Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon mini-moon from pocketnow.com and this is the software review of the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon Wireless let's get to it now for those of you that already know HTC Sense and all of its inner workings and its widgets and its design elements this is going to be kind of review for you but those of you looking at the HTC Thunderbolt kinda for the first time for those but don't really know the Sense interface that well this video should be helpful in kind of helping to navigate that for you because the truth is that this device is basically the same when you get down to the software as the inspire 4G and the Desire HD and the legend and and lots of other phones that have come out recently which isn't such a bad thing the HTC Sense interface has won awards it is won acclaim it is one of the best Android interfaces if not the best Android interface and what that means is that HTC has sort of put something on top of the stock Android experience to make it look a lot better there's a lot of eye candy that goes on here and it starts here on the home screen you get seven of them and you can do a little leap they call it the leap feature and you get to see all seven home screens you still can't add or remove them there's no menu option to do anything like that but you can rearrange them which is nice so we can move one over here move that one over here it's kind of a cool and easy way to manage your home screens and when you're ready to go to one in particular you tap on it just a quick gesture does that and that gesture also works in the browser it's a really cool gesture you pinch and you're taken out to the tab view a lot of people don't know about this gesture because it's kind of hidden but it's one of the ways that the Sense interface makes your experience on an Android phone a lot better now there are a ton of widgets that come with the HTC Sense phones and we can click this personalized button to see all of them if we go to widgets and browse all HTC widgets and we're not going to go through all 66 of them but we're just going to kind of scan through quickly we've got bookmarks I mean really good looking widgets that help to really make your home screens dynamic unfortunately you can't resize these widgets if you get launcher Pro you can get widgets that look like these but they're resizable so you could take something that except a full homescreen like this and shrink it down to be half the height which is always quite nice so a lot of different calendar widgets you get a wide variety of clocks there's the sort of quintessential weather clock that everyone thinks about when they think of HTC Sense and we've got more and more clocks tons of clocks actually FM radio you can play right from your homescreen footprints friends stream and you can pick whether you're streaming from Twitter or Facebook or both a smaller friend stream so you can fit more icons on the screen at one time we've got mail flip through your mail here's another mail widget I mean the list goes on and on they give you just such a big suite of of widgets here's a news widget for feeding news favorite people different favorite people yet another different favorite people but this one's really cool it integrates social networking into it so you can see people's feeds as they update again these widgets will take up CPU cycles and battery life so you got to ask yourself is it really worth having these widgets on your homescreen if that means that you know they're gonna take up or use our battery life so let's take this one and I'll take select my group I'm just going to do HTC favorites and it's going to pull up this widget with some people that I've added before to an HTC widget and the pictures are high quality and from here you can you can action on different people and after you tap on their face it will take you into the contacts screen so we're going to leave that off the screen so you get a lot of choices with widgets again what a lot of people do in this case they think the HTC Sense homescreen experience is a little bit too heavy it's very beautiful but it's heavy so they put on ADW launcher or launcher pro launcher pro happens to be my favorite and in fact if you want to see what launcher pro looks like this is how I have my launcher Pro set up here on the inspire 4G I mean at the end of the day they're very similar but we've got a cool dock along the bottom it's a little bit faster we've got these resizable widgets but this is not an advertisement for launcher Pro just giving you some ideas on how to customize your home screens so let's move that aside and talk about some of the other built-in application so if we go into settings we can see that this phone is running on Android 2.2 point one this is likely to be upgraded to Gingerbread in the near future probably late spring to early summer obviously two point two is not the newest version of Android so it would make sense that HTC would update that on their high-end device this is one of their most high-end devices right now another thing we want to talk about we're going to go into the browser and some other applications is the speed of this device this is a 4G LTE phone right now at this location right here there's no 4G but it's very funny if you go outside my apartment and walk to the left about 50 feet you suddenly get 4G so I've been all around town anywhere that there's 4G running benchmarks my friends think I'm crazy but I've run probably two dozen benchmarks here you can see the speeds that you're getting about 13 at the most seven six and a lot of these were under full bar conditions if you're over 3G you'll do what tells you the date and everything you're over 3G you'll do about 1.3 megabits per second on their Rev a network generally speaking you're gonna get about 6 to 7 megabits per second down we're not really sure on the upload speeds yet because this app can't take advantage or really understand process the fast 4G speeds and we also get really good pings about 50 milliseconds which means the time it takes for the server to respond so you get really good latency on 4G which we're really excited about another thing you can do with the 4G is of course use the mobile hotspot app which is somewhere around here and tether up to 8 devices now this is going to cost you about 20 dollars per month to use but considering that you got a 4G modem in your pocket it's just such a compelling feature to use ok let's go back to the home screen if we go into the app tray and we talked about this in one of the comparison videos there are there's a lot of junk here on the on the in the application trade that Verizon has thrown in what we have here is listed the apps that I've downloaded