Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brad a minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the software review of the htc inspire 4G on AT&T let's get to it so again as we've been talking about the big story with the inspire 4G on AT&T is the HSPA+ data speeds that it can achieve we're going to film another video talking more in depth about this showing you benchmarks we've run talking about whether this really improves the experience so look out for that but in this video we're gonna dive into the Sense 2.0 interface we're gonna benchmark this and we're gonna show you how it performs on the web and lots of other stuff that you want to see so without further ado let's get to it so turn it on here and what we've got of course we'll zoom in on the screen is HTC Sense some people love this some people hate this the people that love it like the eye candy the visual appeal they like how sense shows up in your email your call log your photo gallery it's everywhere and the people that don't like it think it's a little bit too heavy a little bit too intrusive and you really can't turn it off sure you could install launcher pro or ADW launcher and get a new home screen interface but the Sense interface goes into many many programs as I just mentioned so for better or for worse sense has been updated for this new version 2.0 even a little bit above and beyond what we saw on the Desire HD so of course we've got seven home screens to choose from I've got it kind of very minimally populated with just three widgets but we're going to go through a lot more than that we've got the leap features so we can zoom out to see all of our home screens you still can't subtract home screens which is very silly because I'm gonna guess that a lot of people aren't using seven home screens they're using maybe three or maybe four or five but not seven so let's talk about what we have here of course we have the new way to arrange the widgets and that is by pressing the button down here and we have this new customization menu it's a really cool feature that they've brought forward here in the new version of sense we can change the scene which of course is pre-configured widgets so you can have a scene for the weekend shows you your Twitter feed and some other apps maybe your gallery and then you have a scene just for the weekday maybe your schedule maybe if the UPS application who knows what what you want to keep an eye on we've got wallpaper and also skins so let's go through some of these if we go to wallpaper we can choose HTC wallpaper and we get this cool looking gallery that lets you flip through kind of in this cover flow like design the various different things the various different wallpapers that come on the HTC Inspire now as is the case of a lot of these enhancements you can press get more and you could link up to the HTC hub to get more stuff from HTC Sense comm we'll talk about that soon we dive into scene you can kind of see these different scenes HTC scene social scene brings Twitter right up front things like that and lastly if we go to skin I've actually added this one on the left it's called memories it's pretty cool it comes from the HTC hub but beyond that we've got the regular HTC skin we've got the metal skin so if you don't like the way that HTC Sense looks you can at least change it out a little bit so let me show you what this looks like this one's kind of cool it really changes a lot about what you're dealing with here so you get a new background you get a new buttons and you're gonna see in a second if we go into a stock application like the photo gallery you're gonna see that even that has been sort of redesigned with this new skin in place so over here in gallery so look down here you've got kind of an orange strip instead of the black strip that you got with the HTC skin so let's go back to this menu here and we're just gonna change it back cause it's a little bit too busy for the sake of a demonstration video here so we're gonna jump back into the stock HTC skin and here it is so let's go back into the personalization menu and of course we went through these three things and now we have widgets up here that we can go through here's a cool new feature and this was seen in the desire hd you can browse through all of the HTC widgets with this one screen this is a little bit cumbersome you've got 71 widgets to scroll through they should have a thumbnail view of this and hopefully in the next version of sense they do that and we can go back to the previous screen of course we can add a wide variety of widgets a lot of which you've seen before now if you go to get more HTC widgets will see some widgets that you may have not have seen before and this is coming from HTC hub and the first time you use HTC hub you have to sign up it's free and it should be loading let's see what we get here and what we get here is for extra widgets that you don't get stock on the device dice which really is just a simple pair of dice that can animate fortune cookie shows you your fortune translator and word of the day so kind of cool that HTC gives you some extra widgets would be nice to see even more so let's go back again we can add an app shortcut we could add a shortcut to a specific feature like a direct dial or bookmark we can add a link to a folder then we can personalize all this stuff down here all from within this screen let's actually add the word of the day widget because you might not have seen that before we can scroll all the way down and here it is word of the day and there's only one design here so we press select and it loads and pretty cool so every day you can check out the word of the day now something that is kind of annoying