Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is a tour of the application store or as they call it the market for the HTC Hero and really for all Android devices so let's take a look at how it looks and how it functions so we're gonna unlock the screen let's zoom in a little bit so we're going right in to market I have an icon here on the home screen and we're taken into this screen that will show us at the top featured applications we can also go into landscape although it doesn't really make sense to have it in landscape because you get fewer results on the screen at one time and so right off the bat we can choose from a variety of featured application if we don't want a featured application we can just drill into the games category we can go to applications to filter and by specific category we can go to my downloads to see what we've previously downloaded from the Android Marketplace and it all it's also showing if there are updates available for a particular app that you have you can also search for applications so we're gonna go right into just the application screen take a look at the categories we have here again a very endru desk menu system which makes sense because it's on android just you know white text on a black background we can drill into any of the categories let's go to entertainment now what you're gonna find is a lot of the apps on Android I'd say there are more free apps and there are pay apps in the Android Market what you're also going to find is that the Android App Store is less regulated that it than it is on the iPhone you'll find some reviews that may be considered spam that shouldn't be there you'll find some pieces of software in here that are just very junky and crappy and almost sort of advertisements for for other products and services so not as well regulated which is a good thing and a bad thing Apple's iPhone store is very closed and and mysterious in terms of what applications they approve it seems that on the Android Market they approved just about everything anyway so you can sort by popularity or date on the right we get a view of whether it's free whether it's installed how many stars it has and if we want to get one of these let's say Chris Tucker sounds I'm not sure and you would want to get that but let's say you do now what we have here is a short description we have some reviews that we can read in depth we can view more applications we can email the developer we can flag something as inappropriate now to download it it's quite simple you just tap install and it tells you what resources of the phone it will use which is pretty neat so it'll tell you if it's gonna use the GPS or the cellular data or infecting look at call history so you really know what you're dealing with I think this is one way that Android helps to combat getting crappy applications on your device you know before you install it what the program is going to be using on your phone so I'm gonna hit ok and I'm gonna get a new notification on the top of the screen that will show me that something's downloading you see that up there right up there so we can slide down the window shade and see that says download complete and it will proceed to install so we can come back to that later let's take a look at some other applications and it's not sliding up there goes sometimes this device is a little laggy let's go back to let's say finance let's find an application you actually have to pay for so we can talk about what that's like and it's not that easy to find applications that you have to pay for again so much is free on Android here so scrolling down some more some more okay here's something my currency presumably a currency converter that cost Oh point 70 pounds and I think I have to change the regionality on this phone to get it to display in dollars so if I tap on it I am brought to a screen where instead of install it says buy it's gonna take me to another step and I click OK it's gonna take me to another step where it ties into my Google Checkout account and it'll show me all the credit cards that I have associated with this account from here I can choose from a list of credit cards I have I can add a new card if I want to do that and you can buy things right from your device which is great now something to note when you set up the market the application store you have to associate it with a free Google account now if you do this after you go through the first time set up it won't work or didn't work for me and I've heard reports that it didn't work for other people so when you first turn on your hero be sure you associate the Google account immediately you'll have that option it'll say do you want to link this up to a Google account hit yes and do it right from the start and you won't run into any problems so we can go back and take a look at some other applications or we can even search for applications let's search for a Twitter application there are many for four for Android so Twitter and there we go I've already searched for Twitter you can see and we see just the variety of Twitter applications that you can get for the Android operating system and the way that it manages all the downloads through the window shade is just pretty smart it makes it very easy to manage multiple downloads go into applications this is a Chris Tucker sounds and ringtones hilarious okay anyway so one more note after you get the application you can go into the little UP button to find the application and let's find it it would be up here here it is Chris Tucker so we can tap and hold it and drag it to our home screen that way we can access it quickly when we need it and of course there are seven home screens so you can place it on any of those different home screens so that's it for the Android Market for more on Windows Mobile and mobile devices follow us on twitter at slash pocket now tweets that's it for now