Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocketnow.com and this is the hardware tour of the samsung epix on the AT&T network it's a windows mobile 6.1 professional device that just came out and I know a lot of people have been waiting for this to come out so let's take a look at the hardware starting off we have a 2.5 inch touchscreen and the resolution is 320 x 320 it's not a rectangular aspect screen as you can see it's square which is kind of unconventional moving below the AT&T logo we have a left softkey and a right softkey followed by a call start and call end key and the cost start key will double as a speaker phone if you press and hold it while you're in a call and then we have a button to launch the start menu and an ok button in the center we have this optical joystick which actually controls a virtual mouse pointer and it's actually pretty cool and something that I really like about this device is that your thumb never really leaves the center area because there are soft keys so you're moving the cursor with this and you're you're pressing on the soft keys like that and it's great for one handed usability if you look at the palm treo pro which doesn't have these soft keys if you're if you're operating the d-pad and moving around menus to confirm a selection you have to press on the screen like that and move your thumb a lot so I think the epics is going to rank really high in one-handed usability so going down to the keyboard we see that it's a full qwerty keyboard with pretty large-sized keys and nice spaces to access the numbers which are embedded in the letters you have to hold down the function key or if you're dialing from the home screen we'll talk about this later you just start dialing and it will know that you're dialing numbers on the bottom of the keyboard we have some programmable buttons so camera mail all of these can be used to launch various programs and also you can you can program any key on the keyboard to launch a program by holding down the function button so you've got a ton of programmable shortcut buttons that you can use if you're if you're trying to launch programs quickly we'll talk about that later off to the left side we have a kind of chrome strip here and a power button to the right of that we have a very predominant volume rocker which is good because when you're on a call you can feel for it easily turning over to the back we have a two mega so camera self-portrait mirror and stereo speakers we also have a really easy to open battery latch which is refreshing because some other devices take a lot of time to get to the battery over to the other side we have a microSD slot covered with a flap hopefully that will be durable and to the right of that we have the charging syncing and audio port that uses Samsung's proprietary connector on the bottom we have nothing but the microphone and on the top we have the stylus which is in an awkward place up here at the top I don't like this too much and it's it's collapsible three ways look at this two three it's kind of kind of unique but I think Samsung is trying to discourage you from using the stylist by having the optical mouse cursor and you know what I really haven't pulled out the stylus too many times because I'm finding that the mouse to be a really good addition so next up we're going to talk about software on the samsung epix and don't forget to follow us be sure to subscribe to our Twitter account at twitter.com slash pocket now tweets and also follow us on YouTube our channel is pocket now video will be back soon with a lot more on this you