Gadgetory

hey guys its brand a minimun from pocket now calm and in this video we're going to take a look at the HTC heros home screen set up with the widgets now this isn't too dissimilar from the widgets that you find on the omnia two that we recently reviewed so we've multiple home screens we can swipe to the right and swipe to the right again we have three home screens in this case to which we can add a variety of widgets we can add time widgets and launcher widgets and stock widgets and weather widgets all sorts of things and of course you can add new widgets to this area you can even download new ones it's a very similar thing to how it works on the HTC hero so let me zoom in a little bit and we're going to go through this so on the HTC hero there are seven home screens which is actually a little bit too many in my opinion the reason I say it's too many is because if you want to get to the one all the way to the right you have to slide your finger to the right to the right to the right and here we are there's no way to quickly jump over to the right the trackball helps a little bit but again you have to swipe swipe swipe swipe and then you're over to the left it's a little bit cumbersome and as we're going to find out throughout this video and future videos the HTC hero is slightly lacking in the hardware department it needs a faster processor or more RAM when you start to add a lot of widgets things get a little bit slow anyway let's take a look at the widgets that we have here so right now I have a next appointment widget with a dual clock widget and some icons here to launch programs now we can move any of these widgets around although we're out of space the way you do that is you tap and hold and you actually get to see where you can possibly move a widget and that helps you keep everything aligned very Square and flush now if I tap and hold mail I'll have an open slot over here if I remove this new a point the next appointment widget I'll open up a variety big swath of space up here where I can place various icons and as you saw earlier if you want to remove the nikon you just bring it down here to remove and it goes away now to add a widget there are two ways to add widget actually you can just hit + button down here or tap and hold on the home screen and then we get a variety of widgets that we can choose from and we're going to go through all of those in a minute but first I want to talk about scenes so if you press the menu button you get something that's called scenes and later we're going to go through the whole Android interface to explain exactly how the Android interface works compared to windows mobile and other mobile platforms now a scene is a pre-configured set of widgets you've won called social which puts for example Twitter on your second screen so you can easily send a tweet there's one called travel which has a variety of ways to keep track of how the weather is in various cities and what time it is in various cities you have clean slate which is obviously clean here is custom one this is one that I particularly like and it's I like it a lot because it's very clean it gives me access to only the things that I need to see so the screen screen dims a little bit as it loads my particular custom home screen so this is the home screen setup that i really like i get a small clock at the top not too big i get some icons of things that i want to see next appointment and a battery meter which is actually an addition that i downloaded from the android marketplace which I'll talk about later to the right there is nothing I like to keep it clean and actually it's to the left and to the right I have the the current weather and what's really great about the HTC hero is that it knows what city I'm in without actually putting it in so if I travel to Philadelphia it will say Philadelphia the current temperature if I travel to New York City it will say New York City and the current temperature if you tap on that widget you will get a forecast for that particular city and for those of you that use Windows Mobile you'll probably think this is familiar this is the same weather tab that you get on the HTC touch HD HTC touch pro2 touch diamond2 there's a lot of elements taken from the windows mobile touchflo interface put on to the HTC hero in fact if you open up a task manager it's a third party application on the hero the home screen interface is referred to as touchflo so there you have it so I want to press the back button then we have another set of shortcuts over here to dial favorite people so I can tap on their name to get there to call their phone here I have a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth switch a link to camera but go over to the right nothing is there because again I like to keep it very clean so let's start customizing a panel let's say we want to add certain things to this panel I'm going to click the plus button to bring up the list of widgets now we can bring up a list of shortcuts we can take a bookmark that comes right from the the web browser on the hero so we can put a link to Google and there it is quite simply and we can go back to the plus do a shortcut to say Google Mail label or a certain mail inbox if you have multiple email accounts configured you can also link to a person in your contacts list or to a program is safe there's a program that use on a regular basis let's say you use the program called backgrounds a lot and backgrounds is a really cool program we're going to go through it later that lets you change all of the backgrounds it comes pre-configured with a