about HTC Sense is he still can't resize widgets you know if you go to launcher pro and you pay for the premium version which is three bucks you can resize widgets so for example I could go to my favorites widget here and resize it to only take up this much space or this much space but with the HTC Sense widgets you really don't get that much flexibility what you see is what you get fortunately they do provide different versions of the widgets so of course if we go into widgets here and go to bookmarks you have you know two options but what do you do both of them take up the entire screen how about something in between that takes up a smaller size anyhow so you get a choice of lots and lots of beautiful HTC widgets as you would expect with HTC Sense now let's jump right into benchmarks we want to benchmark this device and kind of give you some context here about the speed that we're talking about so we're gonna run a quadrant standard here and we're gonna run the full benchmark and I'll be back in a sec with the score and we're done let's see what we get Wow um let me show you a little bit closer here we've got about 1700 on quadrant which is pretty remarkable even the Nexus S running Android point-three does around 1600 which is of course faster snow than the nexus one running fro you but this is a fast device according to quadrant and then real-world testing we've got to say that this is a snappy device which is strange because it's running you know a Qualcomm 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor it's not dual-core it's not even Android 2.3 it's 2.2 but hey it's pretty darn fast speaking of which let's dump into web browsing and talk about sort of the browsing speed you can get a sense for the performance of this device will it pocket now here of course we're over Wi-Fi I'm going to scroll down for the desktop version so the mode all the graphics and all the other stuff that tend to make the device slow down a little bit while that's loading I can show you something else here if we go to Windows we have the sort of 3d tab viewer sort of tabs really windows so then if we go back to windows we can flip through between the two a little bit heavy there you know HD so you could have gone with something more simple than that maybe some tabs along the top but they kind of like to do things fancily so let's go into landscape and we can see what it's like to browse around on the page I've got plugins required to ask to work so that's why you see those little icons there but of course you will be able to see Flash content scrolling and panning is very smooth with the 4.3 inch Super LCD display browsing the web is a joy so if we zoom in we've got actually a flash video within this link so we'll be able to demonstrate that very fast performance as you can see it's loading the page quite rapidly and scroll down a little bit and we're gonna see this element so I'm gonna tap on it so that it will load and let's see what happens there it is a video we can press play it'll play here or we can have it open in the YouTube application for a little bit more control over it and here we go it's loading and we should be able to tap and vote on this and go fullscreen so there we go YouTube player let's stop it so very good performance on the web as you can see let's test screen rotation speed pretty fast and we've got a lot of Flash elements on the page so we can't expect it to be perfect but it's going pretty quickly there so quite capable web browsing here on the inspire 4G let's go back to the home screen and go into the applications to see what apps we have here we do have some unique entries we've got the AT&T stuff of course family maps so you can locate where family members are on a map if they're using a similar program we've got AT&T code scanner it's a lot of AT&T stuff here as well I agree to the terms and conditions and what this will let you do is presumably scan barcodes and get pricing information on certain objects of course they've Google Goggles and Amazon barcode scanner to do the same thing got AT&T Navigator if you want to get around there's a monthly fee associated with that blockbuster comes on the device of course you can also get that in the Android Market connected media is for the DLNA support now of course with Dion and it's hard to say DLNA you can be looking at multimedia on your phone and sort of flick it off to your TV so you can have you know a big TV to share multimedia now your TV has to support DLNA or you can get the little HTC media extender which is relatively inexpensive but as far as we can tell a lot of people aren't using DLNA right now and tell us in the comments if we're wrong but it requires you to have a supported television or other device and a lot of people just don't have a TV that has DLNA yet because you know most people buy TV every 10 years and not every two or three years so let's move along here so we've got other stuff that I want to talk about HTC hub is very interesting and it's kind of a way to extend your HTC experience should mention that you can hook up with HTC Sense comm to be able to remotely wipe your phone track it on a map ring it if you get lost in a couch cushion and do a lot of other cool stuff with it oddly htcsense.com has lost a lot of functionality since it came to USA customers very strange don't really understand why that is what we can do here is see apps and plugins which are applications that HTC particularly likes and here we go it finally loaded so here are the apps that HTC recommends this is called media link which will work with their little media Hubb like a device that I mentioned earlier which you can buy to make your TV or any TV DLNA compatible over to