Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com the HTC Sensation is finally out and with it we've got a new version of the Sense interface from HTC it's pretty darn cool and in this video we're gonna talk all about it let's get to it okay so since 3.0 starts here on the lockscreen and right now I've got the weather lock screen selected so you get the weather in big beautiful letters here it's even animated a little bit if you watch it the clouds are moving just slightly so what we can do from here is we can take this metal ring which is kind of like a brushed metal looking ring very polished very nice and we can just put it in the center of the screen we get this cool animation and then if you listen we get a sound this sound is a sound effect for the weather animation you can fortunately turn this off because it's super annoying now another thing you can do from the lock screen which is a great feature which every Android phone had this is the ability to quickly launch an application you could get a choice of four it would be nice if you could choose eight or twelve or whatever but let's say you really want to take a picture and you don't want to fumble with your your application tray boom you've launched your app your camera application and you don't miss the moment and there are four or five different lock screens to choose from so if we bring that circle back in and we go into the personalized manual lock screen you can see all of the different available lock screens and hopefully there will be more I'd love to see one that's fully customizable because right now you can only change the shortcuts so here we have the photo album this is kind of a novelty it's very beautiful and 3d looking we can swipe to the right this is the friend stream which is cool it shows you instead of a 3d environment updates to social networks this is the weather one which we just had on stock is pretty useful if you're following some stock quotes and the last one here is clock kind of just a static homescreen this one I want to show you it's really cool photo album if you click on settings you can select the shortcuts that you want so let's say you want to change call history to say something else let's say you want to change it to clock maybe so you can adjust your alarms you click done and then we can click apply and if we go back to the lock screen we'll that the shortcut has been changed and now it's loading the photo stream so pretty cool here it's bringing up a photo slideshow of photos I've taken just sort of bouncing in and out but who sits there and stares at their lock screen I don't know but it's kind of cool to have I guess right so let's bring the circle back into the center of the screen and here we are back on the home screen now HTC Sense home screens haven't changed that much but finally they're different so we get this cool little effect when you turn from home screen to home screen third-party launchers like launcher Pro ADW launcher have had these effects for a while in fact they let you change them since 3.0 you still can't change them HTC also likes to show off the fact that if you spin this thing real quick it becomes like a 3d carousel well what would you do is what we say because it's not really functional it's a cool party trick but who cares that your home screens can become kind of like 3d when you spin them really fast anyhow let's get back to the main home screen here we've got the HTC weather clock along with some shortcuts got the got a battery widget here there's just a third-party quick battery that we like to use scrolling to the left we get the weather they've done a really really good job with weather HTC really pioneered the animated 3d looking weather with early early devices that ran Windows Mobile so what we can do here is flick through our weather full-screen animations sound effects super immersive and if you tap on the weather you go into an even more immersive environment again with these sound effects which you can remove and we can flick through the various different home screens we can click on this button to be able to jump into the hourly or five-day forecast really beautiful this is taking great advantage of the qHD display we're going to talk more about how the qHD display makes a difference in a minute now something else you can do here is you can go to demo if you want to show your friends how cool this device is show them this so it shows you the animation for every different weather situation looks like the HTC thunderbolt start up doesn't it probably is related to that so again we get sound effects with all of these again this is weather to the next level probably a little more than most people need but it's it's great to have it's really taking advantage of the dual-core processor on the HTC Sensation just gorgeous gorgeous animations and we're almost through them all partly sunny rain is always a good one on HTC looks like raindrops are on your screen snow and finally windy so that was a look at the weather pretty cool stuff what HTC has done this looks kind of like the Windows Phone 7 HDC weather app with this sort of shiny tops anyhow so let's move along we've just got some shortcuts over there here's my shelf which is the HTC e-reader application so we can click on any of these and dive into the built-in book app and text looks really good on this so we can flick to the next page really cool animation and if we look really close on the screen to get a sense for how clear the text is and hopefully the camera will focus text is very very very sharp it's not as sharp as you would get on the iPhone 4 because you get ppi which means pixel density is about 326 per inch so if you take a little inch you count up all the pixels you get 326 on the sensation