Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon a minimun from pocketnow.com and this is a look at the Sense interface on the new HTC legend HTC has done a lot to its Sense interface since the earlier Android devices like the hero it's much more usable it's got some cool features a lot of widgets and overall it's just a much better experience especially in terms of speed so let's take a look at it now so I'm going to unlock the screen and by the way the AMOLED screen on the HTC legend is just fantastic the zoom in on the screen a little bit and right away you can see the the weather animation that comes sort of from the HTC hd2 so if it's sunny outside you will get a ray of sunshine if it's cloudy clouds will kind of fly across if it's raining you'll get raindrops on your screen very nice way to sort of experience your device and by the way just a note on this optical trackpad here the hero had a mechanical trackpad but now it's a little bit easier to be more precise with moving your thumb around on this optical area and to click on something you tap in and here it pops up on the screen so if something to get used to it's kind of a nice addition and it really helps with one-handed usability okay so let's get started this is the home screen this is how HTC puts together the home screens out of the box we get the clock up here tapping on the clock will bring you to an HTC Sense like clock application so from here we can go to the world clock we can set the alarm clock and I'm waking up at 7 a.m. it looks like tomorrow over here is the stopwatch and on the right there is the timer so really nice sense interface applied to the clock application it seems kind of simple but it's it's a nice congruency going down we have some other shortcuts that I've added such as a link to call somebody or an application and also you get your look your weather and your high low temperature for the day which is quite nice it knows where you are I didn't have to configure this it used the GPS to find out where I am so I'm going to swipe to the left here and this is my email inbox widget so I can see at a quick glance the emails that I have if I want to open up an email I just tap on it and it comes up and there it is from here I can also launch my entire email inbox like tap down here to go straight to the message list and by the way the message list also is wrapped in this nice sense interface so kind of taken from Windows Mobile actually we have this list down here we can view by conversation this is really great we can see the VIP group if you have people set in a special group we can go to unread marked meeting invitations and also anything that has an attachment an awesome way to quickly filter your email and by the way you can swipe the optical trackpad here to move between these different fields and you see this interface a lot all throughout the operating system which again makes for a very nice consistent feel so that was the email application let's go to the left this is the friend stream so this will tie into multiple social networks at the moment I only have it set up with Twitter and it automatically updates and I can quickly glance and see what's happening on Twitter and I can tap on one tweet in particular it will open up the friend stream application and from here I can quickly tweet I can use the sense interface once again to see all of my of my mentions or I can see my private messages or I can see any favorites that I have made so let's go back to the previous screen over to the left we have the weather weather widget which is very functional it knows exactly where you are if you have multiple cities set up you can swipe your finger up and down or tapping on the weather widget will bring up a beautiful weather application and here it is and we can actually go through a little bit of a demo here so you can see what the weather animations will look like the weather animations aren't as smooth as I think they should be we're gonna see the same implementation of sense on the HTC Desire which has a Snapdragon processor I think it's gonna rock on the desire and so we can swipe and see the other animations but you get the point very visual very nice indeed let's go back home and that was the widget all the way on the left now a problem that HTC has solved is okay I've got seven screens to customize I want to get all the way over to the right now they have that pinch functionality which lets you zoom out to one particular to be able to see all of your different widgets and you can you can tap on one of the screens and get there or another way you can get here is just by tapping the home button while you're home and this is just a really quick and easy way to jump around from screen to screen so I'm gonna continue on my way here this is the favorite people widget which lets you quickly dial people that you call on a regular basis and it's very easy to add to and tapping on these lines here will jump you into the full contacts list which also has an HTC Sense like interface and let's go over to the right here's the bookmarked tab which is quite nice it shows you a little preview of the websites that you visit on a regular basis so up here's there's pocket now you can see the pocket now logo at the top very elegant we're gonna talk about the web browser in a future video swiping to the right we have nothing because I want to show you some of the other widgets that HTC doesn't put on the device or on the home screens out of the box so a little tap and hold will bring up whoops missed it there will bring up the widget screen and I'm gonna I'm gonna go through the things mark with HTC so calendar that's right from HTC and there are three different styles that you can have you can have this color coded version this simple version or the full calendar and so I'm going to go into the full calendar and quite simply this is a widget that sits on my home screen that's beautiful and very interactive so I can tap on tomorrow see what I'm doing tomorrow I also get the weather integrated right into the calendar application which is quite nice let me get back to that and you can see how fast it is going from screen to screen now that HTC has added that new feature so I'm going to delete this widget and we'll go through the other ones okay we just got calendar you've already seen the clock HDC is added footprints this was also from Windows Mobile and there are two different styles you can have kind of the condensed style or the full style so I'm gonna click select and here we have footprints