Gadgetory

hey guys it's jeff Farina with pocketnow.com if you start unboxing of the HTC Wildfire we were able to actually start the device up and give you a brief look at HTC Sense well in this video we're going to dive in a little bit further and give you a tour of what sense has to offer in terms of being a android operating system skin and we're also going to look at some of the preloaded software on the HTC Wildfire device so without further ado let's go ahead and get started alright and we are back and we're going to start off our series on the HTC Wildfire by giving you a brief intro to the software that is loaded on this device now the device itself comes with android 2.1 which is also known as Eclair and as you can see here it's running HTC Sense over the android OS now for those of you who haven't used HTC Sense before it is a custom skin that has been developed by HTC for Android and it gives you some different options as well as some home screen features so I can show you right here to scrolling left and right you're going to get 27 different home screens with HTC sense now the advantage here is if you've used an HTC device in the past it's still going to stay consistent to that however if you have an using HTC device in the past this is going to be new to you a phone button down here as well as the menu button and this plus button these are exclusive to HTC Sense the phone is pretty self-explanatory it brings up the phone option pressing the menu button will bring up your menu here which will allow you to scroll through all of your various apps you have on your system and then going to the plus button will allow you to add a shortcut whether it be a widget and a folder etc rather than just a long press you see sense is also known for this nice clock and weather widget you see here which gives you a big flip clock as well as the brief weather forecast you can actually tap on the clock to get a few different settings such as an alarm clock motor a desk clock type of mode you can also get your world clock so you basically add your different cities your alarms stopwatch and your timer now there is one difference with HTC sense or better yet with Android on this device than a lot of the newer Android devices you do not have the ability to and live wallpapers and I believe that's because of the processor devices on the HTC hero have also been updated to android 2.1 and still do not have the ability to do the live wallpapers and this is very similar to that once again most likely because of the process are coming in only five hundred twenty eight megahertz using a live wallpaper will definitely dedicate some of that cpu so by sacrificing the ability to have live wallpapers HTC has kept the processor somewhat up to spec in terms of the apps don't run incredibly slow however if you do have a live wallpaper you would definitely see a difference now because its uses HTC Sense HTC is going to incorporate many of their own widgets as well that includes stocks news weather even a music player now showing you some of those are up the bat is going to be the music player application itself with a widget itself which is much better than the Android music players by default that's one of the big complaints with Android as the music player this widget you're seeing down here is the HTC music player if we actually go ahead and click on this it will bring up the player itself and as you can see it gives you the cover art type style you can actually flow through pretty easily this definitely runs better than the stock Android music player going back to the home screen we can continue to scroll toward the right you have your stocks widget here these are the default it will give you you can change these though to it ever fits your portfolio or whatever you want to follow for that matter now you can also pinch in to get a helicopter type view now going back to the opposite side of our home screen we have the HTC news widget now as you see here it is a typical size widget which will give you all of your new stories you can actually just scroll right through select a widget and it will actually bring up that story for you to read in its detail going back to the home screen that you can actually change which feeds by pressing the all stories and it allows you to change which feeds you want to pull from as you see here we have the cnet seeing gadgets the yahoo is you can even add many more though if you'd like you can do it based on RSS as well so it's incense an RSS reader as well now we also have the HTC mail widget which will basically show your email right on the screen as well as you can see here this gives the ability to actually write a response directly from your home screen and sense a much faster way to respond to email you just type who compose the message and then you just press the send button and off it goes you're also going to have the HTC bookmark widget which is once again pretty straightforward you can see here it gives you some of your favorite bookmarks and these are the default standards that it's going to come preset with you just scroll up and down you can actually choose the window that you want to go to so for example we can press the google page right there and now it's actually to bring us right to google com pretty fast and simple it eliminates the need of having open up a browser and type in the address every time and you get the added benefit of being visual a little bit of eye candy for you as you can see right there now of course that doesn't mean that you are stuck having to use the HTC widgets you do have to use HTC Sense but you can load some of the widgets from the market and any pre-loaded widgets from Android are also going to be included for example the power manager here which is a Android stock widget you can use that in conjunction with the HTC calendar breakout widget as I have on that screen there which means that for the most part your standard Android experience will live in harmony with HTC sense while many people may say that sense does slow down the OS because it is in fact a skin and it's a very intense skin it does also give you the added benefit of some of the productivity features like this calendar widget here as well as the well-regarded clock that you see on the home screen now the on-screen keyboard because it is a 3.2 inch screen of course has to be modified to fit that screen as you can see here it's very similar to the HTC hero on sprint it's very similar to that keyboard if it's the screen perfectly it's actually very easy to type on very similar to the iphone in terms of the accuracy really very few errors are had when typing a long message or a quick message for that matter one great thing about sense is that it's going to incorporate your Facebook and your Twitter contacts with your standard address book so that when someone calls you if they have a Facebook page it will actually show their picture and it may even show their status updates or their recent twitter updates in the contacts profile itself now you're also going to have the addition of what's called apps sharing if we go into the menu here as you can see app sharing this gives you the ability to actually recommend an app to a friend so you can actually as you see a tease of two to two apps that are currently on this device Facebook and Twitter so you can actually pick Twitter and you can share it via Facebook friend stream which is the HTC custom stream to see your feeds from facebook and twitter you can send it through the gmail application through the standard mail application as well as to a text message etc etc even on twitter if you want it to that's a pretty cool feature you know being able to show your friends what apps you use and which ones they should download especially if they're new to android and that's going to conclude our part one of the software overview of the HTC Wildfire which comes pre-loaded with sense which is the OS skin make sure you stay tuned for our coming hardware update as well as the software overview part 2 which will incorporate a browser test as well as some of the different social networking applications on a speed test compared to one of these devices big brother the HTC EVO as always please leave us a thumbs up thank you everyone for watching