zoom out and see all of your home screens in a quick view now what is different about this version of cents compared to the last generation version of sense that it works in landscape and it actually works very well everything rearranges within about one second it's a little bit slow in my opinion but you'll see that if you add a variety of widgets they're all formatted for landscape now which is quite nice and leap works in this view as well so a very nice way to jump around from home screen to home screen now the whole interface has been just redesigned a little bit right off the bat you can see that the buttons down here look a little bit different if we tap on this button in the quarter this is the personalized button and there's a lot of things that we can do here that you couldn't do in a previous version of HTC Sense for example you can choose different skins so right now we're on the music lover skin we've got the metal skin it changes the bottom bar it also changes the slider in various applications this one's really cool blackboard it's actually a very informal theme it changes all the system fonts we have wood and we have slate and you can get more through the HTC hub application so let's actually apply this would skin looks pretty cool changes the background it changes the notification tray a lot of complaints that people have with HTC sentences that you can't customize of this that much but now you can with the skins which are really nice so let's go back into this personalized menu and see what else we can do here so this is categorized by the different ways that you can customize your device you can personalize the scene wallpaper or skin you can add widgets or apps shortcuts or folders to your home screen then you have a wide variety of personalization settings for sound so you can change your ringtone fication sound in your alarm HTC has put all of the personalization components of HTC Sense within this nice handy screen so it's very good to use so let's go back to the home screen and let's add some widgets see what kind of widgets they have in this newest version of sense when to dive back into the personalized screen go to widgets you're going to see a lot of familiar which 'it's here that came on previous HTC devices with the sense interface we've got bookmarks calendar but you know there's a really cool thing that you can do here that is new that allows you to browse through all of the widgets in a very nice screen so I'm going to click browse all widgets and what I can do now is just swipe through one at a time and see what every widget looks like in this full screen preview you want a calculator you can select it see details and as you can see there are 68 widgets obviously you can add more but this is a really cool way to just go through and see what all of the choices look like for your HTC device so we're going to choose this one here nice full screen FM radio and here it is on this screen and we're going to delete it so let's go back into the personalized menu and see if there's anything else there that we want to show off so a lot of these widgets are carryovers from previous versions of sense some are new like the HTC likes widget which will show you an apple recommendation which is cool because every day it changes there's also a neat word of the day widget which I actually don't think is new but it is made by HTC so you can select that and every day you'll get a new word of the day updated automatically practice your your vocabulary a little bit so let's throw this away now so the skin that you have selected will impact how things look in a lot of other programs so if for example we go to the music player over here we'll see that everything is skinned here if we go into the sort of broken down view these touchflo 3d if you remember how that looked at the slider this has all been skinned for this particular skin that we've selected the wood theme okay now let's take a look at this HTC hub this phone will integrate with HTC Sense calm and we showed you this in the previous video allows you to remotely turn off your phone lock it it allows you to find your phone on a map if you are hooked up to HTC Sense calm which is free it's a great service that really allows you to get more out of your phone and HTC hub kind of ties into that because you have to log in with your HTC Sense calm account and from here we can download new widgets wallpapers scenes let's go into wallpapers this is a great way to get more person personalized stuff for your device so let's go to abstract and browse through the gallery of abstract we're pulling this down from HTC Sense calm right now and it's kind of a cover flow like display we can even go into a landscape view here and it reflows very nicely and you can download these right to your device and as if you are downloading from the marketplace you get a little indicator over here that shows you the abstract 10 5 is complete so let's go back and check out HTC hub a little bit more here so also from here you can get sound sets ringtones notification sound so he can really personalize your device let's go into that application called HTC likes because that has a really cool way of showing you new items to download that may be of interest here it is so this gives you a bunch of different options down here we can go into featured most popular friends comments there's actually a social feature to this Sophie of someone else if you know somebody else that is using a desire HD or a desire z they can send your recommendations of apps to download but it's not you can flip through the featured applications with again this beautiful cover slow-like design it shows you some really cool key applications that actually tie into the android market so let's say we want to download dropbox actually got a text message there so i'm going to click install and it's going to pull it from the android market here i'm in the android market i can click install and proceed to get it that way let's go back to the HTC likes application and what school is over here in the my downloads section it actually synchronizes with the market like the other panels do so you can see all the apps that you've downloaded to your phone within this nice app management and from here you can jump to HTC hub to get more add-ons go to the android market you can see some apps that are featured by HTC so a really cool way to discover applications every device that has the new version of HTC Sense gets this now one of the major downsides of this device is that it has an 800 megahertz processor if it was running the stock default installation of android 2.2 that would it be a problem in fact the g2 has the same processor and is running stock android and it's fast but the desire z can be slow at times I think the HTC Sense interface is taking up a lot of system resources this device should have had a 1 gigahertz processor but instead it has an 800 megahertz processor probably the save on battery but things are a little bit slower than then you would expect on an Android device that is brand-new it's not too bad and I'm sure there's going to be a way to remove sense from this device in the future but just something to be aware of if you're getting this device so overall HTC has done an awesome job with upgrading the new version of sense here we have skins and themes and different ways to personalize your device and of course it integrates very well with HTC Sense calm so that you can remotely manage your device if you're looking for the desire z and you want it on AT&T again you can get that Bell Canada version from negri electronics com it works very well on TNT's 3g network you see here's an example of where things are a little bit slow but of course it takes a minute for the screen to redraw so overall a very powerful device if you like Android and you want to have this really great keyboard hopefully some software modifications will come out on the development sites to allow you to lean things up a bit so that it runs nice and speedy if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now