Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brenda minimun from pocketnow.com and this is a software review of the HTC Incredible S let's get to it now again this is an unlocked european smartphone that happens to work on t-mobile 3G network here in the USA you can buy it unlock for about six hundred and forty dollars from Negri electronics again the thought is that this is coming to Verizon as the Droid Incredible 2 we'll have to wait and see if that actually happens but it's quite possible at this moment in time so let's jump into this let's talk about the software we're gonna go right into quadrant standard and run a speed test and you know we're actually gonna compare this head-to-head with the desire hd this is actually the inspire 4G but we're going to call it the Desire HD because it's the same device now the reason we're going to compare this is to make a point the designer HD is HTC's last generation 2010 high-end smartphone the inspire s is HTC's new high-end smartphone for 2011 or at least that's the only information that we have from HTC at this time it's very likely that HTC is going to come out with something much higher end at CTIA called the pyramid the dual-core processor a higher resolution screen but we just don't have confirmation on that so we have to give HTC the benefit of the doubt that the inspire s is is one of the best devices they're gonna have in 2011 we go to system information you're gonna see that these devices have the exact same internals they are the same device so if we scroll down to CPU we have the same arm arm v7 processor that's the Qualcomm Snapdragon frequency is 1024 megahertz everything else is the same the bogo MIPS for some reason shows as a different number that's another measurement of CPU speed but because these CPUs kind of scale up they scale down depending on what you're doing you don't always get the same measurement memory is exactly the same we've got 768 megabytes although user-accessible is about 630 there's 8 megabytes more available on the desire hd and everything else going down the same the GPU is the same the Adreno 205 opengl SCM 1.1 and so on and so forth so this is these are basically the same device so if we run the benchmark we should get probably the same results although it would be nice to see the incredible has to come out with better results since it was released a full year later let's see what happens okay here are the results the incredible s is no slouch scoring a benchmark score 1400 over here the desire hd is much higher at 1600 the the point I'm trying to make here is that it's kind of surprising that a device that came out a year later and that was sort of HTC's high-end has scored a lower benchmarking score than the last generation phone again this may not be fair because HTC isn't done yet for this year and we're likely to see a better phone come out at CTIA but it's just an interesting observation here in terms of day to day performance as you're going to see in this video the incredible ass is quite good it's not as fast as this Desire HD opening programs instead of being instant I have about a point to five-second delay but let's actually compare these side-by-side in doing some other things so we're going to do some web browser speed comparisons here and let's see what we have we're going to just load the desktop pocket now and I'm going to zoom in over here we've got plugins set to on demand so that they aren't going to show up actually we wanted to get to the desktop version here okay so here they're both loading the same page and we're going to move around on the page and see which one performs better and do some speed tests from there so it's a loading on the incredible s okay let's move down quickly looks good looks good both of them look good pinch-to-zoom quite smooth on both let's click on this link at the same time the screen on the incredible west as you can tell is much more clear and crisp both of these are set to automatic screen brightness but the incredible s just has a lot more clarity okay so it looks like the Desire HD finished slightly faster although that might have not been fair I mean they were so close let's actually go to a longer page will go to engadget.com and do the slick scroll test to see which of these can keep up the best okay let's do the flip scroll test on Engadget that's a very long page we want to see if the phone can keep up so we're gonna flick very quickly no checkerboard on the desire hd flip very quickly on the incredible ice no checkerboard very good so these are exhibiting a similar similar level of performance let's zoom in here we're gonna click on this link at the same time if possible boom again the incredible s actually finished slightly faster there so a very good web browsing performance are the incredible s compared to the desire hd despite its scoring a little bit lower in the benchmarks so let's take that off the scene here and talk a little bit more about the incredible s of course we've got the button rotation which we talked about in the last video the problem of the button rotation is that they leave the buttons looking a little bit low-quality if we tilt the device slightly you can see how they're getting brighter now they get dimmer the button on the right is the most of them the button on the left is the least amount of strange and of course the buttons will rotate there okay so let's go back to the home screen and talk about HTC Sense now HTC hasn't made any changes except for the addition of one widget to the newer version of sense they're going to upgrade sense when these devices be incredible as the desire as the Wildfire s that they announced at Mobile World Congress get Gingerbread 2.3 so right now this is the same version of sense that you've seen on the desire hd on the legend on a lot of phones that are out there and and quite simply we get our seven home screens we get leap you've seen this a million times before although here's a little feature and leap that you may not know about you can actually move around home screens like so kind of cool to know about they don't make it immediately obvious then we can go and add some widgets and let me show you the the widget selection here I'm going to show you every one but just kind of browse through some of these so we've got bookmarks of course there are 72 two widgets here the desire hd has 71 and I'm going to show you which one is new so we've got a lot of really high quality beautiful HTC widgets that you can expect to have it's we're going to go back and let me just show you immediately the one that is new it is called navigation or navigate so we click on that this one