Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon diamond from pocketnow.com and in this video we're going to talk about the multi-touch capability of the HTC hd2 we're also going to talk about how the capacitive screen works in Windows Mobile an operating system that wasn't designed for use with a capacitive screen it was made for use with a stylus so let's go through a few programs and sort of talk about the implementation of multi-touch and the capacitive the screen as mentioned in previous videos the screen sensitivity is very high it's definitely higher than the touch pro2 not as high as the iPhone which is okay it still is very very sensitive so let's go into the notes application the real difference here is that the screen is made out of glass so it has a very firm feel to it which is much better than the squishy kind of feel that you get on a resistive touchscreen display so let's go to new we still have the capability to write on the screen so I can say hello but because you're not using a stylus because capacitive screens don't respond to us a stylus you can't be very precise in writing so you don't have the capability now for handwriting recognition throughout the entire operating system HTC has stripped this out and it makes sense but it's nice that you can still write on the screen and the notes application and other programs if you're doing some artwork or some drafting or something like that let's go into another program that you probably know very well File Explorer ok and what's interesting is that everything just works even though it was made for a resistive screen so if we tap on this down arrow we can switch between my device and windows very easily as if we had our finger was a stylus so it works very well a few modifications have been made so the side scroll bar is now thinner but what's kind of cool and what HTC has done is if you want to grab the scroll bar it's kind of difficult because it's so small but if you take your thumb and bring it to the side you get this thumb sized scroll bar that you can grab on to to go faster down the page which is great if you have a really long screen like this instead of having them you know do 10 flicks you can just kind of tap and hold on the side grab the little handle and go all the way down to the bottom of the screen so this works in all programs let's talk about the on-screen keyboard so we're gonna go into a new email message okay so here we are in a new email message and of course we get this great HTC onscreen keyboard very familiar it's from all of the other HTC devices but it feels a lot better because you have more room to work with and the sensitivity of the screen is so great that it's really easy to to type so of course we can have this landscape keyboard or actually this is portrait and we can flip over and we can bring up this larger landscape keyboard frankly I prefer the portrait keyboard because this requires a lot of thumb travel this will probably good for people with large hands let me just show you a little test right now we're on t9 so so still pretty good and I spelled that wrong but of course I like this keyboard better this is a test and of course it takes a little practice like any on-screen keyboard but after some practice it feels quite good by default there's haptic feedback so you get a little bit of a buzz of vibration when you use the keyboard I turn that off to save a little bit on battery life and I don't really find it necessary to have that vibration feedback if we tap and hold on the keyboard options we don't have that many choices we have the phone keypad which is sort of the t9 style which is back we thought that this may not be present on HD 2 so we can kind of do some people are really good at t9 so this would be good for them we can tap and hold and go to sort of the compact QWERTY which is a shirt type keyword that you would get let's say blackberry pearl that may also save on finger travel a little bit but we don't get is the transcriber which is the option that lets you write on the screen and have it recognize your your handwriting because obviously this device doesn't use a stylus and you would need one to get that to work so that the on-screen keyboard options are fantastic you can really type fast I'd say it's as good as the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone possibly better because it's larger and people with larger hands may really appreciate having that so let's go through some other programs that you may be familiar with to see how they interact with the capacitive display so I'm gonna hit No and let's go into four-player which is of course a one of the best video players for Windows Mobile plays a variety of formats right now we are looking at an episode of The Office but let me just show you what kind of the the interface is like so I am going through this interface as if I had a stylus but I don't need a stylus cuz the screen knows where I'm tapping it's very it's very smart and almost all of the time I don't have to tap twice when you get to a little small area on the screen once in a while you have to tap twice to get it to recognize and video quality is amazing so this is a high definition episode of the office and the whole interface works well now the pinch to zoom works in a lot of different applications which is pretty great so Adobe Reader or Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word really the whole Microsoft Office suite works with multi-touch I'll show you a few areas and I'll put a whole list up on pocketnow.com of where they work so if we're an Excel spreadsheet and we want to zoom out a little bit we pinch it does kind of a weird animation but it's it's quite helpful to be able to do this typically if you want to change the view and zoom out a little bit you've got to go into view and zoom and and something like that but now you can just pinch to zoom it's much more much more easy to sort of navigate through an Excel spreadsheet and then if we go into word mobile you'll see that that will also work to adjust the text size so go into this is a test and if I pinch to zoom the text gets bigger it zooms in it magnifies really great and we get the same functionality in Outlook Mobile so let's get into that okay so here we are in an email and we can pinch to zoom to make the text bigger it will reflow this is really great if you're walking down the street for example and you want to have the text bigger so you can kind of keep the device a few feet away from your face then when you get back to the office you want to see more on the screen at one time you can zoom back out and have it be once again so very handy feature and this works in all the messaging applications also the pinch-to-zoom will work in Google Maps mobile so let's go to that and by the way there's a really interesting way the Google Maps mobile interfaces with the digital compass and we're going to talk about that in a future video okay so here we are in Google Maps mobile and we can pinch to zoom and it's very precise which is great right now we're over edged so it's a little bit slow to rerender the screen but it works a lot better I think then pressing the plus button on the bottom of the screen this way you can pinpoint a specific area on the screen and sort sort of pinch right in to zoom and to get there so that was a look at the capacitive multi-touch capability of the hd2 if you have a lot of third-party apps that you use you can rest assured that the capacitive screen and almost all cases works flawlessly as if you are using a resistive touchscreen the only times when you have some trouble is when you're trying to check off very small items I'll give you an example so let's go into the set the settings menu we're going to go into the standard windows mobile settings and let's go to let's go to today so for example if you had a stylus to tap on this button that says items down here would be very easy you'd be able to tap it and it's very precise but because you're using your finger which is a little bit thicker sometimes you may have to tap a few times to be a little bit more careful to get in that area but it's well optimized beyond that to let you sort of tap along so a lot more coming up on the HTC hd2 be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to see the videos as they occur pocket now video on YouTube that's it for now