Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocket now calm and this is the software review part 1 of the sprint Evo 4G in this video we're going to talk about the Sense interface from HDC and we're also going to go through internet browsing in part 2 we're going to talk about the built-in applications the wireless tethering then we're going to talk about the 4G connectivity in case you missed it check out the hardware of you I'll put an annotation up on the screen right now so go check that out if you haven't yet but if you did let's get on with the software review part 1 let's do it ok so let's talk about this Sense interface on HTC EVO 4G we've seen the Sense interface before but we've never seen it on a 4.3 inch display it makes it very dramatic with the beautiful widgets and the backgrounds and everything that makes HTC Sense useful and interesting so of course with HTC Sense you get seven different home screens and you can flick all the way this way and all the way this way the way that you keep track of the home screens is that you can see the little bar moving along the bottom and new to the newer version of HTC Sense is the leap of feature so you can pinch and quickly jump from screen to screen so if you're on screen1 you want to get the screen 7 it's extremely fast and easy now with this feature so a great addition let's look at some of the live wallpapers so you can get a sense for how it looks on such a big display so I'm gonna go into menu and I'm not going to go into settings I'm going to go into wallpaper then I'm gonna go into live wallpaper I also want you to pay attention to how fast the devices as I'm bouncing around it's about 512 megabytes of RAM it's got the Qualcomm 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor and I'll have a conclusion about that later but I'd like for you to see in this video how it looks so let's pick say HTC Sense since this is HTC Sense afterall and we get this cool animated background with the kind of colors moving in the background we'll keep it like that and let's go through some of the different widgets that you can add to the HTC EVO 4G of course you can go into the Android Market and download a bevy of other widgets for example I've added this little battery meter here just a quick and easy way to see how much battery I have so of course I can tap on the clock here and I'm taken into the TC scents like interface where I can swipe to the right see my alarm I see the stopwatch so this East HTC Sense interface is very congruent throughout the entire operating system just like you would expect from an HTC device so let's swipe to the right and I've got some widgets here I've got a 4G switch but I'm actually using Wi-Fi if you have a Wi-Fi connection available 4G will turn off and you will go on to Wi-Fi the reason I'm using Wi-Fi and not 4G right now it's because Wi-Fi is actually faster than 4G where I am so we'll talk more about 4G later I've got some other shortcuts there some other toggle switches for GPS oddly when I got the Evo 4G the GPS was toggled on all the time and my battery life was horrendous and after turning that off battery life is still not that great but it's improved a lot I have no idea why Sprint out of the box as GPS turned on they're gonna get a lot of angry customers when they see their battery draining so quickly so let's add some widgets you can tap and hold go to widgets and HTC adds a variety of really cool widgets so we can go to the bookmark tab and we can choose a variety of styles to different styles so I'm going to choose this one and loading bookmarks and we get a quick shortcut there a quick list of various bookmarks that you like to look at on a regular basis and you can easily add your own so if I go down to add bookmark and I don't know if let's put Google and by the way I want to talk about this on-screen keyboard this on-screen keyboard is in my opinion the best on-screen keyboard of any mobile device and I say that because the screen is extremely responsive and also the screen is so big so it's very difficult to miss keys when you're pressing and also you get a massive massive touchscreen keyboard here when you go into landscape if you have the HTC hd2 you know what I'm talking about it's the same sort of experience so I just added Google and what it does really nice it saves a little thumbnail so you get these live thumbnails of the website so that you view on a regular basis a really cool widget I like it a lot let's jump back into widgets and I'll show you some other cool ones so we've got the Facebook widget you've seen that before you have footprints if you travel the friend stream the mail widget the text message widget alright let's go into the HTC photo album this one looks awesome on the Evo 4G because of the big screen so I'm just going to choose the the photo album that I want to use in this particular widget it's gonna load it up this is a great way to show people photos if you've taken a bunch or you have albums stored on the storage card you just flick through and it just looks it just looks awesome on such a big screen then we can go into landscape and we can go through the photo galleries super