Gadgetory

hey guys it's Branham in a min from pocketnow.com and this is a look at the sense user interface on HTC HD Mini this experience is supposed to be very similar to what you'll find on the HD 2 we're going to compare parts of the Sense interface in this video but in the next video we're going to go more in-depth comparing the HD 2 with the HD mini so let's start off by turning on the device and we have this new unboxing which is not nearly as usable as the one you get in standard windows mobile 6.5 it shows you indicators on the bottom and it should come back here about how many text messages you have how many emails you have but you can't action on them like you can in windows mobile 6.5 and 6.5 if you have a new email you can slide on the email it will take you directly into the email application on the HD Mini that is not the case so right off the bat we have the nice weather animation which comes from HTC's newer devices it knows where you are using the the the GPS and it will show you the weather and the conditions in this particular area and of course I can tap on the clock and it shows me the world clock you can also show me my alarm clock over here and it's really interesting to see how these soft keys look down here again this is Windows Mobile 6 point 5 point 3 as a comparison if we look at the hd2 running 6 point 5 point 3 we see that there's a start button in the bottom left corner and even if we tap over to another part of sense the favorite people tab we still get the Start menu down there on the HD Mini you cannot get to the Start menu unless you tap the Hardware button down here which I guess is ok they're trying to save on space a little bit so we zoom in some more if we tap on the conditions were taken to the weather tab we've seen this before and we can flick through different areas let's go back over to the left now we don't get that much information on the screen like we get on the HD 2 on the HD 2 in this particular screen you get to see your three Quick Links your next appointment and everything else that you get to see on the HD Mini but because this is a low resolution screen which by the way really shows in some programs text looks really bad you don't forget to see that much on the screen you have to flick up to see your Quick Links which is a little bit annoying and of course you can you can add and remove them you can add programs contacts or bookmarks which is quite convenient but it's this is stuff that we've seen on other versions of sense it's just not as not as nice because of the lower resolution screen so if we go over to the people tab we have the quick Quick Links here that allows you to quickly dial someone that you contact on a regular basis we have SMS over here which you can flick through normal stuff that we've gotten on the Sense interface and of course we can go to menu and we can action on these right from this screen without having to dig into the the text messaging application for Windows Mobile we can go into email and you can flick through and see the different emails you can action on them right from here so again you don't actually have to go into your email application this is a new feature for sense you don't have to you can spend a lot of your time on the home tabs instead of going into the actual applications we can go into the internet tab and from here we can launch the browser or we can set up these Quick Links to quickly launch a website because this is a capacitive multi-touch screen there it is pinch to zoom in the Opera browser and we're going to talk more about that in another video over here we have the HTC calendar which does an awesome job at showing you your appointments you can flick through to month you go back to agenda view and change things over there here we have the listing of stocks we've seen this before over here we've got some some photos but if you go into landscape nothing happens you don't really get the graphical power that you get on the hd2 so I don't think HTC could do that really fancy animation we're in the in the Photos tab you get that nice transition into the landscape view over here we have the music tab we've seen this a million times you can go into your library and get this nice looking sense interface to go through your artists and your albums and these these icons are actually kind of new for this device I think they're very colorful alright let's go back here we have weather we have twitter integration of course this is HTC's twitter client peach there's just a pretty good job can automatically update you can see your @replies you can see your messages and your favorites right from your home screen without digging in anywhere we have HTC footprints and you can click through I don't think anybody really uses this but it's a nice feature if you travel you can tap on one of these things it flips over it will geotag a picture and you can also set a voice note to it or coordinates or things like that again good if you travel if you don't travel it really isn't something you'll use too much and over here we have some settings we're going to go through the settings in a second but let me open up the the notification area up here so if you tap and hold you get this notification area and new to this version of sense is that you get a link to the task manager within the notification area so right now I can see all the applications I've opened some of these I forgot to close so they're taking up memory like the camera application is using up 4.1 eight megabytes so I'd probably want to close that but the device isn't really slowing down right now it has plenty of RAM for what it is through about three hundred and eighty four megabytes of RAM and you can probably tell by me just using it right now it's not getting slow even though I have several programs open okay so let's go back to the settings here we can personalize some of the things we can personalize the home home screen wallpaper by doing either the wet weather or wallpaper or animated wallpaper they've got some really bright ones here so I'm going to choose this one lockscreen wallpaper we can change that too this is the standard kind of new-age HTC Sense wallpaper we can change the font size so oddly it doesn't seem like cleartype is on at all let me show you why I think that let's go back home you see the new wallpaper if you look at these icons up close they look very blurry or anywhere that you see text in the operating system it's just it's not clear let me bring up a message okay here I brought up a message and text is just not very nice-looking and let me bring this up on the hd2 we can compare them side-by-side and you'll see what I mean I think the H VGA screen is just way too low resolution for a device like this okay so here we are side by side and I'm zoomed out all the way so I did a pinch to zoom out and look at the text here and then look at the text here much darker over here smoother easier on the eyes but on the HD Mini not so much and again these graphics down here also don't look very clear I think that's an issue with the low resolution screen something that you'll have to get used to another place where you really get to see the low resolution screen is up here in the notification area look at the look at the Wi-Fi icon I'll try to focus it can you see the Wi-Fi icon it looks horrible it looks like a device from three or four years ago but that's okay maybe that doesn't matter that much to you let's go through some other areas of the Sense interface so I'm going to go to call history and share we have the sense interface nicely integrated with the contact so we can slide our finger to the right and go to groups call history updates and events it will integrate with Facebook we can see our groups of people we can go to our favorites and so on so very nice integration of this sense interface with the slider along the bottom you get a lot of that throughout a lot of the operating system whether you're in the calendar or in certain other areas of the operating system so that was a look at the Sense interface on the HTC HD Mini I really don't think HTC capture the sense interface found on the hd2 because of this low resolution screen and also because it doesn't have all of the interesting animations that you'll find on the HD to suggest the cool slideshow view and other things like that so it's basically an HD to half of the way there but perhaps that's what HTC was growing forth so that's it for now please give a thumbs up on the video if you liked it and we'll be back soon with more that's it for now