Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is a software tour of the kyocera echo first dual screen android smartphone that happens to be on Sprint let's get to it so in the previous video we talked in detail about how the dual screen configuration works how you can actually get once one app on one screen another app on the other screen and use two apps at the same time we'll put an annotation up on the video right here now but if you want to watch this video first we'll put the annotation back on the video at the end so you can jump back to take a look at that because it's pretty important to understanding how this device works so in this video we're going to talk about settings built-in applications overall experience of the device and we've got the final review coming up soon on pocketnow.com now of course you can use the kyocera echo in the single screen mode like so but what's nice is that when you open up the second display the screen comes out of standby so you don't even have to unlock it so it's going to turn on in a sec here we go and it ships with the android 2.2 basic default launcher which is kind of boring so i've installed launcher pro here just to see if third-party launchers will work with the echo and fortunately they do so we've got launcher pro here it works very well even the the specific widgets work they scroll nicely so so ADW launcher and the other launchers that you might use to replace stock android will work but you have to get a special application called tablet mode extension in order for it to work so if we scroll down a little bit we should see it down what they want to do that should see it down here tablet mode extension here it is it's a quick little app that you download from the android market and it allows you to scale a nap across both screens even a launcher if you turn this off it doesn't work so you might as well leave it on I can't find it in the background processes so it doesn't seem to be taking up any ram to run now take a note of the battery thirty-eight percent and start the timer now we're going to kind of keep an eye on the battery life how much it declines every minute I'm not going to cut out the video so it's just going to be a continuous play here okay so let's jump into the program list here the app tray and talk about some things that we have here we've got battery use kyocera actually has brought that forward they're just linking to the setting which allows you to see what is using the most battery life naturally on the kyocera echo you're powering two screens display is going to be at the top this device was did it sitting idle for about 24 hours which is why cell standby is thirty percent and display is twenty-five percent in terms of battery life if you keep this on automatic screen brightness you should get through almost today but probably not it really depends on how much you're using the tablet mode if you use it in single screen mode you'll definitely get through a day if you're using the tablet mode a lot you're going to have to carry around that extra battery that comes with the echo so if we go over here to display I've got auto brightness turned off because for the sake of this video I had to boost the screen brightness turning on auto screen brightness just makes the screen way too dim although it really helps to conserve battery life it has a light sensor so when you go outside the screen gets bright it gets visible one of the problems with the echo is that if you're wearing polarized sunglasses you can't see the screen which is pretty annoying so I'm going to turn back turn off auto screen brightness you can see where we are right now so we're at about seventy-five percent so keep that in mind when you are looking at the battery meter when we go back to the home screen and check that out okay so let's go back here in settings not much to talk about in here we can go to SD phone card storage we can see that with the 8 gigabyte class 2 micro SD card we're getting about 7.5 gigabytes of space which is good because the device only has about 408 around 500 megabytes of usable memory before you install programs and things like that so it's nice that it comes with a microSD card although you'd be hard-pressed to find a device these days without it you can sideload applications which is nice so you can check off install applications from unknown sources that's a good thing let us jump back to the program list here some things we want to take a look at if we go into echo top apps it's going to take us to this website it was already loaded which tells you about the tablet mode extension which is a must if you have the echo and then it shows you these featured apps and you're thinking to yourself okay these apps must work in dual screen mode right only if only a few apps will be able to run simultaneously like the web browser for example and all of these apps as we talked about in the last video so i went ahead and i downloaded one of these apps thinking that uh oh maybe one of these games will work simon in the simulcast mode but no so the game i downloaded i pay two bucks for this and i'm going to get a refund at the end of this video because it's horrible is called shopping and if i do the double tap nothing happens and the graphics are horrible so it's and the sound is horrible too so I want gotta wonder why kyocera is advertising these horrible apps that don't even work in the dual screen mode my guess is that there are no other apps that work in the dual screen mode besides the ones that come stock on the device which is a shame but the sdk is out there for developers that want to make their apps Amal task capable we're probably not going to see any the kyocera is echo is just one device so let's go back in here and take a look at the the app list so a lot of these apps are all of them will work in tablet mode very nicely so here we have the calendar we can go to you know a month view or that's not right go into a month you over here and it looks great it scans it scrolls to both displays just fine as do most applications that you'll find even third party apps on the kyocera echo here's an entry HD games it's taking you to a game loft website which will presumably show you some HD games but we're not terribly interested in that let's go down a little bit more so some advertising here get named Koh games I don't really need that to be in my application tray if I want named Koh games I'll go to the market and get them we've got the sprint stuff we've got sprint and a scar here on the kyocera echo and it has problems authenticating the device because probably signed up for that we've got sprint TV here a lot of sprint stuff of course if we go over here or if we can have to put it into portrait mode it's going to download sprint TV from the market and of course you've seen this before it allows you to watch on demand TV or rent a movie although it will cost you cancel that or it's going to install in order to use the service see what else we have here the phone application is interesting it doesn't have quick dial unfortunately so as we talked about in the last video if you're trying to call Brandon and you want to be our a do it just it doesn't pull up the contact which is kind of annoying and this is one of the apps that works in simultext so we can pull up say YouTube on the bottom while the phone is on the top and there you can see it coming through weren't actually not going to go through with that we've got sprint football live sprint radio a lot of spritz stuff TeleNav gps navigator of course you can use the built in google maps navigation for free it comes with the sim 3 where the sims 3 but you actually have to download some content in order to get that working and that's pretty much it there's not that much on here which is kind of a good thing we get the standard sprint stuff but we get a little bit less crap where than we would get with an AT&T device which is always nice device performance we're going to show you full benchmarks when we do the four of you on pocket now device performance is good it snappy but it is a little bit bulky at times it has frozen to the point where I take the battery out put it back in applications launch pretty speedily web browsing performance could be a lot better let's go to pocketnow.com we'll go to the desktop version after it loads kind of a graphic intense web page with some flash content I've got it set to ask to turn on plugins so it's not going to actually load the Flash content and it's a big bummer you don't get multi-touch in the browser and they do that because if you're pressing with two fingers on the display you're probably trying to bring up the simultaneous try it again up came up then it went away real quick so now so here's an example of where it's really not very responsive so I did this I'm there it is about five seconds later right so I hit the back button and it still guess it's done loading so just so I just flicked on the page nothing happened it might freeze right now if we've too many windows open okay um so yeah it is uh here's an example of where it just it's not stable I would have to take the battery out I'll be right back and we're back after resetting the device taking the battery out and putting it back in and unfortunately that's happened several times during our test period hear the echo doesn't seem to be the most stable device out there unfortunately it feels a little bit unfinished unfortunately and I guess that's that's what you get in these types of situations so we're at thirty six percent battery life it's been a little bit over two minutes so we're doing it about one percent per minute but I've seen it go down as high as three percent per minute which is insane when you're doing simulcasting with to web pages and the screen brightness is not on automatic so you can really burn through battery really quickly in certain situations on the kyocera echo so that was a quick look at the software we're going to have a full review coming up on pocketnow.com we're going to talk in detail about battery life and performance and all those other things in terms of the the basic software offering it's good that we don't get a lot of crap we're but the device definitely could be faster and it should never crash I mean android is a mature product by now and it shouldn't become unstable to the point where you have to take the battery out so if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and again we're going to put up that annotation of the previous video where we talk in depth about how the simulcast feature works it's really interesting and actually that part of the phone is quite innovative so take a look at that video and thanks for watching that's it for now