Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from pocket now calm and this is the software tour of the htcs 743 now because the 743 doesn't have a touchscreen HTC couldn't use touchflo 3d which it's pretty much including on all of its newer devices these days so instead the s7 43 has a modified version of the sliding panel interface that we saw on non-touchscreen windows mobile devices so we take something like the blackjack two here probably looks familiar to you go down through the sliding panels you can see your next appointment you can make a new appointment if you go down further you can set up email you can play music right from your home screen go through pictures things like that it's a really fantastic interface but HTC has actually made it a little bit better with their own additions and let me show you that now okay here we are and before I get started I want you to take note to something around the d-pad there is a swirl of light this is actually the system indicator light as you find on the touch diamond and a touch pro so if I have a new message it swirls around in a circle kind of blinks like it is now if you're charging it you've just plugged it in it will feed white from bottom to the top if you have a full charge after you plugged it in it will remain steady so kind of a cool way to show off various various system notifications okay so let's get closer and on the screen and take a look at these sliding panels so the first one is the one that we've seen already and the one that's on all of the phones is the time now if we go down to the next panel we can flip to the right and we can see our upcoming appointments if we go to the next one this is the standard too we see no no miss calls no new voicemail and then if we go down one here's something that's kind of new and unique we can see our text messages right on the screen so i have three text messages and i can flip back and forth from them if we go down one here's something that's all so new we can see the emails that have fallen into the inbox and you can read a preview of them right on the screen and then you can tap on the d-pad and open it up right on the screen so if we go down to where we left off here we have weather and unfortunately we don't get the weather animations that you get on touchflo 3d but it is nice to have it on the home screen and if we tap on the d-pad it will take us to a five-day forecast although it's not a very detailed five-day forecast I must say if we go down here something that's also unique you get your internet explorer favorites right on the home screen which is kind of cool because if you just want to really quickly check a website you can just you know go down to that panel tap over and check out what's going on at pocketnow.com mobile all right and let's go back down and then we've weather excuse me we have a internet explorer then we have playoff songs which is you know if you put in a media card you can actually play songs right from your home screen but that's not anything that is unique and of course we can change our profile and go to go to the communications manager and everything like that so that is the home screen and something interesting happens when you open up the keyboard all that's not terribly interesting you get this little launcher and the purpose of this is to allow you to do things that are related to typing on a keyboard so email messenger SMS MMS it's kind of silly and you can turn this off so that you just see the standard home screen when you slide out the keyboard okay now I'm just going to go through a few things that I wanted to show you that that makes this device kind of unique so I'm going to go into the start menu and I'm going to click all programs and what you'll notice if you go into all programs is that there's no scroll bar on the side so the only way to get to the next panel or the next pain of programs is to press more this is not that big of a deal but I think it's going to confuse some people that are new to windows mobile and are wondering are there only nine programs and know there are a lot more than nine programs which is kind of silly but anyway so we have a few folders here if we go into multimedia we have the camera album and this may look familiar if you have an HTC touch pro or touch diamond this is a really nice-looking gallery for non-touchscreen windows mobile devices it's very similar to that of their higher end devices and if we tap on a picture we get it on the screen if we tap on the d-pad it will go to the next picture we can zoom in that way and zoom out it's a very very smooth implementation of the photo gallery and I like it a lot I'm going to cover it fully in the review we've the camera application which is a for the 3.1 megapixel camera of course we have the video recorder there so let's go back and let's go to the next go to accessories and nothing terribly interesting here we've connections set up which will automatically configure your device whether you're on AT&T or tmobile or any other GSM carrier it will choose that for you I didn't really have to use that it just worked when I put in my sim card let's go to the next task manager voice recorder internet sharing which is cool in case you want to use the internet connection from your device on your laptop alright let's go to the next thing alright and we have an RSS program and going to the right way voice commander which is kind of like Microsoft voice command it's not as good but allows you to talk to your device without having to train at first which is good and i just put skyfire on there because really it comes with pocket internet explorer which isn't that good of a browser so you're gonna wanna get skyfire or opera mini or something like that to get a good web browsing experience now there are a few interesting things that come over from from the other HTC devices like the system volume this is totally new for the non-touch screen version of windows mobile this looks just like it does on the touch diamond and touch pro something else that looks like it does on a touch a diamond and touch pro is the communications managers let me go down to that here it is really nice-looking communications managers that let you quickly turn it off on and off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and all those sort of things what I want to cover now is the phone experience because some things have changed like the caller ID picture is bigger when someone calls and it's really easy to turn on speakerphone and things like that so let me call my phone here and show you what it looks like when somebody makes a call to your device okay so me getting us all right now and the picture is much larger than just usually find an image mobile devices someone answer them and what I what I really like about this is that you can turn on the d-pad add a call mute the call or look at the contact by using the d-pad which is kind of cool it's a good use of the d-pad and other windows mobile standard devices you have to dig through the menu to actually do any of these things but in this case I can just press up to turn on the speaker phone so that's it for the software tour of the htcs 743 there's a lot that I didn't cover that I'm going to cover in the full review coming up on pocketnow.com very soon so be sure to check that out we're going to talk about battery life performance and pretty much everything else you need to know about this device so that's it for the s7 43