right from Windows Mobile so the idea here is that you take a photo of a place that you want to go to again it will assign geo coordinates so that you can actually map a you can go on to the map and see where it is you took that picture so we can tap on one of these items we can see sort of what the notes that we wrote about it these are all just demo right on the device I'm going to take that off let's add another widget from HTC see what else we have on here okay we did footprints and you can see there's an Android Facebook widget friends stream we already saw that mail here's messages let's take a look at that and you've got only one style okay and so here is the awesome looking messages widget this is this is brand new it lets you look into your text messages and you can just flick through your messages very elegantly you can tap on one to view it in full screen you can make a new one by tapping on the little pencil icon very awesome edition in fact this is one I probably have closer to my Center area so I can get to it within a a quick second so let me remove this and we'll go back to the widget menu and see the other ones okay the music widget is also quite nice and this is looks looks different than what you got before on save the hero two different styles simple style and more expanded let's look at the more expanded it's gonna search your device for any music you may have and complain music right from our home screen if you have different albums you can flick through them with your finger or if you can tap on the album cover you're taken into the HTC music application which is absolutely gorgeous I mean you can flip through the album art tap on something and play it and of course the music continues to play because Android can multitask let me actually let me delete this all right let's go back into the widget area a lot of really awesome widgets as you're seeing news is something that's not new there's two different styles simple and expanded so we can go into we can add a feed for a particular website and be able to see the news updated right on right on our home screen which is quite nice so I've just added a feed hopefully it'll work now doesn't look like it took well let's go to the next one so we've people we already saw that I believe yep that's the that's the favorite people and we've seen that let's go back photo album which is quite nice let me show you that select which album you want to display here so this is just a viewer this is a quick way to browse through photos say you've just taken a picture some pictures of a partying you want to show your friends what happened at the party you can flick through that's my fingerprint iPad these are just stock HTC images that come on the device and just a simple and quick and easy way to browse through pictures and let's go back to widgets we're almost almost on the list here we have a photo frame from HTC I'm not going to show that we have the search from HTC again that's very simple and then we've some settings here things that we can add so we can add a quick link to Wi-Fi which is quite nice a toggle switch on and off and something else I wanted to show you if I go back here is the stocks application which is also quite robust and there are three different styles you can get a stock ticker kind of with a simple view just one symbol or with several different symbols and it's very congruent with the Sense look again all of these things are very consistent and we can tap on one of the particular stock tickers and it will load a chart and here we go again with the beautiful Sense interface with this little scroller along the bottom that you can actually move with the optical joystick very very elegant let's go back delete that and I think that's pretty much it for the widgets from HTC there's a huge list they've spent a lot of time developing really killer widgets for the new breed of Android devices from HTC with this latest version of sense and couple that with the fantastic new pitch feature that allows you to quickly jump to any of your home screens and it's a really killer interface that shows dramatic improvement over where it was before and makes it so much more useful than any other interface in my opinion that you can get on a mobile device right now just shows you the information that you want and it's all very easily accessible now with so many different widgets what if you want a widget configuration for the weekend the widget configuration when you're traveling and always your configuration when you're at work well you can actually do that with HTC Sense they've had this on previous generations of sense you go to menu and you click on scenes and you can go to a bunch of pre-configured widget setups and so we're gonna go to I think this was play right here and so this is a little bit more so you have a nice looking clock you can set up a picture album there's your FriendFeed you get this kind of colorful background music player and bookmarks you could also configure this particular scene and save it as a custom sign so let's go back into the scene mode and let's go to travel let's say you're traveling let's see how HTC thinks you should have your slates or your and let's see this okay so for a travel scenario HTC thinks you should have some world clocks here over here is the mail application although this is the different mail application different view pretty cool we didn't actually show that we've HTC footprints weather see what else we have we have music friends Stream condensed your calendar and then a blank screen over here so scenes is a really cool way to customize different widget configurations and finally let me just show you the different wallpapers that you get on this device so I'm going to go back over here press menu and then I'm going to do wallpaper there's some pretty cool stuff that is here and you can change the wallpaper on the lock screen or on the home screen and I'm gonna go to the wallpaper gallery and there's always cool wallpaper on Android devices but this is definitely true on the legend so we have some very nice landscapes that look beautiful with the AMOLED display so let's go to that beach scene that actually stood out and I'm to click set wallpaper and there we have a beautiful beach scene as our background awesome so coming up soon we'll talk about the other software on the HTC legend will go through web browsing and some of the included programs if you liked this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and thanks in advance for doing that that's it for now