Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocket now calm and this is a pocket knife throwback to the HTC ozone a windows mobile 6.1 standard phone let's get to it so this phone was released in June 2008 so it's almost two years ago now that we saw this phone it was actually released as the HTC snap in Europe first and then it came to the US on Verizon as the ozone and then it went to sprint as the snap so the really cool thing about this phone is the keyboard this was one of the last front facing QWERTY keyboard devices that HTC made right now they're doing a lot of side sliding QWERTY keyboards and also of course the slab form factor with the on-screen display but a lot of people really appreciated having this really nice on-screen keyboard sort of blackberry style so let's take a tour around the device here we've got a tiny 2.4 inch QVGA screen so that would be 240 down and 320 across it was capable of displaying a mere 65,000 colors so not the best display on the planet it's obviously not touchscreen we've got a lot of hardware buttons down here we've got the d-pad with a selection button we've got a tap and hold to access microsoft voice command we've got the power button soft keys it's really cumbersome to actually use this today because I'm so used to using touchscreens I keep wanting to touch the screen and it's almost frustrating having to operate everything with the hardware keys but as people from the Windows Mobile days knew using hardware buttons to get around in the operating system actually could be very very fast with keyboard shortcuts and other things built in to the operating system we've got an LED notification up here to tell you if you've got a missed call or a voicemail the device was actually pretty thick even though it had not much to it inside it has a Qualcomm processor running at 528 megahertz it's got 192 megabytes of RAM so definitely nothing even close to what you get today and I mentioned the thickness because look at the thickness of the ozone compared to the desire hd it is thick than a device that is many times more powerful and of course it has a larger screen but very interesting to see this was definitely a thick device so I've got the volume up and down rocker over here on the bottom we had HTC's EXT proprietary USB port fortunately this also worked with many USB chargers if you wanted to get headphone audio output you'd have to connect an adapter which is really annoying around this time the HDC started to make all of their phones with 3.5 millimeter headphone jacks and limiting the need for that annoying adapter over here on the right we have nothing and it is completely blank on the top on the back we've got a 2 megapixel camera no flash we've got a speaker kind of a nice-looking silvery backing and if we pop off the back battery cover you'll see the 1500 milliamp hour battery really good battery life on the snap and the ozone and underneath the battery you will find a SIM card slot because this was a world capable phone for business users perhaps ok so let's talk more about the software here again we're running windows mobile 6.1 standard the non-touchscreen version of Windows Mobile they they went on to do windows mobile 6.5 standard and then they killed it so this is sort of almost towards the end of Windows Mobile's lifespan what we have here is kind of a nice looking sort of pane interface where you can select slide the pane down select different things and swipe right-to-left I say swipe but I mean hit the d-pad right to left see your new messages you could scroll through pictures you can see your emails you can scroll through them in this pane without having to actually jump into the email application we can look through text messages we can go into the weather application and select a city let's type Philadelphia go and there it comes weather for Philadelphia there we go nice little forecast there and if you tap on that you should get some more information a nice little forecast this is an HTC addition they kind of added their own tweak to windows mobile 6.1 down here we've got favorites which you can flip through any of the favorites that you want down here you can change your profile and then some things like getting started but then you can remove this if I remember at the end remove getting started and it is gone after it reloads the homescreen so let's talk about how you actually use this device up here at the top we've got a place where you see your notifications you see your system indicators you can see that there's a new email of course because this is not touchscreen you can't reach up and touch the picture of the envelope to access email you'd have to get it to it in another way so we can go to the Start screen and we can see all of the programs this is a really ugly way to see the programs and you can add speed dial which means that you can actually use the keyboard to launch certain programs if you correspond say Windows Media Player to three you open up the Start menu you press three and then you're there now going down here we've got Internet Explorer really probably the most poor internet browsing experience of any device that we have around here can be found on this device and let me show you why so I'm gonna go to go to web address and it's hidden in a menu we can do a little backspace here to delete everything let's just go to pocketnow.com very good keyboard by the way that was definitely one of the shining points of this device and we can click go and we're over Wi-Fi right now so it should be relatively fast it's gonna load up the mobile version so we get this a little mouse pointer thing that lets us move around on the page we can zoom out to get a sort of zoomed out view let's look at the desktop version