Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com and this is our full review of the HTC One V the one with the chin let's get to it as we mentioned in our review of the HTC One X and we'll put a link up here so we can get back to that HTC is on a crusade in 2012 to take back the limelight they want to be revered as the number one handset manufacturer they want to have devices that are truly compelling with awesome software and amazing hardware and the one series of devices represents their first attempt to do that with the One X the 1s and the one v that we have here the one v is the cheapest device in the one series designed for the budget-minded it's only 350 bucks if you buy it from a site like niger electronics comm and it comes in both brown and gray this is the brown version the specs match the price though is you'll find a one gigahertz single core Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU with 512 megabytes of RAM and just four gigabytes of storage but you can actually expand it with a microSD slot unlike the One X you might be wondering if these last generation specs hampered device performance and will have to answer that later in the video we also from UMTS allowing it to work in the US on AT&T 3G the rear camera is 5 megapixels and shoots 720p video while on the front there is no front facing camera it's running on android 4.0.3 with Sense 4.0 and is powered by 1,800 milliamp hour battery the most notable design feature of the One V is its chin which is reminiscent of the HTC Hero and legend the chin really has no functional value except to make the device feel more like an actual phone in hand and not like a mini tablet as is the case with a 1 V and other devices that have a large screen the phone has a unibody aluminum casing which provides a very high-quality feel it's cool to the touch when you pick it up which reminds us of the Desire HD The Legend and other unibody phones from HTC the aluminum has a nice metallic shine to it which looks great in the light the phone itself feels very much like a phone thanks to its small form factor overall it feels pretty great in the hand especially when you're using it as home phone and Hornung it against your face here on the bottom we have a removable panel which lets you access the microSD and SIM slot while the 1/v takes a regular sized SIM unlike the 1x which takes up Micro SIM you can actually finagle all Micro SIM to fit if you don't have an adapter just make sure you have a paperclip around to fish it out should you need to remove it as with the other HTC One devices the One V has Beats Audio which is an audio equalizer that does indeed make audio sound better but now to a huge degree on the front we have a piece of Gorilla Glass covering the 3.7 inch WVGA Super LCD 2 panel so that's 800 by 480 because the screen is small at 3.7 inches you still get a reasonable pixel density of around 250 allowing for relatively sharp and clear text though it's not nearly as impressive as the One X below the screen we have the three Android buttons for Ice Cream Sandwich and then there's a sharp ledge below the screen which helps you to feel for the capacitive buttons when you're not looking we've talked quite a bit about Sense 4.0 in previous videos and as a summary we find it to be a big improvement over previous versions but it doesn't go far enough to reduce the fluff and the clutter interestingly because of the low respect Hardware on the one V a lot of sense 4.0 has been tuned down for example folders do not animate when you open them unlike the One X also the multitask UI is stock Ice Cream Sandwich instead of that crazy fluffy 3d thing that you get on the One X another place that sense is tuned down for the One V is the lack of leap feature which means that you cannot customize the number of home screens you have nor can you zoom out to get an overall view like you can on other HTC devices in terms of general performance the HTC One V has a lot of problems we were hoping that the tried-and-true Snapdragon 1 gigahertz CPU would provide snappy performance especially when coupled with ICS but that just is not the case flipping around between various apps is often cumbersome and slow the worst performance is found in the browser let's go to pocket now and check out performance scrolling is choppy zooming is choppy it's pretty much intolerable using the web browser scrolling again is very choppy zooming in takes a long time to clear up it's just a really bad web browsing experience which is very unfortunate because pretty much the number one use of smartphones for most people is browsing the web and the 1/v just doesn't do it very well that said you could try other browsers which might help but the stock browser really does not do a good job other than that you get seven home screens to customize with a variety of widgets like the One X there is a new albeit a bit clunky way to add widgets to your home screen the one B sputters through this new interface if you're trying to quickly add a bunch of widgets the bright side of Sense 4.0 comes through in apps like email where HTC has improved upon the stock ICS email experience for example threaded messages are displayed with a little down arrow and when you hit it you get this nice layered view unfortunately the One X has trouble with that animation and it kind of sputters once again here you can see the Sense 4.0 keyboard which is more compact than what is found on the One X it's an easy to use keyboard and it works very well although you don't get the swipe feature that you do on the other HTC devices battery life on the One V is above average thanks to its single core cpu relatively large battery and smallish screen so there's not that massive of a backlight that needs to power with mine aren't use expect to get one and a half days of use out of the one v which is better than your typical one day or less than one day with other phones another test note photo-quality the camera on the One V is good but not amazing as HTC would leave us to believe we'll have some photo samples in the full review on PocketNow but I can tell you that photos were noisy and color saturation was in some cases overdone that said the camera app is impressive it lets you easily toggle between photos and videos take burst shots and even take photos while a video is running which is a very unique feature how about pocket ability let's do the pocket test the One V slips easily into a pocket the chin doesn't get in the way at all when you're trying to put the phone away in your pocket overall here's what we like and don't like about the HTC One V what we like is that it's using aluminum unibody construction we like that it feels really great in the hand the high degree of build quality and we like that it has above-average battery life which is difficult to find these days we don't like that performance is poor especially in the web browser we also don't like that there's no front facing camera and finally we weren't excited by the quality of the photos and video we were hoping that the HTC One V would be a very capable budget device the price is great the hardware is amazing but the software just does not cut it it's slow and very laggy in fact laggy is an understatement it has poor performance especially in the web browser which is kind of depressing to be honest because most people use their phone primarily for web browsing so we cannot recommend the HTC One V and we give it a three out of five stars until HTC can fix the software it's very likely that in a short period of time a software update will fix these performance issues but right now it's not worth getting even at a low price point if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now you