Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocket now calm and this is the software tour of the HTC touch HD now there's a lot oft we're on this device but we're only going to cover the major and interesting things and we're going to cover everything thoroughly in the upcoming review on pocketnow.com so watch out for that so here we have touchflo 3d and it's been slightly reworked for the touch HD so it adds a few tabs that you don't find on the touch diamond and the touch pro and those sort of devices what's interesting is that if you tap one of the buttons along the bottom one of the icons you get a little bit of haptic feedback just as you would if you touch one of the hardware buttons here on the touch HD which is great because it lets you know that you've actually pressed the button so going to the right we have favorite people you've seen this before you've seen the text messaging tab before also the internet tab which lets you flick through all your favorites quite easily and access a web page really fast and then then we have this new tab the stocks tab and this is really great because you can put all of the stocks that you're watching on the screen though update automatically you can flick through them to see the next one and if you want more information you just tap right on the chart and you get a more elaborate chart with information about the stock and it's using yahoo finance so you can go to six months you can see the chart how things have been going so that's a really good addition going over to the right we have the photo tab which is a little different than the other touchflo 3d because you get more picture because the screen is longer right so you can actually see more of the picture going down the screen and of course you flick your finger you flick your stylus and you can look through your pictures that way next up is the music tab and we've seen this before you can play songs right from your today screen or you can flip through your album art if you have any songs on your device going over to the right we have the weather tab which is slightly reworked now if you remember the weather tab on the diamond and touch pro they'll let you see a five-day forecast but you have to go to another screen to do so um this way we have the weather forecast right on the screen because the screen is longer so that's great ok go over to the next tab we have some settings and in this version of touchflo 3d you can customize the taps so you can uncheck the ones you don't want and you can rearrange them by tapping and dragging like so so that's a really good addition and if we finish up in programs we see that there are a lot of icons on the screen and of course if you want to add a program you tap on the plus button you scroll with your finger like so very smooth flick scrolling and you just tap on something in the icona pop up click scrolling is prevalent throughout the entire operating system here so it's really finger friendly okay so let's get into programs i want to show you some things that you may not have seen before or that are interesting performance on the touch HD is pretty good as you're going to see in an upcoming video it's about the same as the touch pro and the diamond which is already pretty darn fast so here we are in programs we have the usual HTC entries we've Communication Manager we have the camera which we're going to talk about in the review it's 5 megapixels so probably take some great shots we have FM radio with a with a new icon this device comes with google maps which of course is free to everyone let's take a look at opera and see how web pages render on such a wide large display okay so here we are I'm going to go to cnn.com it's a news where I shall go to cnet's closer and let's see how long this takes were over a Wi-Fi connection right now now unfortunately the prototype version of the touch HD had flash support and this device does not it doesn't look like they included the updated version of opera that has flash support although it has a new zooming feature that i'm going to show you in a second so here we are we're done loading and now i'm just going to flip it over to landscape and we get a really fast screen rotation and of course you can flick your finger to go down the page now we have this new zoom slider of course you can zoom in by double tapping and it will resize the column very nice or you can use the zoom slider now which I don't like that much it's not very precise so tap on it I can go in I much prefer the double tap method and using the internet on this device it's just amazing you see so much screen data at one time it's just remarkable so we're going to get out of opera mobile all right let's go down the list we have the usual entries I want to show you YouTube because it's a slightly different version of YouTube and i also want to show you how videos look streaming videos on this device ok so what's new about this version of opera or youtube I should say is that there's now a program guide at the top previous versions didn't have this that came on the touch pro in touch diamond which which lets you dial down by category in YouTube so we can go to let's go to science and technology and we're going to filter by the top-rated video and I'm going to play the first one I see or the second one so let's go to actually this one looks a little better and we go to landscape and videos just look really fantastic on this device this may not be the best video to to demonstrate that but take my word for it you'll see this in an upcoming video that I'm going to do comparing the touch pro and the touch HD that video playback is just very smooth it looks fantastic on the huge screen and the wvga resolution really helps to make things extra crisp and extra clear ok so let's go into the settings now and talk about a few things let's start off by going into buttons and here we can customize just one button we don't really have that many choices to begin with but we can do a tap and hold of the call start button which is good we don't have voice command we voice speed dial which you much must train it's kind of annoying let's go over to system and see how much memory we have we have a few programs open right now but even then we have over a hundred megabytes of free program memory this device has about 200 free which is the same around the same as the touch pro so that's good let's go down the list we have of course the calibration wizard for HTC devices with an accelerometer and something is kind of unfortunate is that you can't change the orientation of the screen permanently so if we go down to screen we don't have the setting to change the orientation so if I want to use it in landscape full time I can't do that the only times when I can use landscape is when you're looking at pictures or you're on YouTube or you're in Opera so that's that's really unfortunate and over in connection we have the usual things now I want to talk about entering data entering text on the touch HD because obviously doesn't have a keyboard so how do you enter data well it has all the HTC keyboards that come on other devices and the really good keyboards so here we have a few choices of keyboards let me show you them we have the phone keypad which is what you're seeing now compact qwerty which is like a shirt type and then a full qwerty which is obviously a full on keyboards so i'm going to show you this one and this is kind of like a t9 pad that you would have on a numeric phone so i'm going to just type you know today is saturday and i have it switched to ABC which so it's not doing the t9 let me turn that on okay so let's try that today a Saturday today is Saturday there it is pretty fast right you can change that the the word completion options and that sort of thing let's try another keyboard let's try the suretype and I think the shirts at keyboard would be best suited for long emails where you can use both thumbs whereas the previous keyboard is good for if you're using it one handed so I'm going to type again today is Saturday just as good and like i said if i were to pick this up and use my thumb's it would be even faster and let me just finish up by showing you the full qwerty keyboard and here it is it's kind of like the iphone keyboard where it doesn't register a press unless you lift up your finger so overall the keyboards on the HTC touch HD are pretty good and I think after a while of getting used to it after a few days of usage you'd become really comfortable and be able to enter text pretty fast so that's a great thing and with the large screen it helps to be able to have so much surface area to work with okay here we are on the phone application and I'm covering up a phone number at the top because is exposed so here's the problem because this device doesn't have a deep AB d-pad we can't go down to Ryan press right to go to home and dial his number if I tap on Ryan it's going to call Ryan that's kind of a flaw with the device but here's something interesting if I go down to Ryan and swipe right or left I can toggle between text messages mobile and home and that way if I want to call Ryan home now I just tap or if I want to use his phone to text message him I just tapped now after i switch it and took me a really long time to figure that out actually because it's kind of unconventional for windows mobile devices to not let you use the d-pad to select a number and then press right or left to choose their mobile number or their home number or that sort of thing so that's it for the software tour of the touch HD and as I was mentioning we have a video coming up where we're going to compare the touch pro with the touch HD and show you kind of how these screens differ how the performance differs and what it actually looks like to have such a large screen on the touch HD so watch out for that and follow us on Twitter so that you can find out right when we post it twitter.com slash pocket now tweets and that's it for now