Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brannon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is a two-month update on the HTC hd2 I've been using this device as my daily driver for about two months now since the review that we published on pocket now in mid-november and I want to talk a little bit about the experience over the last 60 days talk a little bit about battery life and performance how the hardware is holding up and really how the whole experience has been in using this device of course you can't get this device in the US yet you can import it from Europe it will be on t-mobile in the USA coming up in q1 of 2010 so I can't get us 3G on this unfortunately which means that internet browsing can get a little bit slower a lot slow when I am NOT near Wi-Fi so just that little disclaimer to start things off so the hd2 has always been an amazing device mostly because of its screen and also because of its speed it's got the largest touch screen of any smartphone that you can buy right now 4.3 inches and when people see this device they say wow that screen is massive time and time again without fail that is their response to seeing the HD 2 and it makes a lot of sense and you would think that with such a large screen the device would be huge in the pocket but thanks to a very very thin width here it's not the case it's quite a thin device and most people that pick this up and play with it for a moment say wow this device is really thin it doesn't feel that big which is also quite great HTC did a great job at spreading the screen from edge to edge but you can really appreciate because there's just a small strip of buttons along the bottom which really makes the device all about the screen so let's talk a little bit about the hardware I found the hardware durability to be top-notch perhaps the best I've seen on any mobile device I am not gentle with the hd2 I come home I drop it on the counter I put it in a pocket where there may be a key I don't use a case I don't use a screen protector and yet the hardware shows no sign of wear and tear yet I cannot find a scratch on this HD 2 we're gonna walk around it in the second maybe you can but it's holding up very very well extremely high build on the hd2 which is nice to see and I think that's because it's reusing the device has real materials the back is actually real metal so it doesn't scratch easily it takes a lot to scratch real metal then you have this rubbery coating on the top and the bottom which gives it a good in hand feel and then the front is glass 100% real glass if I get a key and tap against the screen you can hear kind of that pinging sound and another thing about the screen is that it does a really good job at warding off smudges and fingerprints it's got an anti-smudge coating I did not clean the screen of this device before filming the video and you can see that there are hardly any smudges on the screen even though I've made several calls today I've held it up to my greasy face and nothing has happened to the screen in terms of getting filled with fingerprints which really makes a big difference when you're using the device because you're not having to constantly clean it off one thing I did notice is that the buttons here on the bottom have a little bit of wiggle to them which is really not that big of a deal I was afraid that that may cause lint and debris to get trapped behind the buttons but that hasn't happened yet as you can see the buttons are completely clean but what you do discover is that this is actually not five separate buttons it's one panel of buttons speaking of lint and debris another problem with a lot of smartphones out there is that the the edges don't come all the way or the screen doesn't go all the way to the edges so you get debris over here the hd2 is clean very nice okay so let's turn on the device to talk a little bit about the software experience and sort of the battery life I've been getting and the performance I'm running a stock rom this is version 1.4 8 it's pretty much the same ROM that shipped with the device when I got it it's running windows mobile 6.5 build 21 8 6 9 gonna turn on the device and again the response that I get when people look at this phone is wow that screen is huge and it really is it's really an amazingly huge screen and of course it is capacitive touch so it requires the lightest bit of pressure to get it to operate which is very very nice most where all of Windows Mobile devices previous to the HD to use a resistive touch screen meaning you have to use pressure to get it to operate even though the resistive touch screens have gotten a lot better festive touchscreen on the HD 2 is fantastic and it also has multi-touch so if we slide over to say photos and video and we go to a picture and pinch to zoom we get multi-touch touch just like you would get on an iPhone and it's very precise it's very sensitive it works quite well and it also works in the web browser which helps tremendously I've been really enjoying the HTC Sense UI which is really just an evolution of touchflo 3d they gave it a new name to sort of correspond with what they're doing on Android the Sense UI means that you get these colorized icons you get additional panels along the bottom you also get this gorgeous weather animation so the device knows where you are of course and it will show you the weather based on the weather conditions and we can go into what the weather demo to see what these all would look like so when it's raining you get a windshield wiper go across the screen went snowing there's frost on the screen I can tell you that the weather animation doesn't have much of a purpose for me but I like to see it anyway I don't say oh look it's snowing and I look out the window and it's snowing it's not like that it's more so like hey there's this really cool animation going on on my main screen I'm not gonna do much work on my main screen so it's not distracting but it's nice to have that's another nice thing about the homescreen on the HTC hd2 with this version of sense so you get these Quick Links so these three things I do quite often I call my girlfriend I go to Opera Mobile and I enter an email very quick ways to access all of that and of course you can fill this up with many different items here that you can quickly action on which is quite nice something that I found a little bit annoying is that the hd2 does not come with the HTC task manager in the upper right corner that you find on many HTC devices of course you can get this from XD developers but out of the box it doesn't come with that so what you may end up have happening is that lots of programs are being built up in the in the RAM and while the hd2 has a tremendous amount of system ram 448 megabytes which is more than any mobile device that i've ever I've ever tested sometimes the device gets a little bit slow and I think it's because a backward background or tasks is taking up a lot of resources that said on day to day operation the one gigahertz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor is really fast and it doesn't lag like I said there are times where things get slow I've noticed it especially in the Twitter peak application I haven't loaded on a third-party Twitter application because this is because this is quite good for what I need it for but at times Twitter peak does get a little bit slow and it's nice to have the integration into the main screen in terms of battery life I've been getting a good day and a half of battery life out of this just quite remarkable considering how larger the screen is so at the end of the day on average I have about 35% battery life left sometimes around 40 sometimes around 20 depending on how much I used it on that particular day so that's quite good a lot better than the iPhone that's for sure which often times for me when I use the iPhone I can't get through a full day without charging it so in the last two months I've really stayed impressed with the HTC hd2 for me it kind of represents the ideal device it's got amazing hardware extremely high quality hardware with a gorgeous screen enough eye candy but not too much eye candy and the productivity that I really need to be as productive as possible when I am mobile it runs Windows Mobile it can multitask it can run a lot of apps it can be tweaked and hacked to your heart's content and all while looking really really good along the way and staying fast with such a fast processor and a ton of RAM so I'm really happy with the HD - I wish AT&T would get this so that I could use it on AT&T 3G but t-mobile customers should be happy because it's coming to t-mobile in quarter 1 2010 so that was a look in an update on the HD 2 and the experience that we've been having with it that's it for now