see how it fares with the full heavy graphics version of pocketnow.com now there are a lot of third party browsers for Windows Mobile Skyfire being one of them which actually worked really really well on the standard devices the nine touchscreen windows mobile phones but for some reason that I'm gonna show you this in a second you can't access Skyfire anymore you'll see why so it's loading right now it can actually load some Flash content which was pretty cool I think this is based on the ie6 engine and right now it's not responding because it's loading a pretty heavy page this was a big problem with Windows Mobile would slow down and freeze a lot um yep we are frozen here the thing has stopped spinning let's go back to the home screen okay so we had to get out of that and now maybe if we go back into internet explorer who knows what will be there up here it is Pocket nails back so we can move around on the page you can see the microscopic scroll bars on the right side there I'm gonna hit stop and so that we can actually zoom out and see the page in its entirety so here we go so there you go a reasonably good view it took a while to load but if you want to zoom in on a particular spot you press zoom in here you are and you can go from here in terms of the menu options we can of course go to a web address add to favorites go to your home page check out your history and then you can switch between mobile view or desktop view you can also go fullscreen which helps a little bit when browsing these web pages so anyhow let's go back to the home screen and talk about the other built-in programs of windows mobile 6.1 standard so we've got the default stuff calendar and contacts so go into calendar we can switch between week view and month for you kind of a very plain interface which is why a Microsoft scrapped this in favor of Windows Phone 7 Windows Media Player which with a lot of finagling would work with your desktop software but it it wasn't as easy as for example Zune is today where you download an album you send it to your device you can do it wirelessly on Windows Phone 7 we've got office mobile here and some of these let you actually edit and most of them don't so they're mostly readers let's go back to the previous screen we've the settings via the list view of settings and there's no other way to look at this really ugly and if you wanted to get to a setting that is on the third page you'd have to go to the right to the right to the right just not an intuitive way to adjust settings there it's click done see what else we have here Adobe Reader so you could view PDFs voice command which is always helpful so you can you know let's try it what time is it so Microsoft boys command always worked really well in Windows Mobile and of course today on Windows Phone 7 and Android and iOS there are tools that you can use to get voice recognition here in albums it's just kind of the built-in album program this is actually skinned by HTC so a little bit of an upgrade from what you get in stock windows mobile 6.1 so there's the the goldfish you may recognize from other devices we can zoom in from here although it's a little bit imprecise without a touch screen certainly so let's get out of here go back see what else we have active sync of course the way that Windows Mobile would synchronize with Outlook and with your tasks and everything Microsoft ActiveSync right now I've got it hooked up to exchange so it just says connected we've got the camera application Bluetooth Explorer a lot of other stuff file explorer which of course Windows Phone 7 lakhs now get applications for that's just a shortcut to get some apps and b3 trimmer modem links so you could tether there wasn't an app store on this particular device it wasn't until windows mobile 6.5 when you could access they call it the windows they caught them the windows marketplace for mobile and right now it's still in existence it doesn't have that many apps maybe 2000 apps many of which are pretty expensive but certainly Microsoft has done a pretty good job with the Windows Phone 7 app store which is now on every device and hooks up with Zune very nicely so that was pretty much it and then you got the games of course whoops if you went to games you'd probably recognize Bubble breaker and solitaire of course the quintessential window mobile games of the past and the email experience was very good on this device so if we jumped into email go back to the home screen to do that and here we are in the email application it's very easy to use with the keyboard it was fantastic if you wanted to search I think they had that you start typing now if not in this version but speaking of just type one of the greatest parts of windows mobile 6.1 standard is sort of a Palm webOS like feature which is the just type so here I'm on the home screen I want to call Matt I'd type ma TT boom instantly there's Matt's information I can call him right from here really quick and easy to do that in Windows Mobile standard so the HTC Ozone was a really cool device kind of modeled out off of the BlackBerry kind of form factor with the QWERTY keyboard below the non touch screen it was a cool device it wasn't that popular in 2008 we were seeing the transition from non touch to touch and today you'd be really hard-pressed in fact you wouldn't be able to find a smartphone running on Android or Windows Phone that didn't have a touch screen so this was pretty much the end of the line in terms of the non touchscreen interfaces and you know a lot of people were sad to see it go because after a lot of practice you could become extremely efficient and fast with the non touchscreen interface so if you like this throwback please give us a thumbs up and thank you for watching that's it for now