the right we have because of web album which I installed because I use Picasa Web album I wanted to sync up that photos I had in the cloud over here on the right we have a plugin that adds LinkedIn to another panel of your people program here that has lots of HTC Sense features so you can add those off for free which is quite nice so let's go back to a previous screen it says new category available that was weird let's see what the new category is see if you can recognize a new category I really can't see the new category but uh real quick we'll just show you what this is downloads and you can see I've downloaded the memories skin 4 megabytes Picasa Web Albums and of course the word of the day widget so back over here in HTC hub got another thing called HTC likes and we saw this on the desire hd this is really cool this is basically an application recommendation tool that links into the Android Market so you're probably wondering if you're new to Android there's a hundred thousand apps out there which one do i download well this helps you a little bit by showing you some of the really cool popular HTC this one's cool call mom remind yourself to call someone from your contact it shows you what HTC recommends and you can go through the categories two most popular apps Angry Birds is right at the top we've got friends comments so you can link up how kind of have a social feature there my downloads and over to the right is marked items so just quickly showing you what happens when you actually tap on one of these things let's go to Angry Birds I haven't yet downloaded Angry Birds on here and of course that's a necessity for every device so if we click install we are going to be dumped into the Android Market and boom boom it's gonna be installed just like that so let's bounce back into the application list again you can see what else we have here so a lot of the built-in Google stuff like Google Maps we've got live TV which is just another service AT&T that you can pay for its using mobi TV so you can actually watch live TV and here it's going to show you the application in the marketplace and you can use a trial and then after that you can hey if you like it so let's go back to the program list once again we've got HTC news HTC news and weather there's the people I guess hub you could call it and from here you've got the HTC Sense interface you can swipe to the right you can see call history you can see online directories and all of your contacts right within the screen which is quite nice scroll down a little bit more we've got a reader application so if you want to download books ebooks of course you can also load the Barnes on open look application you can load the Kindle application and Android there's a lot of ways to get ebooks Google is HTC is giving you another so a really cool 3d looking way to browse their books and no landscape interface unfortunately if we click the little shopping cart we're taken into the Kobo book store so HTC is hooking up here with Kobo so you can download books right onto your device and utilize this pretty cool eReader hub which there's also a widget for by the way which is quite nice scrolling down a little bit more let's see what else we get on here that I didn't add transfer data allows you to bring forth data from your SIM card and Wi-Fi hotspot is something else really cool use for this phone because it can do these fast data speeds is to use it as a portable hotspot so if you're traveling in a car you need some Wi-Fi somewhere at a coffee shop you can use this to beam your HSPA+ connection to multiple devices we've got the same portable hotspot application that you've seen on multiple HTC devices something else I want to talk about is on-screen keyboards we've got some uniqueness here so I'm gonna go into a new message I'm going to actually just go into the text messaging application here I'm gonna go and compose message now we've got three keyboard choices here which is great because HTC for awhile phased out two of their keyboards in favour for just this one you see here and then they brought back the the QWERTY keyboard the kind of shirt type or T keyboard and also the t9 style keyboard so here we have the regular QWERTY keyboard screen sensitivity on here is fantastic so this is a test of the keyboard and I'm not even really looking but the t9 is fantastic I want to go into settings real quick and you're gonna see what I mean by the different keyboard choices so language and keyboard we'll go over here keyboard types let's go to phone keypad and we'll go back into that draft tap and hold by the way another way to multitask here on the inspire each or inspire 40 is to swipe down from the top and you get into the multitasking list up here kind of cool okay and now we have the t9 style pad which is kind of cool if you're used to using a t9 pad so let's do hey this is a test I'm not as practiced with this as I am with the other ones hey this is a test so a lot less finger travel with this one then with the full QWERTY keyboard finally let me show you the other keyboard the final one and then we're going to end up the video by going into more detail in the settings touch input and let's change it to compact working you know also known as sure type or what have you and this one just groups together the letters sort of in two keys which is nice because you again less fare travel but sometimes annoying because you have to if you're trying to spell a unique word that's not the dictionary you got to take your time so I'm gonna say this is a test so very good prediction as you can see there this is a test works very well or of course you can just speak to the device and say this is a test of the keyboard BAM