Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe with pocket now and this phone the HTC Desire s is running Android Gingerbread that's two point three with HTC Sense UI version 2.1 this phone the t-mobile g2 that I've got CyanogenMod 7 on is not running HTC Sense but with the new 3 version out some people call that 3.0 others call it HTC Sense 3d let's see what happens when we try and put sense 3d on to the g2 let's go take a look ok first of all this rom is very very experimental it it's not even the right resolution all kinds of fun stuff but I haven't seen it yet you haven't seen it yet so let's go ahead and look and see what it's like so the steps we need I've fired up rom manager premium over here and what I'm gonna do is install a rom from sdcard I've already downloaded it to this device so it should be over here in the download folder and there it is RM k rom vision sensation yada yada yada we'll select that we'll say ok that's the one that I want I do want to backup my existing rom just in case something goes awry and I do need to wipe data and cache otherwise this is going to blow up all over the place so two very important steps say ok to that it gives us a warning saying you know this is your last chance to back out do you want to do that I want to go ahead and continue so we'll say ok it's gonna reboot me into my recovery image which in this case is clockworkmod recovery and from there it's gonna go ahead and run all of those different tasks that I just told it to that's probably going to take about 5 or 10 minutes so to save you that agony I'm gonna go ahead and shoot that off camera so when we come back we'll get the first boot and see exactly what this is going to look like alright and here we go this is the first boot screen that we've got you can clearly see the HTC confidential so I hope this isn't getting anybody in trouble we've got our traditional tab to unlock we'll go ahead and unlock that got our HTC scream there again now if you want to try this yourself on your own t-mobile g2 or HTC Desire Z head on over to pocketnow.com and I will have a link to the the XDA thread where you can go and grab the wrong for this as long as the ROM is still up you can go ahead and do it as soon as they take the ROM down well that son we're not gonna mirror it or host it or anything for you so now with most HTC Sense roms you'll have an initial setup where basically launch is a setup wizard to walk you through the rest of the process configuring your username and password and whatnot so I believe that's what it's doing right here we're gonna go ahead and let that continue and be right back okay so here we are at the language selector screen and I'm gonna go ahead and choose English Singapore because that's I only went to Singapore once and they spoke English there I'm not gonna transfer my stuff so we're gonna skip that okay we're gonna go ahead and say mobile network or Wi-Fi so so far the setup process is pretty much the same as what we'd see in any HTC sense ROM we'll go ahead and automatically sync data we want to go ahead and connect to my Wi-Fi so I'll do that off-camera so I've done that and you can see my green checkmark there now one thing I noticed while I was doing it this watermark this HTC confidential watermark is laid on top of everything so every screen that you see is gonna have that on top of it and I don't know if there's any way that we can get that off we're going to go ahead and use location just like we've seen before we're going to agree to let them do that I'm not going to set up any accounts right well you know what let's go ahead and do that just so we can go through the process like we normally do set up my normal gmail account okay so we put in the username and password and I don't necessarily want to keep this device backed up if this were a normal phone that I'd be doing I'd keep that checkmark but because this is just kind of a demo of an experimental ROM I want to uncheck that so it doesn't sink what I do here up with with Google so you got a green check on my Google account I'm not gonna do any of the others I'll just go ahead and hit next and yeah let's go ahead no you know because this is a pre-release ROM I don't necessarily want to do that so we uncheck the HTC anonymous collection we'll go ahead and finish that okay the first thing you're gonna notice is it's gone ahead and pulled it in my wallpaper from my previous device but you know also notice look over here on the side see how everything is kind of scrunched up to the right side of the device in fact it's cutting off half of market and half of camera which isn't really all that cool well the reason for that is this ROM is built for a different resolution device and it's not just pixel density you know it's actually the size of the device so I can't go in and shrink it and make it any smaller by anything that is user controllable that's something they may be able to do in future versions of this ROM but for now it's just going to and we're gonna have to live with it now that's not a problem other than just you know it doesn't look all that great until you get the keyboard opened you know when you open up the keyboard that's when you notice you know half of your letters on the side over there are cut off and up not very usable so we're just scrolling around here the first thing I'm noticing is I don't have an HTC Sense little dock bar down on the bottom and I don't know why so what I'm gonna do is you guys have seen this up front really quickly oh that's cool do you see the carousel there I just flipped through it really fast and that time I tapped on it rather than flipping fast so we're just gonna flip there you go the carousel where the faster you flip it the smaller those thumbnails are and then as it slows down it brings that thumbnail up nice and close really cool it's kind of like what SPB is done but in a