with the qHD display 4.3 inches we are getting a ppi of about 250 now the the predecessor to this the Desire HD with a WVGA screen had a pixel density of about 217 so you're really getting an improvement there in terms of the pixel density which surely makes text sharp and crisp but what's awesome which it was very impressive is what HTC is done with the extra pixels in some of the built-in applications like email web and so forth we're going to go through that in just a minute want to talk a little bit more about these home screens and adding widgets so let's go into widgets of course with each passing generation of devices HTC adds more and more widgets so if we go into browse all HTC widgets we'll see that there are 81 on previous devices like the Desire HD you were in the 70s so what they've really done is added refinements to some of the more popular widgets you might see some new ones as I flick through I'm not gonna flick through all 81 but just to give you a sense of what HT is HTC has done and these widgets look better than ever with a qHD display so we've got things for Twitter we've got music widgets unfortunately you still cannot resize widgets in HTC Sense you can do that in launcher Pro you can do that with a wide variety of other third-party replacements but in terms of customizability HTC still really mixed misses the mark this is actually new one here photo grid really cool looking kind of like a mosaic so we've got news see if there's any other new ones this is a new social clock which actually comes from the HTC Facebook phones like the cha-cha and the salsa right within your clock you can see Facebook updates kind of fun and we've got a bunch of clocks you've seen the clocks for many generations of devices calculators nothing new there this is new stocks Wow full screen stocks widget now some people really like widgets and some people don't the thing with widgets is that they take up RAM they use CPU cycles in the background when you're doing other things so some people like to keep it simple with launcher pro with ADW launcher and some people like to make it really visually intense with widgets from HTC so it's really up to you how you want to do that now the notification tray has been redone here for the HTC Sensation because we get more pixels HTC has more space to work with they can fit more stuff in here so we've got this new bar with the Clear button a little bit different than before we've got shortcuts right here although of course an Android you tap and hold on the home button to get to your recent applications like so of course and now we've got a new tab down here finally HTC is bringing forth settings samsung has been doing this for a long time now from here we can quickly toggle on on and off GPS Wi-Fi bluetooth we can also go into HTC's new beautifully designed task manager so here we can see how much RAM we have free we can selectively kill applications right from the screen very beautiful display here in the new notification shade on the HTC Sensation so now let's dive into some built-in apps on the HTC Sensation email on this phone is probably the best email experience of any Android phone we've ever tested okay let's jump into the mail application HDC is brilliant when it comes to designing this email app up here at the top we have the drop down arrow where we can switch between mail applications to the right of that we have a new message button and then we've got these emails with four line previews but you can change it to be no lines or up to I think five so if we go into more and settings and general settings so versatile here we can go to portrait body preview so we can do three lines like we have now one line or none this is really awesome so if you're the kind of person that likes to just glance at their box inbox to see previews you can turn this up to five lines and really instantly without having to go into a message read the top few lines or if you like to see just a simple index maybe with one line you can do that if you want to make the font size really small and fit a lot of text on the screen if you have good eyes you can change the smallest end on the sensation you can really get away with that because the pixel density is nice and so it just looks really really good on the screen so here we have our inbox we've got check boxes already exposed the Samsung Galaxy S 2 for example doesn't have the check boxes as expose making it difficult to do email arbitrage so what we can do here is we can check off multiple messages boom within a second mark red delete or move to and fortunately unlike stock Android when you check something and you do an action on it it becomes unchecked huh if you get a Nexus S and you try to do this it stays checked no matter what you do with it which is very frustrating so we can go to delete from here we can obviously click on a message and now we get these buttons along the bottom a little bit different than what we got with the previous HTC mail apps so you got to kind of experiment with these to figure out what they are this is reply this is reply halt forward move to folder and trash so kind of a little bit of a learning curve there let's also go back into the settings and see all of the other settings that we can use change font size use a signature we can change the cap the attachment cache asked before deleting body portrait preview so really a killer fast customisable mail app here on the HTC Sensation five stars for male experience taking advantage of the full qHD resolution and the calendar has also been revamped to be very very nice and so has the app tray which we'll go over in a sec just want to jump into the calendar real quick so here's the calendar and so now it's just looks a lot better than it did before so