is new right here press select and then you can choose which of your footprints you want to navigate to let's try to go to the Statue of Liberty click done and this way you have a quick link to navigate to somewhere right from your home screen pretty cool let's say you go to the same place all the time and you want to navigate somewhere you pull this up tap on Statue of Liberty and it's going to bring up the HTC navigation program that wants me to turn on the GPS satellites in order to get it working here we go a little bit choppy on the video there we're using HTC's navigation program so it's getting directions and flying out and here we go it shows us the how to get there pretty cool anyhow let's move on so this is the car panel which will allow you to navigate from your phone free guidance very cool stuff here ok so let's go into the program tray here now the program tray and the new version of sense will actually have three sliders along the bottom that let you filter between favorite applications downloaded applications and all applications there's not much you can do with the program tray although there are a couple of options you can go into list mode you can you can share a particular app if you want to or you can sort them alphabetically by date or by date including the most recent and the oldest which is really handy because then you can put the apps that you've downloaded right at the top so you can get a record right when you pop pop into the program trail you can see the apps that you've downloaded most recently so let's look down the list of some of these apps that come in on the device yet obviously the top two rows are apps that I've downloaded so we've got basic stuff here we've got the navigation panel you saw comes with Amazon mp3 let's see flashlights always good FM radio the HTC hub you can actually hook this up to htcsense.com so that you can remotely manage your phone it's really cool you just plug in your your username and password you set it up on your phone and then you can locate your phone anywhere in the world you can have your phone ring you could have it display a lot screen message or you can remotely wipe all the data if you leave it in the back seat of a cab car and you're never going to get it back we've got the HTC application which we've seen before and this wants you to login with your with your htcsense.com account it'll suggest applications for you kind of a good way to discover new apps and of course HTC hub should do the same thing it asks you to login that will give you access to wallpapers skins ringtones and other assets from HTC servers we've got the music program this does have that SRS capability built in which is the Dolby labs functionality it's actually two different things don't be labs in SRS or two different things but what happens is that when you play a song you can switch up here to SRS it looks like there's no Dolby labs only SRS so SRS makes it sound slightly better if you're listening with headphones turning on SRS will make the bass sound boom ear and the highest sound crisp ear so just something to consider HTC is including that with all of its new smartphones of course there's a nice cover flow here but of course this is standard for all the HTC music applications really nice animation we've got HTC peep included quick look up things like that whether YouTube's Wi-Fi hotspot built right in so that you can share your connection now what about data speeds well this will do three 3G on t-mobile in fact let's really quick turn off the Wi-Fi so that we can actually do some real-time benchmarking of the HSDPA speeds that you're getting this doesn't do the HSPA+ higher speed internet access that you get on some of the four GT mobile phones but the speeds are quite good as we're going to see that wasn't a good run but let's do a run now we've got three out of four bars let's see what we get running the speed test here 728 millisecond ping and here we go this is very typical of t-mobile's 3G network about 2.9 megabits per second down and a solid 1.7 1.8 megabits per second up and that's the final final verdict there we go over to the results panel you can see all the other tests I've run ignore anything with a little Wi-Fi logo so three down to point four two point one two one one point six two point nine so you get pretty fast data speeds on this so it's definitely a worthy device of tea bubbles 3G network with with pretty pretty strong data speeds there of course also with HTC Sense the new version you get the improved notification shade which will actually include your your last used application so you can either use that to toggle between apps or a tavern road of the poem button to go into an app that you've recently visited and of course many other applications are adorned with HTC Sense so we go into the mail application this has the you know the HTC Sense interface which is great because the stock Android mail application annoyingly puts the compose mail button behind the Menu key but on HTC a sense they put it right out in front so it's easy to access also these sliders are configurable if you tap and hold on one of them you can actually bring down different ones to the bottom slider or remove them and have kind of a minimal design like I have here and this goes through a lot of different programs like contacts and phone and other things like that it's a really good experience and the camera should add has those on-screen effects so if we go to the little blonde over here we can change it to Distortion you can move around your finger a lot of other photobooth like effects that you can choose from right on-screen and have them be be rendered sort of in real time we're going to talk more about photo samples and the camera the 720p recording capability of the Incredible s in the full review but as a little preview so far we're impressed by the imaging capability of this phone so that concludes the software review of the HTC Incredible S again we know what to expect on an HTC device there's no real surprises at this point they haven't upgraded their version of sense for this particular device there's a little bit unfortunate but HTC Sense is very mature it's a great Android interface a lot of people agree that it's the best Android interface the device is fast it does good data speeds although it's strangely not as fast the last generation HDC high-end smartphone but in day-to-day operation it is generally fast bouncing between applications using the 768 megabytes of RAM allows for pretty fast operation nothing incredible but but certainly it performs quite well so if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now