it's amazing how how far voice recognition has come so finally to conclude this video I know it's getting along there's just so much to show you I want to jump into the settings and take a look at what we have there because of course HTC kind of does their own thing in settings so we have a new entry here personalized which you've seen before you can access this from the home screen will go back nothing new and wireless network or some of this stuff here in display I've turned off all the window animations something that HTC has done is made the system font smaller which is nice because you fit more on the screen at one time if you go into email you get lots of the emails it's really taking advantage of the resolution here I've got here's the settings for the LED notification that we two in the hardware review so you can specify when this little green light blinks a great feature to have on a smartphone because you don't always have to turn on your phone and check if you've got a new SMS or if you're waiting for a clock so here are the different things that you can check off scrolling down a little bit let's see what else we can take a look at here that is unique that's not really unique we've got power saver which is unique unique to HTC devices what it does is smartly it manages your power very conservatively when your battery gets below a certain point so turn battery saver on and you set the percentage at which it kicks in so say I gets a 10% battery power I get a notification kind of like telling a story here and then from there it's gonna do all these things it's going to disable background data disable Wi-Fi disable Bluetooth turn down screen brightness to a certain setting turn off the screen after a certain amount of things disable screen animation disable vibration feedback really smart feature because when you're down to like 15 percent battery life you're probably worrying that in a minute you're not gonna be able to make a phone call or at least on your htc inspire 4G your phone is gonna be managing the power and turning off everything that's not necessary except of course the phone and scrolling down a little bit more nothing much different down here AT&T software update is a new entry kind of they rolled the HTC software update and the AT&T update into the same screen and about phone we went through this previously so if we go to network we said we see it says HSDPA not HSPA although we have the HSPA+ indicator it sort of strange that it's showing that and of course if we go to software information we can see that we are running Android 2.2 point 1 this phone if we were betting people we'd say is likely to get an upgrade to Gingerbread eventually and of course if you don't want to wait there will be plenty of gingerbread builds available on XDA developers once they root this phone and one more thing to talk about the camera application look how fast it opens 1 to 2 seconds on a lot of other Android phones you're talking about 3 or 4 seconds which may not be that long in terms of shear seconds but when you're trying to take a picture every second counts so here we've got the camera application which has been redesigned by HTC now and what we can do here is a variety of things we can switch to video mode or to camera mode and of course in video mode we can change the resolution to full 720p or we can go all the way down to you know MMS video which is very low resolution and very low quality and there's other settings here too it can change the white balance record with audio shutter sound that are those are the settings for video but for the camera we've got image adjustment white balance resolution we can go all the way up to 8 megapixels really curious to see how pictures turn out here be sure to check the four of you on pocket now review duration widescreen whether you want it to be widescreen or five by three aspect ratio face detection I mean they've got a lot of features here then after you take the picture they've got some cool stuff let me take a picture okay here's a picture of the htc inspire 4G manual maybe not the most amazing thing in the world so we can pull that up we should get some some options here so this is the new sort of gallery settings so from here we can share to a variety of services we can press the little magic wand and we can do a lot of editing so we can go to effects and this is kind of cool it shows you a little preview of what you can make it look like sepia high contrast so you get some you know photo editing tools above and beyond what you typically get on your usual Android phone which is quite nice so let's say we like antique that's sort of cool let's press save saving photo now it's ready for your consumption you can email it or whatnot so pretty cool enhancement to the the camera application here and it opens up quite fast so that's it for the software review of the htc inspire 4G this turned out to be a long video because there's just so much to talk about HTC has impacted nearly every program that comes on this phone again for better or for worse depending on whether you like what HTC does when you got ahead it to them that they spent a long time customizing this phone and really making the experience consistent pleasing there's a lot of eye candy a lot of added functionality then once you get on a stock Android phone so in terms of software we're going to give the HTC Inspire a thumbs up because it packs a lot of good stuff that a lot of people are going to find useful we're going to dive into software even more in the upcoming review on pocketnow.com be sure to check that out and please give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it thanks for watching and that's it for now