Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the software tour of the samsung epix a phone that just came out on the AT&T network this is a follow up video to the hardware tour video that we just shot so be sure you check that out if you're looking at this moaning you're considering it I want to start off with the optical mouse I know a lot of people have been asking about that so before I get close in on the screen let me just give you an idea of how well the optical mouse works so you operate it quite simply by moving your finger along this touchpad here below the AT&T logo and i'll tell you what guys it worked really really well in fact i haven't taken out the stylus too many times because you can control really everything through this mouse and let me show you the settings for because there are some settings so if we go over here to finger mouse we can change the speed of it from fast to medium too slow we can also make it into a four-way navigation standard d-pad if we really don't like having this on the screen we can also change the pointer you get a variety of pointers and if you have a sale samsung omnia you know that it also has the mouse but it doesn't have the the pointers so we can change it to a little a little ducky here if you if you like to have a duck which is kind of unconventional but um i'm going to leave it on the on the standard cursor and i'm going to turn it off actually because during this video i'm not going to be using it because it's kind of awkward to shoot the screen and be able to operate the mouse at the same time okay and we're back the today screen you see here is not the default today's screen that's installed on the epics it's included and i've turned it on because i think it's kind of the most flashy today's screen the epics doesn't have any sort of interface replacement like touchflo 3d or spb mobile shell but this is kind of what they include so you can do a few things from here you can go two favorite people you can go to settings and you get this animation and the sound we can go to favorites which is just a list of favorite programs and we can press the plus button and find another program that we want to add to the list and we can go back home and from here we can access our email our email here our text messages here and our missed calls there's also a link to AT&T Navigator it's kind of you so I'll probably leave this on here for the time being i'll switch over to spb mobile shell after i complete the review but for now this looks nice and it's nice and clean now the soft keys the samsung use on on on this device is phone and contacts so you can't change either of these you can't customize them and that's unfortunate let's go into the program's menu and see what we have there now unfortunately the program's menu is not flick friendly you can't flick and scroll as is the case on other HTC devices that have the flick scroll functionality that's unfortunate we have a lot of AT&T things here so AT&T mall AT&T music media net cingular video which they should have renamed to ATT video they have an IM client which works really well you can use aim and msn and all the major messengers it works quite well for that going down the list we have games and they actually throw in a few extra games but they're all java-based then they don't look that great and they're all demos so you have to pay to actually use them for more than a few minutes I'm going down the list further we have applications let's go in there and wave some standard things like camera going down the list we have some more java applications like mobile banking fox sports mobile pro we have a version of mobitv and mobitv is really cool it lets you watch a variety of live TV stations on your device but it's ten dollars a month and they only give you five minutes of free viewing as a trial going down the list we have something called photo slides which will allow you to take a bunch of photos and make them into a slideshow which is pretty neat if you take a lot of pictures and you want to show off the kids or other things like that we have a standard RSS reader we have the windows mobile 6.1 task manager and then we have some more java based applications here that I'll probably never use but they're on here if you if you want to use them okay let's go down the list we have my stuff which is basically like a file explorer then we've organizer which includes the standard stuff like calculator and stopwatch and then they're smart converter which is which is pretty useful I mean you can use you can make conversions from milligrams to tons and that sort of thing so a lot of people may find that useful and the device does not come with upper 9.5 i've just installed that and i recommend that everybody does that because the fantastic browser it's a lot better than pocket internet explorer which is what this device uses as its default browser i should also note that the office 2000 sweat 7 mobile suite is included so that's good and finally I want to wrap up by showing you the settings because there are some interesting settings that i want to show you so let's start with function key settings and if you remember in the first video I talked about how all of the keys on the keyboard are customizable so you can do function G that'll launch a certain program function H launch a certain program well this is where you do it from so if we go to show list we get a whole listing of all of the different letters that you can assign to launch a program so that should be great for those that like to do that if we go into buttons we see that we can assign the these keys on the bottom to launch certain applications so we have a camera button here and a mail button here and all of those are assignable just like the the keys on the keyboard are with the function key going down the list we have theme and we can change the color of the whole environment of the device a little bit so if we want to do like a like a kind of like a magenta here I guess you would call that nuts more pink let's do a yellow and you do okay and there it is color changed okay let's go down the list we have video share the AT&T video share you have to pay extra for that that allows you to do live video one way so I could hold my phone up to something and somebody would see what video I was streaming at that point but I couldn't see video from their device we have a full version of voice command which is good always a welcomed addition we have some settings on what we can do with the wake up button just the behavior of the standby button also in the personal tab we have sounds and notifications which will allow us to turn on the vibrate function so it kind of gives a feeling of haptic feedback but not really it's really a waste of battery life some people may appreciate it but I'm just going to leave that turned off because I really don't see the need let's go over to the system tab in backlight we can adjust the keyboard backlight and when it comes on and when it comes off unfortunately this doesn't have a light sensor built in we can go to brightness and of course change the brightness of the screen right now it's on medium going down the list we have the settings for the finger mouse that you already saw going down further we have the standard windows mobile 6.1 task manager have a lot of programs open right now and let's take a look at how much memory I have with all those programs open right now a lot of a lot of free program memories 70 megabytes of free program memory and as you've seen so far the device is pretty snappy I mean I'm going screen to screen at a pretty fast pace let's finish over in the connections tab and we will go to the wireless manager see what it looks like standard windows mobile task manager wireless manager I should say it hasn't been skinned by Samsung and some other more advanced things for the business users like proxy manager and GPRS authentication all that sort of thing are in here and one more feature i want to show you that's included on many samsung devices but i never have understood why it's there if i press and hold on the camera button watch what happens to the screen I get a magnifier effect and I can move around on the screen I think by tapping and dragging I you know I I can be creative and trying to think of a reason somebody would want to use this but I just can't I mean if something small on the screen in most programs you can make the text bigger I wonder why you would want to zoom in like this oh well it's a it's a feature there if you want to use it and that's it for the software tour of the samsung epix we've got a lot more to cover in the upcoming review or we'll talk about the pros and the cons and the device will talk about battery life camera quality pretty much everything so watch out for that follow us on twitter twitter.com slash pocket nail tweets and you'll know right when the review hits so that is it for now