ton of great-looking themes that you can have so let's go into the next item HTC widgets this is the widgets that HTC has created that are a little bit different than what you get on say a g1 so we can have this bookmarks widget which i think is actually kind of a cpu intensive thing that i wouldn't want to have on and there are two visual styles just a list or very iconic based bookmark selection so we can place that on the screen and it says no space on the screen drag to another screen to place and see bring it up sometimes it's hard to tell it to go over to the next screen here it goes i rolled the trackball and here it is this is a list of bookmarks that I've got on my device but let me take this off and remove it back to the screen HTC widgets we can do a calendar the calendar is really fantastic actually and you can change the style from this standard calendar it looks very similar to what you find on touchflo 3d or even the iPhone or we can go to simply the next appointment item which is really really handy to have so you know where you're supposed to be so I'm going to go with the calendar and again it needs more space so I'm going to drop it right here and it's a really great calendar application because I can click on a certain day and it will bring up what's happening it'll also give me the weather for my particular area just like you get on again touchflo 3d you get this in the calendar tab okay so let's throw this away and go back to the list then you have clock and there's a variety of clocks you can choose let me show you we use the trackball to go over this is very very touch flo 3d looking i'm sure you'll recognize that began dual clock or a very artistic clock kind of cartoonish and of course as with any of the widgets you can just move them around on screen let's do the dual clock and we are going to put put it down here and we'll remove it so we're not going to go through every single widget I just want to show you kind of the cool ones that are left so wave footprints which is another feature from windows mobile devices we've mail which is another feature from windows mobile devices that lets you flick through your mail messages just like you get in touch flo 3d and they're actually a few different versions of this this particular one lets you flick through like so we're going to go back messages music people which you've already seen it lets you let you look through favorite people photo album again comes from touchflo 3d you can flick through pictures photo frame really cool idea with photo frame what you can do is you can take a picture from your photo gallery and basically have a photo of say you know your your friend or your spouse or whatever what have you on your main screen so i don't really have that many pictures on here but i'm going to take the first one that i see i have no idea what this is and you can also resize it drop it and now you have a little picture frame right on your home screen so that you always see the picture of your spouse when you turn on your phone not sure if you want to have that but if you do that has that option really interesting widget and let's go back down see what else we have we can do a search we can do settings we can choose any setting really from this list to put on to the home screen so with one touch you can turn on Wi-Fi or gps going down the list further we have a really cool Twitter widget looks like I just got a text message from down Webster so we can have two different styles of the of the of Twitter we can have the small widget or we can have the larger sort of widget that lets you see more at one time so let's go with that one and I wants me to log in here but I haven't configured my Twitter yet so we won't go there let's go back to the next one we have weather and stocks and stocks is pretty cool it's very touch flo 3d like I'm sure that's not a surprise to you at this point and actually didn't select the right one stocks here we go and there are several different stock styles you can have a small ticker a larger more in-depth thicker as you saw before and it looks like I selected just the standard ticker though I'm imagining this to use a lot of battery and CPU so again these widgets aren't really well optimized for the device I think they use a lot of power and the device could benefit from some some better utilization of the cpu and ram so overall i love the ability to customize my home screen this has been one of my biggest complaints about the iphone is that you can't do much with the home screen you have a bunch of icons and then you have another page of icons but at least with the hero and android devices you can have next appointment and you can see at a glance your battery level and you can turn Wi-Fi on and off in one click or you can click on an icon for to dial your friend or text them very quickly or to see your how many messages you have all in one screen or if there's more information that you need you can go to the screens on the right there are seven of them which i actually think is a little bit too much i wish HTC is offered maybe a one two three four five six seven button along the bottom to allow you to jump from screen to screen or even remove screens if you're not using all of them and make it easier to go from side to side so that's it for the whole sense UI widget based interface on the HTC hero we're going to be back soon with a lot more on how the whole Android interface actually works with the notification systems the whole menu system and how things actually work compared to say windows mobile device that's it for now