Gadgetory

this is Ray Duan from pocketnow.com with a quick look at HTC's new rom for the sprint mogul on Monday March 10 HTC released a new rom updating a couple of things on Sprint's device before I go through some of these enhancements let me show you what the current rom version is if we go to settings another the system tab we go to Device information mostly that the current rom version is 3.3 5.65 1.2 with a rom date of februari 22nd 2008 current mobile users can go to HTC's us website and download this file the file itself is about 60 megabytes and takes about 10 to 15 minutes to install now before doing the rom upgrade make sure that you've synced up your contacts your calendar items your tasks and backed up any applications that you have as this upgrade process will wipe out everything that's currently on the device so what does this upgrade do well the first thing it does is it enhances the phones radio from EV do revision 02 evdo revision a what does that mean for you current users well under revision 0 there was a theoretical max birth rate of 2.4 five megabits per second revision a upset first rate to about 3.1 megabytes now in real world usage you'll probably see something around 400 to 700 kilobytes per second but to test it out let's see if that's true we'll go to pocket Internet Explorer here and I've already bookmarked dsl report com to do our speed test so if i go to favorites dslreports com will do the 100 kilobyte test which i know is going to be unstable because it's too small so we'll choose a larger file and we'll do the one megabyte file then where I live I live in Connecticut and in this area where I live it's a little rural so we may see some spotty coverage but look at this here we just got a speed of 948 kilobits per second with a latency of point to 32 and a download titanum 8.8 46 seconds really strong showing there we'll try that again to see make sure that's not like an anomaly it could possibly be looks like this run is a little slower than the last still loading here and we're at down to 721 kilobytes per second with a latency of point to 28 download time about 11.5 seconds I'm just going to do one more run of this just to see what happens again looks like we might be in this 700 kilobyte range just based on the based on the time here and actually we're up to 800 32 kilobytes per second so it looks like we've got some pretty strong showing from the this update 10 seconds to download the file this time but if we were in stronger areas we'd probably see a little bit more consistent showing and probably a little faster but also keep in mind that network traffic may also affect the download times so the second update that HTC has made was actually to enable the gps chipset that's already built into Qualcomm's MSM 7500 processor I know a lot of sprint users were looking forward to this as the only device in the US market right now that's a windows mobile 6 professional device that has gps enabled is the AT&T tilt on the Mogul here I've installed I guidance version 2.1 which is I an application i'm currently using on my tilt if we click ok we're going to see how quickly it takes to acquire a satellite signal now I've already set this up on I guidance for so there's not gonna be a cold time test here so this will be a warm start and just to give you an idea I set this up on calm for and the baud rate was 4,800 and as we saw their the acquire time was pretty fast just a matter of 10 to 15 seconds there and it looks like the Mogul is acquiring on to about six to seven satellites I'm going to bring out here my 18t tilt to see what kind of acquisition time we can get here using the same application tilt still working on it and it looks like it acquired on 257 just about just as quickly about 10 seconds or so but if you notice that the mogul actually has a stronger catch on the satellite signals so that's a pretty good showing from the mogul here let me put down the tilts and we're going to exit out of I guidance here I've also installed Microsoft's live search and Google's google map mobile on the device so let's try google maps again I've already set up the GPS I haven't used it yet if we click on use GPS huh we get this error message your gps receiver does not appear to be responding interesting is I guidance already recognized it and start it up pretty quickly if we scroll down looks like we get what is GPS how can i improve gps reception and could be a function of me just being inside my house let's try to retry again doesn't look like it looks like maybe google maps doesn't recognize the gps device on or the gps chip on the Mogul let's see if live search has that same problem again I've already set up the settings for the gps so if I click on map here blows up the satellite view pretty quickly Center on GPS here it's getting the GPS position it's close to my house but not exactly it and there we have it looks like a the GPS chip does work on Microsoft's live search and it's centered on the position where i am currently so that's interesting looks like the GPS chip may be hit or miss depending on which application you use but right now it looks like it works on Microsoft's live search and it also works in I navs I guidance version 2.1 this looks like it's a promising rom update and looks like something that most sprint users will want to do so this has been raid one with pocketnow.com and a first look at HTC's new rom for the sprint mogul