Gadgetory

hey guys its brand of in a min from pocket now calm and this is a software review of the Samsung Focus a windows phone 7 device on AT&T let's get to it so in this video we want to focus on the software hardware interplay and overall how Windows Phone 7 feels on the Samsung Focus we're going to be covering windows phone 7 in detail on pocketnow.com but in this video we're going to stick to just the samsung focus experience for windows phone 7 so this device is all about the screen it's got the same four inch Super AMOLED display that you'll find on the Samsung Galaxy S series of devices what that means is that colors are extremely vibrant blacks are super rich and outdoor screen visibility's fantastic when you turn on this phone for the first time before you even get into the operating system you're going to be impressed because the quality of the screen is just top-notch and the sensitivity of the screen is top notch in fact when we went to New York to play with all the windows phone 7 launch devices we found that the Samsung Focus had the highest screen sensitivity of all the all the devices which means that it's effortless to go from side to side to pinch to zoom which we're going to go through in a minute to jump in and out of applications and the device feels fast despite having 256 megabytes of RAM the other launch devices have around 512 the samsung focus seems to be one of the fastest devices that is coming out for windows phone 7 so let's talk more about the speed of this device I'm going to jump in and out of a bunch of applications and you're going to see how the focus doesn't sputter or slow down so I'm going to go into internet explorer jump back out swipe over here go into Adobe Reader I'm not even letting the applications load fully and things are just moving really really fast here we go into the pictures application this is really where things get super fluid and I've taken a lot of pictures so we go into all camera roll turn it over to the side so we get the landscape orientation or actually in this particular view you don't get landscape orientation only when you dive into an actual picture so let's go into this picture it's already in landscape orientation we can slide to the left here and we can zoom in swiping panning moving around on the screen on this device is buttery smooth thanks in part to the sensitivity screen and thanks in part to really good software optimization windows 17 is fast and this device has the power to make it feel fast so let's swipe over here find a nice picture zoom in super buttery smooth the picture clears up very fast it's got a lot of power especially when you're looking at pictures and even on the web so let's go to pocketnow.com see what it's like to browse around on the site there so this is the mobile site and we're going to go down to the desktop view and let that load up well that loads up a little note on Windows Phone 7 in terms of system notifications it's really interesting because Microsoft has hit in the system notifications at the top the only way to see them is to tap then you get Wi-Fi cellular and battery status it's an interesting idea because you have to stop and wonder do I actually have to see that stuff because at first it's really weird not seeing your battery status all the time it's kind of a nice feeling it really lets you focus on what you're doing a little bit more although we nice to have a setting to keep that stuff displayed all the time and to have a percentage battery meter so you know really where you stand on battery life so here we have pocketnow.com loaded flick scrolling is super fast you never see checkerboard and Windows Phone 7 or at least I cabin and this is a very graphically intense page there are probably a dozen or more pictures if we go over to landscape we get this really fantastic full screen view and the only way to access the controls in the program would be to go back into portrait but you gotta really appreciate that this full screen view covers the whole screen there's nothing on the dislikes of the website and a little scroll bar once in a while so here we can tap on another story and it's going to load it and you do get a loading bar as it goes across on the top and as mentioned we can go into portrait screen rotation speed isn't the greatest but it really doesn't matter because while the page is loading you're probably going to want to switch it into landscape there are a few options that we can choose from here so we can go to settings and some of the options appear after the site has loading so we'll let it finish loading reaction to force it to stop and now we can do a few things we can share page we can search within the page which is nice pin it to the Start screen or go into settings and settings there really isn't that much you can change you can tell it to choose the mobile site or the desktop site delete history and things like that tab management is fantastic we talked about this in previous videos you can load one tab while looking at another for example the iphone doesn't let you do this and to close the tab you just tap on it to open it it brings it forward very very quickly so we can be really fast at launching different websites here we go to engadget then we can go back to the tab manager we can go to say gizmodo or say there we go and by the time because moto is done loading and gadget has already begun and it will continue to load in the background because moto is finished while we were looking at engadget just a really smooth browsing experience yes it doesn't have html5 or flash support but that's not the biggest deal in the world you can get around the internet quite fine without those technologies supported now by the way there will be a YouTube player in the marketplace so the idea is that when you go to a website that has an embedded YouTube video you tap on that and it opens the YouTube player like you know the iphone or like android 2.1 and below so you will be able to get flash video in terms of youtube there now let's talk about the typing experience because obviously the samsung focus does not have a slide out keyboard or any sort of keyboard so the on-screen keyboard really matters let's go into messaging i'm going to start a new message here now with this 4-inch really sensitive display keyboard the keyboard experience is quite good on the samsung focus so if i do a little test here with a little bit of practice you can get really fast in fact I find this keyboard to be better than the iphone's keyboard which in my personal opinion is the best on-screen keyboard that there is so now Windows Phone 7 in my mind takes the place or takes the title is the best on-screen keyboard experience and you can go into landscape to get keys there are a little bit wider although what you'll find is that it doesn't actually take up the entire screen you still get a little Black Bart here in a little black bar here that is kind of to keep things symmetrical it would seem so we go back into portrait and have you know the taller keys here now something that has been interesting to get used to is the emoticon button I've actually been using it a lot more than I thought I would this gives you a wide variety of smiley faces but it's really handy to have it there because in a text message an email you really can't express emotion obviously and you can do so with a one of these many many emoticons some of which you probably have never seen before but it's quite handy to have that button there in Windows Phone 7 now samsung focus includes a wide variety of AT&T applications which are removable by the way and the way you remove them in case you want to you know free your device here as you tap and hold and you go to uninstall and it goes off the screen within a second I don't know if it's actually uninstalling or if it's just taking it off the start screen and writing a part of the disk as you know free but it happens very fast and we're going to cover all the AT&T applications in a separate video but you get the Navigator you get u-verse mobile which is like a mobile TV service you get family finder and there's several other different ones that you can uninstall if you don't want them beyond that the samsung focus has the typical windows phone 7 application like alarm calendar and calculator and they all work as expected what is a little bit different here and I'll get to it down here is the now application which is basically a samsung hub a kind of like HTC hub it gives you the weather and it actually has a sub weather application you can swipe to the right to see your forecast you can swipe to the right here to see news and change the settings if you want to really determine what kind of news you want and one more time you get stocks now most people are going to not use this application and have a separate application for weather for news and for stocks because it doesn't really make sense to put it all under one roof but the marketplace right now doesn't have that many or any news weather or staff app so it's a matter of waiting this is a good way to start and it has a nice interface to it has the nice Metro interface and if you pin it to your Start screen it's actually a 2 tile wyd item and unfortunately it's live tile it doesn't show you any information so you get this kind of wide tile taking up all the space on your Start screen what it could very well have been just a single size tile like those other ones so overall the samsung focus is one of the fastest windows phone 7 devices it has a very pleasing to the eye screen with the Super AMOLED has fantastic colors great contrast fantastic outdoor spring visibility and the device itself is really fast I haven't run into a situate into a situation where the device has become slow or frozen it constantly keeps up despite having a little bit less ram than the other launch devices for windows phone 7 so that was a look at the software experience on the Samsung Focus with Windows Phone 7 if you liked the video please thumbs up and check pocketnow.com for the full samsung focus review we will talk about battery life more on performance camera quality and a lot of other stuff thanks for watching that's it for now