Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocket now calm and this is a further look at software on the HTC HD Mini in this video we're going to compare the HD Mini with its big brother the hd2 we're going to talk about web browsing and we're also going to talk about third-party applications and see how they look on this h vga resolution display coming up in the full review on pocketnow.com we're going to talk about battery life performance call quality all those sorts of things but right now let's get a little bit more into the software aspect of the HD Mini so I'm going to unlock the screen and let's bring over the hd2 here both of these are running windows mobile 6.5 point 3 that was a custom lock screen that you just saw here so let's start off on the home screen on the home screen between the two devices you get more information here on the hd2 you can access to your Quick Links whereas on the HD Mini because of the lower resolution screen you have to flick upwards to see any quick links at all let's go over to the people tab which looks pretty much the same you get to see two and a half rows of pictures over here it's kind of two and a quarter so not as much information of course you can expect that with a screen that is much much higher resolution over here on the hd2 if we go into email we get to see the same email screen although on the hd2 you get to see more screen information from here of course on both devices we can delete the messages or reply right from the screen without actually having to drill into the email application over here on the internet tab the same exact screen we can set quick tiles to quickly go to a certain website or we can search Google right from the top let's go over to the calendar view and here we are on the same day I'm going to go out to month you calendars look very much similar between the hd2 and the HD menu which is nice the HTC calendar is really brilliantly put together and it keeps you from going into the ugly windows mobile calendar which I don't even think you can get to anymore because HTC is covered up with this beautiful sense interface let's go to the stocks tab very similar stock stab a slightly newer version here on the hd2 we can tap on one of these in particular and you get a lot more on the screen we can tap to update data and there it goes and on the hd2 we should be able to go into doesn't look like we can go into landscape actually on on either device we can go into landscape so let's go back but here in photos we can flick our pictures upward very smooth animation on both devices but where things get a little bit different is that on hd2 you can rotate and get this beautiful animation but on the HD Mini it it doesn't do that so you have to stay in this portrait view and you can't get into this really nice-looking landscape view speaking of pictures let's go to a picture and do some pinch to zoom because both of these devices have multitouch maybe that's not the best picture it doesn't look to be high resolution enough let's go over to the scene ok great so pinch to zoom works very well on the hd2 very precise on the HD Mini for some reason it's very slow and you can probably see what I mean let me do that again on the hd2 nice and precise and on the HD Mini it's a little bit slower it's not as sensitive and I think they do that because the screen is smaller but it takes more finger movement to get the pictures to move it almost feels kind of numb so let's go back and that will flip over and press the back button there ok let's go into weather and so I'm gonna go to weather here and weather here and it is not picking up my location so I'm going to real quick add a location let's go to Philadelphia ok there we go and flick upwards ok so here's Philadelphia on both devices looks pretty much the same things are smaller on the hd2 you have to squint a little bit to see the high and low temperatures but basically the animations are the same it actually looks like the graphics have been updated just a little bit here on the HD Mini so let's go over to the music tab and take a look at what we have there and says no music found will go into library and see how they differ in terms of this library again they've updated sense a little bit so now these are colored really nice looking icons over here on this older version of windows mobile 6.5 point 3 you really don't get those colorful icons let's go back ok let's continue down let's go to footprints something that I really don't think many people use and just to get an idea of how they compare in terms of graphical power on the hd2 very smooth animation and on the HD Mini you just saw it right there kind of choppy I'm actually surprised it was that shop it usually it's a little bit smoother than that so let me go back here and and it looks like it's actually unresponsive this happens actually more than you would then you would hope on the HD Mini it freezes up ok there it goes it's just responded probably didn't help that I was tapping the screen a million times but so here it comes so I'm going to go back over to footprints something is is slowing down this device so I'm going to tap and hold up here really quickly go to the task manager so overall compared to the hd2 it's easy to see how the HD Mini is sort of a lite version of the hd2 it's lacking in sort of the power the screen resolution isn't even close to what you get on the hd2 it is a similar experience at the end of the day if somebody wants to have a lower priced device like the hd2 that is smaller and and perhaps not as as flashy so let's go on to the next thing let's talk about web browsing on the HD Mini I'm going to zoom in on the screen a little bit and let's slide over to the the internet tab and I'm going to tap on pocket