we've got these buttons along the bottom and we can toggle between the the the day view we could go to the week view just looks really slick on the screen and then we have of course this this agenda view which most people would probably use and finally invitation screen and all of this works gloriously is that a word gloriously in landscape too so really beautiful calendar display now you just got a little preview of the new application tray on the HTC Sensation so we've got three sliders along the bottom finally HTC has done something with sliders there they're sort of very intelligent interface paradigm in the application tray and now when you flick through the applications they kind of go notch by notch instead of all at one time sort of freely scrolling and what we can do here is change how they're sorted so we can change the sorting order from date and Ottis which you could do in previous HTC phones but now if we slide to the right we have frequent apps which is something that people will probably keep this on at all times and over to the right we've downloaded apps so you can see all of your third-party apps in one screen it's really fantastic and if you land on one of them and you close it and go back in it brings you back to that same area so this is probably where most people will want to land on their frequently used applications because a lot of these things people don't use in here especially the built in carrier apps that you cannot remove okay so let's talk about web browsing experience I know this video is starting to run a little bit long but there's just so much to talk about in the HTC Sensation so here we're loading Google and of course we've got this cool tab view where we can open up a new tab let's jump into pocketnow.com we're going to do comparisons a lot of comparisons with this device so you can see how fast it is with the dual-core processor let's slow the desktop view we're over why right now see how long this taste takes sensation has fantastic web browsing performance as a little bit of a preview it's not as fast as the Galaxy s2 but it is much faster than the Desire HD then the Nexus S you name it the sensation pretty much beats it and so here we have pocket now and you can see the address bar is very skinny because of the qHD resolution and it disappears when you start scrolling of course so when scroll down the page we get no checkerboards we can do a little pinch to zoom action extremely smooth very fluid the colors on the screen are fantastic we're running super LCD panel it's not Super AMOLED plus but it is darn good so let's jump into Engadget here because that's a really long webpage especially when we load the desktop version so let's do the checker board test let's load the desktop version and while it's loading we're going to try to flip down the page to see if you get checker boards no checker boards fantastic performance on the the sensation we can flick back and forth this is still a little bit choppy this was always choppy in previous HTC devices still choppy now but not too bad we can go into there and flick down we can double tap on a column it will resize it beautifully text is super sharp super clear awesome marks for web browsing and of course we've got a bunch of settings another thing that's great that HTC is always done is adjust the the size of text within the whole operating system so text is really small here allowing you to see all of the menu options without having to scroll which is always nice so standard options in terms of web browsing it's always nice to leave plugins set to ask which is somewhere around here or on demand so that you don't have the Flash content loading slowing down your pages even though this does have a dual core processor flash does doe slow down devices okay real quick let's dive into the included applications to see if there's anything interesting here 360 shop 360 updates that's for a Vodafone this is actually a Vodafone device we've got dice which is an HTC thing we have HTC hub which is great which you to extend the use of your phone to download new scenes this does still have scenes by the way what I like the most here is the skins so you can download the skin to change the entire look and feel of your phone these are two new ones purple passion and painting the world this one's kind of cool music lover so you download that and in the notification shade you'll see that it's downloading you can tap on that and then apply it somehow oh that's a new one Burgundy okay these are the built-in ones that we just came to I'm just gonna go to Burgundy that looks pretty cool so click apply and so what this is gonna do is revamp all of the screens and if you go back to the to the HTC homescreen it's gonna have to refresh things are gonna be burgundy so that's always a fun little thing to patisserie and with and there you go there's the burgundy woohoo okay so let's jump into settings real quick and see if there's anything useful there and if we go to display we can change the notification flash so this has an LED notification which you can turn on for email MMS missed calls that kind of thing auto rotate screen is obviously always turned on there not much other things have been added here if we go to sdcard and storage total space available is of course seven point three eight gigabytes available about five the eight gigabyte card out of the box will probably give you about six gigabytes of space plus an available of one gigabyte in your add about seven gigabytes of space out of the box of course you can add a 32 gig microSD card we go to a bat phone we can see that there's software here to software we are running on android 2.3.3 since version 3.0 so this is running the latest version of sense the latest version of Android