smooth tap on that one bring it forward just pictures are are gorgeous absolutely gorgeous on WVGA screen it's got a very nice level of sensitivity for the pinch-to-zoom so let's go back to the home screen delete this widget and by the way I've loaded this up with a lot of widgets and I found that it doesn't slow down in fact what I can do to show you an example of that I can go to menu and click on scenes and scenes are preset widget configurations so I'm going to go to the HTC scene which will add a variety of widgets for this particular scene so I'm gonna let it load up it gives a different background it'll probably change there goes and what we have is a variety of widgets we have the HTC mail widget we have the SMS widget the weather widget which is always nice to have it knows your current location and it will immediately pull the weather and update it wherever you are if you're traveling let's go over here here's that favorites widget you actually this is the the people favorite widget very nice to show you the pictures of the people that you call to the right we have the bookmarked widgets and nothing over that way let's go back to scenes and change it again let's go to play and see what the play widgets look like okay so we get this awesome big clock this is the kind of scene that you want to use on the weekend get a cool different background links to voicemail camera we'll talk about camera in the next video part 2 tap descent alibi friends stream so this will tie into multiple social networks right now I have it only synchronizing with Twitter so you get these many applications right on your home screens and with the four three inch display on the Evo four teeth just it's very dramatic and I keep using that word and you really have to hold one in your hand and use it to know what I'm talking about and so we have a music player here bookmarks and over to the right there is nothing so widgets are fantastic even 14 handles it fantastically well as well as the HTC Desire which is another Android phone that has the HTC Sense interface for Android ok so let's jump into the browser and quickly show you what it's like to browse websites on this 4.3 inch display let me just make sure that I don't have any other windows open just so I have maximum performance and I don't so let's jump to pocketnow.com will go into landscape we'll do a speed comparison against the Google Nexus 1 in a moment and let's see see how it looks this may be a good time to put up the kickstand although it puts it at a weird angle for the camera so another great use for the kickstand by the way is when you're on speakerphone I've done this a few times I'm on the phone I'm at my desk I put it up like so and it makes the the speaker have an exposed area about out here so I can hear the speaker and then the microphone is exposed over here so let's take a look at performance very very good performance on the web we can pinch to zoom tap on a headline and Rover a fast Wi-Fi connection so it's coming through nicely and here we go let's go to another website and again again we get this nice landscape keyboard we'll go to and gadget you get a little bit of haptic feedback when you type on this keyboard and you can turn that off if it had no issue in fact I'm probably going to do that because battery life on the Evo 4G hasn't been amazing and I want to do anything possible to get back some more juice so here we are on end gadget but a boot up the the Nexus One here running Froyo I'm gonna go to the same place and we're going to click around ok so here we are Engadget loaded on both devices again we're running a newer browser on the right here with Froyo so we can move around on the page can get a sense for how things load let's go down to a link and we'll zoom in will zoom in and tap on a link at the same time just to see we're over the same Wi-Fi network here let's see which goes faster and it looks like the frozen the Froyo browser one no surprise it's got a lot of speed improvements let's see how fast screen rotation is for the Evo 4G very fast not as fast that time it was faster so very very very fast screen rotation speed and very good web browsing performance on the Evo 4G and as you can see it's it's awesome browsing on such a large display you just get to see so much of the Internet it feels like a slate computer so in terms of HTC Sense the homescreen interfaces the widgets the HTC EVO 4G really shines the huge display that the fantastic color reproduction means that you get a really immersive home screen experience that really is unrivaled by any other device I've ever used and in terms of the internet browsing fidelity and the capability it's up there with the best of the best the big screen helps a lot it's got a fast processor and it just looks awesome or any webpage really looks awesome on a 4.3 inch display can't argue with that coming up in part two of the software review we're going to talk about some of the built-in applications or to talk more about the 4G capability of this device whether it really matters so be sure to check that out if you liked the video please give it a thumbs up we'll be back soon with more that's it for now