more user-friendly more animated way right there on the home screen so let me go ahead and find some cool stuff to show you here it's looking like we got the stock widgets you know some updates here and know that Celsius guys I haven't changed it to two Fahrenheit yet so it's a bit warmer than nine degrees but anyway really cool let me dig into it and I'll show you the highlights in just sec okay the next cool thing that I found is the web browser no not that that's the cool part but check this out I've loaded up the PocketNow website and this is the mobile version of our website you guys are all familiar with that but check this out see that guy little little RSS feed guy right there yeah tap on that and check it we can now add a subscription I can rename this which I'd like to rename PocketNow but P is way over there so I can't do that so we're just going to call it RSS put a checkmark next to that and we'll go ahead and add that now theoretically if there were a whole bunch of RSS feeds that we had on our page it would list all of them down there so we'd be able to see it now it said that the RSS loading was complete and that there are 99 plus items in the feed and that it is loading up right here so I assume that what this is is an integrated RSS reader into the web browser you can go in and let's see so just really cool really quick you can subscribe to the RSS feed so you don't even have to visit the websites to get the the news so really kind of cool there if you like something like the white iPhone 4 go ahead and put a star next to that of course I'm an Android guy so I can't do that so we'll uncheck that yeah that was humor guys just so you know well hey you know kind of cool it's even got this lazy load where it'll pull in the most recent ones and then when you get down to the bottom it will go out and load the next batch so very fluid very nice fits on the screen all kinds of neat stuff now one thing I do want to show you over here ready let's go ahead and go home and I've got an alternate launcher apparently that came with this or that's being pulled so let's use sense now I mentioned to you that I didn't have a little bottom app drawer launcher drawer thing down at the bottom right you know the one has the phone that customized and the app drawer button on it has a nice swoosh style well that's because my screens not big enough it's actually right about down here I can screw this up so it's down here if I could tap the screen down there I could get to it but I can't so we're just going to have to live with not being able to launch many of our apps from here again not all that functional but still kind of cool so let's dig deeper and see what else we can find all right next up I'm going to show off the the weather widget but to do that I want to show you kind of the that HTC 2.1 the sense 2.1 versus the sense 3 widget so you can kind of get a feel for how they're different so the icons and the way to get to them are the same so let's go ahead and open them both up now with HTC Sense UI you get to pick which type or which style of widget you want so the traditional one is right here and it looks very nice it's very well done there's one of three there's two of three a little bit smaller there's three or three very small and I believe that's a two by one so this is the one that I usually select so let's go ahead and do that and you can see nice animation it looks really good it's still measured in Celsius I believe so showing you that kind of stuff okay now over here you'll notice a new kind of full screen very nice looking widget now I'm not going to talk too much about this one first I want to show you the other two remove that phone out of the way so we come over here this is the small one just like you saw on the the desire s a moment ago we go back one that's the the bigger one kind of a two by two and then you've got this new one and this is really cool so I'm going to go ahead and select this and just gorgeous go ahead and select it and watch what happens here clouds fly out at ya it animates in you've got the sound effects going along with it you can see that it's raining in here again this is Celsius degrees not Fahrenheit degrees so the weather is actually accurate it has detected my location just like you'd expect so very very cool now one more cool thing that I want to show you here and I don't know exactly how to get to it so let's just kind of stumble through let's go into settings I could have taken a shortcut to personalize I suppose and lock screen you see lock screen right here now this I would love to show you in a lot of detail but I can't because on this ROM if you apply a lock screen you can no longer boot your phone it's very securely locked I guess you could say I believe that's because the lock button is off the screen so you can't grab it and pull it up to unlock now the reason for that is this is a 3d style resolution if you will it's made for a qHD screen which this phone does not have so what that means is basically it's about the same width but in aspect ratio it's going to be longer so you think it's gonna be longer so that it has more of a widescreen or a letterbox look to it but let me go ahead and show you what you would have now they've taken kind of widgets and put them on to the lock screen so you can see down here this little kind of half circle that's hidden off the bottom of the screen that's your unlocker okay so if you were to grab that and of course I have to go back into it now personalize a lock screen so if you grab that little washer there and pull it up it will have a nice animation and will unlock the screen there are some videos out on YouTube to show you exactly how that works but it's pretty much like anything else you've seen you drag it up and it unlocks there's some nice animations that you'd expect from HTC Sense in there as well but back to widgets