now and it's going to load up pocket now calm right in the browser and we're going to see how it performs okay so it's still going while it's loading it looks like it just sort of oh it finished right there I'm going to rotate to landscape and takes a little bit of time not very fast here and we can pan around very smooth we can do the capacitive pinch to zoom but again it feels kind of numb as if they got the algorithm wrong that determines how much to zoom in depending on how much how wide your fingers are so here it is here's pocketnow.com let me load it up on another device and we can do a speed comparison once we click on one of these permalinks so here we are on the iphone this is actually beta software this is iphone four point oh so it's very likely that it may not be as fast as it normally is which would be beneficial to to the HD Mini here so here it comes and again we can pinch to zoom we can pinch to zoom smoother on the iPhone but it's happening SAT the exact same time after this is done loading reaction I'm going to force it to stop and see which one wins they're both on the same Wi-Fi network right now so you can tell that the screen on the HD Mini is actually crisper and clearer I've always found the screen on the iPhone any kind of grain though and here they go and the iphone has finished it looks like looks like the the HD Mini has over all loaded the page but it's still trying to get something there and we can pinch and move around on the screen like so let's go to another website on the HD Mini let's go to engadget.com and by the way in a second we're going to talk about the keyboard usage okay here it comes this is an older version of opera mobile this is properly version 9 or so and if you get the newest version of opera mobile 10 it as opera turbo on it which increase increases or decreases page load times so if you have an HD Mini and you want to get some better performance definitely check that out so here we are on engadget still loading but it's loaded for the most part we can go into landscape that goes and scrolling is pretty smooth we can you know double tap to zoom in it reflows the column the text looks good and we can zoom out so overall a pleasant browsing experience on the HD mini the small screen makes it difficult to really have precise navigation and against that pinch to zoom algorithm doesn't seem to be quite perfected yet so I'm going to get out of this okay so let's talk about keyboard the text entry on the HD mini so we're going to go into we're going to go into Microsoft Office and click on word mobile okay so here we are we've the standard HTC keyboard but the story here is that the screen is a lot smaller so it's not as easy to use so I'm going to try to type the quick brown fox okay so pretty accurate the quick brown fix I didn't quite get everything there you can actually change the language on the fly which is sort of new for the HTC keyboards between French Dutch and some other ones like Italian hear something else that is new for this keyboard is that the d-pad arrows are gone you have to tap and hold this to get the d-pad up and it kind of appears above the keyboard now we do have a landscape keyboard which is a little bit better okay so if i go into landscape okay here it is here we get the landscape keyboard but you really have no room to see what you're typing it's so small because the screen is such low resolution let me do a test here the quick brown fox so again relatively precise but it's not the best keyboard in the world because of the small screen and the low resolution on the display so now let's talk about third-party applications now that you've seen the comparisons with the hd2 and some web browsing beautiful weather animation there by the way so I'm going into the start menu now and you can see sort of the included programs on here very standard stuff I'll talk about the YouTube application in a minute I've installed some apps on here such as pocket informant which is one of the best ways to to experience a different kind of calendar on your device i installed the trial and i'm just click no and the point of me showing you this is that for some reason even though pocket informant was not made for the screen resolution it works we can go to the different views and I've been in this program for a while and everything seems to work on the screen so let's get out of here i'm going to show you in a situation where it doesn't work so i loaded on here skyfire which in our test is the fastest mobile browser for windows phone and watch what happens you can see off the bat that it's not formatted for this kind of screen and then i'm going to wait a second and you're going to see an error message pop up out of memory I'm not sure if this is because it's confused with the screen resolution or because the HD Mini just can't handle it doesn't make much sense because sky fireworks on really any devices but it's a shame that you can't use skyfire on the HD Mini and speaking of third party applications i loaded on spb mobile shell which is the award-winning interface replacement for windows mobile watch what happens when I go back to the home screen this is mobile shell it just doesn't work on the screen in fact it is completely broken so you can't use mobile shell on this resolution screen unfortunately the third party application story on the HD Mini is not good there are several applications that I've tried that just don't work because of this weird 480 x 320 display so that was another look at the HTC HD Mini we've got a lot more coming up in the full review on pocketnow.com if you want an HD many of your own you can get one right now at clove co uk they ship worldwide and they have a stock that they just received this week actually that's it for now