and then after Adobe Reader those are the apps that have come on the Thunderbolt and we already talked about this we've got bit bop and city ID the list goes on and on and these built-in apps you cannot remove so it's super annoying having to always see these applications that you may never use or want to use because Verizon thinks that they should be on the device so kind of a downside there the HTC Sense interface can be found in so many applications including the browser so we'll start there and you saw this is an HTC Sense edition the brow the the browser bar up here is an HTC Sense Edition it's kind of the kind of a slate like looking address bar which matches the skin that you've set for the operating system and I'll show you the skin command in a moment now if we go down here to menu and settings there's a lot of settings you can change here one that people will probably care most about is the enable plugins area wherever that might be what that will do it will determine if flash elements load on a site so if we put always-on and let's go back and load PocketNow desktop view because there are some flash ads on on that site that will take advantage of the thunderbolts ability to show you flesh so it's good the desktop version and by the way the Thunderbolt has beaten all other devices that we've compared against in terms of web browsing over Wi-Fi it's got a very very fast engine to pull down the pages and render them as quickly as possible so what you're gonna see now are some our glasses show up where the flash elements want to load and there they're loaded so here is Flash content it's pretty smooth it's a little bit choppy which is like why I like to leave plugins turn to on-demand because I only want the flash stuff to load when I'm ready to see it not when the browser decides that there is flash stuff so that's a good setting to leave on now I alluded to these skins so if you go to the personalize menu you can go to the skins section and from here you can kind of change the look and feel of the HTC Sense interface this is kind of the default look and we can swipe and go to metal this one's pretty cool so let's click apply takes a sec changes in the background it changes the notification shade it changes the highlighting color and a lot of other stuff even if we tap the weather clock we get sort of that metal theme down here on the slider if you see that pretty cool stuff now something that this device is lacking that the inspire 4G does have is the HTC hub which allows you to use htcsense.com to remotely manage your phone a really great service it allows you to remotely wipe your phone to put a lock screen on to put a password on it in case you lose it but for some reason it's not included here on the the HTC thunderbolt it just it doesn't work with it and you would know that because there would be the HTC hub feature but it's not it's not here ugly performance is very good we will go into a YouTube video and see how long it takes to to bring up a video so we'll search for pocket now and we'll pull up a video and within you know two or three seconds it loads very good performance of course you've got this awesome kickstand to watch videos with so kind of picture this right got it up on a table you're studying or having lunch or hopefully not studying because you should be paying attention to not the phone you can really use this kickstand to to make a better viewing angle for you when you're watching videos or you're checking email or what-have-you it's a really good addition to have there now a thunderbolt does have DLNA support so if you go to the connected media application this is where you go to set up the DLNA so if you have a TV that has support for this technology you can actually flick a picture or a video onto the screen it's really awesome wirelessly but of course you have to have the equipment that works with it more and more devices are coming with DLNA I think in the future it's going to be a pretty big deal because people have this problem where the content kind of lives on your phone right and you want to get it onto the big screen to show friends or family or whatnot and DLNA is the technology to do so let's take a look at the camera application here we've got camcorder and camera and if we turn on just the camera application obviously it's going to be blank but we can switch to the front-facing camera and you can say I to me hey how you doing and it's got this really cool real-time effect thing so I can make my face look really weird hopefully the cameras picking up I can move this dot around the screen that's the weirdest face I've ever seen we can change that around to vignette we can change it I mean this is these are really cool real-time effects grayscale kind of like an old-fashioned movie negative well that is creepy aqua all of the newer HTC devices have this and this is a really fun feature it's kind of like photobooth on the Mac and it's just it's a lot of fun and you can take pictures like this you can take full videos like this so watch this I can actually film a video with my face well they actually limit the number of features you can do when you do video so if I say record the video hey everybody I am recording a video and negative and then we go back we click play so you can add a lot of fun with the cameras on the HTC Thunderbolt certainly has the graphic power and the CPU to be able to do these effects in real time and as you're gonna see in the full review of the photo quality's really really good on the HTC Thunderbolt both in terms of 720p video recording and also taking photos eight megapixels close-up bright light it just does it all really really well now in terms of battery life battery life isn't so great on the Thunderbolt it's probably about what you would get on the Evo maybe a little bit better since certainly Android has evolved since then and usually with every incremental upgrade an HTC sends and Android you get better battery life so we're gonna say you can get through about a day with heavy use if you're using it a ton you probably won't get through the day you want to keep a charger around in terms of moderate use you'll go a little bit more than a day a day and a half a day and a quarter and light use you'll get about two days of usage out of the HTC Thunderbolt so coming up soon on pocketnow.com we're gonna have the full review with sample pictures more notes on performance and overall impressions there's a lot of interesting nuances about this device that we're going to talk about in the review we hope you enjoyed our video coverage of the HTC Thunderbolt if there's anything you still want to see drop us a comment and we'll try to get to it please thumbs up this video if you liked it and thank for watching that's it for now