you can see here this is using their their finance or their stocks widget so you can turn on your device without unlocking it have information too or have a one glance look at your information it's updated it's right there and it's ready for you but of course you may not want stock so you might want something like just the time in a nice wallpaper that gives you an indicator of how many phone calls you've missed how many emails you've got waiting how many text messages you've got waiting as well over here the next one is just photos so you can have your photo album there and you can see they're kind of floating around here so I can imagine that being a nice floaty 3d animated look into your gallery which might not be a good thing if you have inappropriate pictures in your gallery somebody tricks up your phone unlocks it and yeah so be smart cool little watch widget there over here these are your messages again in that same kind of floating around you know the cards are in space showing you the most recent than rotating and then weather just like we saw now this actually functions exactly like we just saw with the weather widget on your home screen this time is just on the lock screen so you have that animation right there as well so very very cool there are some settings that you can do in here to customize the buttons down at the bottom all kinds of neat stuff all right now this is HTC Sense UI 3d right so what does the 3d mean well first of all this is a 2d phone one dimension to dimension that's all my screen can display three dimension means that there would be some depth to what I'm looking at so here's what they've done with some of the widgets now let me show you first with the flip clock the flip clock as you've seen before kind of flips the numbers down well it has to flip on some hinges right but where are the hos hinge is hiding so if we rotate look right up there on the top if I can get in there closer for you can you see the hinge that rotates on you can also see that there's some depth to those cards you can see that there's three stacked on top of each other and if I rotate that it kind of goes away kind of goes the other way where the numbers are sitting on top so very cool how it's doing that if I come back over here to my people look at the rolodex card up there on the top see that how it sitting up on top of the the rest of the widget so let's go over here to weather so here's our weather widget let me just put on and if we look at that we've got multiple layers of clouds we've got the temperature on top of that and everything is on top of the the background of the widget itself so very cool now looking at this just right here it's just spit and polish htc didn't want to reinvent the sense UI instead what they wanted to do is improve it so what they've done is they've kept things pretty much the same but they've added in some extra features some extra polish and you know they've just made it look really nice I mean especially when you come in here and do this fast flip where you're going through and it's rotating through and the carousel it's just really really nice it looks cool when you add that to the 3d effect and when you add that to a high definition or a qHD screen which is what most of the new phones are going to be coming with that's my prediction you get a you know longer screen that's more like you're watching a movie that's more like a you know an HD style screen like you have on your TV so when you're looking at it this way your video content is going to be more letterbox than it is just in a box like that so they're doing that across the whole screen that's nice because anything that you record with your camera or with your video camera is then going to theoretically be hi-def so it will look wonderful when you watch it on your your TV now the HTC EVO 3d even has a micro USB port in it that with an adapter will plug into your HDMI port on your big-screen TV and if you've got a compatible TV it will even charge your phone while you're watching it so you're not gonna have to worry about you know I've only got 10% battery life yet am I gonna be able to watch this whole home video or what not you'll be able to to do that on the newer TVs or with a powered adapter which I'm sure they're going to come out with first so all kinds of cool now I'm not going to be able to function with this ROM very obviously and you could see there my my lockscreen was the old style lockscreen and my back lights not working entirely right so I'm gonna have to flash this back to something that I can use more regularly but it's really cool and I'm sure there's going to be updates to it now that's the good news the bad news is HTC has come out on their Twitter feed and said that they're not going to have since 3d retrofit to existing devices a lot of that is because of screen resolutions because of extra sensors that are in the newer devices and 3ds screens and whatnot and I don't know so much that I blame them especially because it's more just polish on the existing Sense UI experience than anything else but I can see us hopefully being able to as a developer or a hacker community get in there and make those fixes so that we can run this on some of our unlock devices I think it's cool I don't know what do you think and more specifically I've only had you know a couple hours to go through this and look at it and play with all the the bells and whistles here so is there something that I missed is there something that you'd like to share with us that you found in Sense UI 3d if so that's what the comments are for leave them down below if you like seeing these things so you don't have to try and flash it on your phone and run into all the problems of course give the video a thumbs up and head on over to pocketnow.com for that hyper link if you'd like to try this out on your phone as well for PocketNow I'm Joe Levi