Gadgetory

greetings all this is deke Adams with pocketnow.com and today we're taking a closer look of the hardware on the motorola photon 4g for sprint so sit back relax and enjoy the show the fit and finish on the motorola photon 4g is very very solid this device feels really good in the hand the rounded corners are really nice it feels a little weighty it doesn't feel like it's too lightweight so it doesn't feel like you're going to throw it someplace overall a great device in the hand the only complaints that I've run into our the finish up here on this kind of chromed edge and right here along this edge here as well have taken some abuse to two other objects in my pocket and have scratched very easily the screen is stayed very resilient considering that it's using gorilla glass even with this little kind of lifted edge here on the sides but just some scraping here so just know that if you put it in your you know if you've pocket your device without it being in a case in your front pants pocket or otherwise where there might be keys or a knife or other you know other sharp objects just expect that the fit and finish around the outside may get damaged a little bit the dual core and NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor 1 gigahertz is very very snappy on this device I found it to be work early and in for the additional processing power you get a lot of functionality of this now on the home screens on the other hand and I know that this was kind of mentioned in the unboxing review that it seems slow I find that it mostly has to do with the number of widgets on the screen and after we get through the software review I'll take some of these often will comment on the full review how fast the home screen was in comparison we'll talk more about it in the software review as well as far as buttons and levers and otherwise on the motorola photon 4g you've got the fork passive buttons on the front they're very responsive I'd had no problems moving back and forth between areas or the speed there in there's a little bit of animation that happens there but really it works very very quickly on the top is our power button which I had no problems with using or having it cause any issues for me on the side is the volume button and the there textured a little bit as I mentioned in the unboxing review which is really nice when you're trying to find the buttons the action on these rockers is very smooth and as a nice click the camera button is that same textured feel but it is only a single actuation meaning that you press it down and the camera takes the picture there is no half pressed for focus when we'll come back to that in just a minute and talk about the reason why that's important outside of buttons but more ports you have the USB and HDMI ports on either side here and if you've got other Motorola accessories such as the car dock as long as you have the adapter that fits this particular device because the rounded corners it will work fine in that device I used this particular device on the motorola droid 3 from verizon i just use the adapter for it at the car adapter that i had even though that this came with a car adapter as well the review unit did just want to make sure that it was the functionality would be the same there on the back the kickstands is nice and solid it has a little bit of a issue on this side right here where it can get tipped over pretty easily if you hit it in the wrong spot but as far as setting it up to act as an alarm clock it works pretty well and for watching movies it works pretty well as as far as I've been able to find this stays magnetically closed so it doesn't flop open when you're happening in your pocket which is fantastic the camera on the motorola photon 4g is 8 megapixels it does 720p recording and device itself can do 1080p playback it's got dual flash unfortunately and we talked about this camera button over here this team takes a long time to focus the motorola photon 4g is like a lot of its motorola siblings recently that you press the button to take the shot it does a focus and then finally Titans takes a shot and they can take just enough time that you either lose the shot or the shot still comes out blurry which is a little disappointing video is a little better and we'll have samples of both of those in our final review one thing to note on this comparison the droid 3 it does not suffer from the kind of bluish tint that the CMOS sensor or the sensor the camera sensor in the droid 3 had suffered from if you read our full review on that front facing camera is just a standard webcam great for items such as Skype or otherwise which is nice now this is Motorola's first 4g phone for sprint it is also a world device it does have a sim card in it unfortunately since it's locked for domestic use only for outside the United States does this work weren't really able to be able to test that functionality very well but it is a world device let's just say that then at 16 gigs onboard memory it has a slot for additional memory and using microSD up to 32 gigs but it doesn't come with one included which is a little bit of a disappointment there but what can you say battery life on the motorola fortune is fantastic the qhd display with the pin tile technology seems to just sip the battery very very quietly unless you have the 4g service turned on and then it seems to through it pretty quickly overall i found with phone calls and average daily use i'm getting easily a day or day and a half of power out of this compared to my epic 4g which can barely survive a day of course the 1700 milliamp hour battery does help with that as far as speeds go on this device as you can see here when we get into the actual 4g area and get 12 and 1.6 10 and 1.6 up good speeds when it switches over to 3g the speeds are as one would expect for a 3g on the sprint network and again with the 4g service it's about the same as i found with every other 4g device on sprint's network speeds in the high range if you're close to a tower if you must move further and further away you either lose the speeds completely or even if it's on the map sometimes it won't give you a signal such as nearby to my house it shows that we have 4G service here but unless you're standing in the middle of the street two blocks away you can't actually get signal that's pick and stay and actually transmit data compared to its sibling on the verizon network the motorola photon 4g is slightly longer than the droid 3 and a little bit wider it's just a fraction on just a hair thinner than the droid 3 it is noticeably thinner to the epic 4g on sprint here weight-wise it's a little lighter than the droid 3 a little heavier than the nexus s feels good in the hand as we mentioned the beginning so the weight it really isn't too much of a factor at all I do like the 4.3 inch qhd display and my only complaint with it is because of pintail technology when you start zooming in on small and so I look very close rather on small text such as we see here and you start scrolling up and down quickly you get a lot of ghosting and up here in the like in the battery meteor solid colors you can see the pixelation very clearly additionally the blacks aren't really as black as they could be and that does have a tendency to change the color when you're looking at images on this phone that's that the viewing angles on this device are fantastic it's easily seen from all angles and in the sunlight it performs just like the droid 3 easily seen in bright sunlight which cannot be said for most of the AMOLED screens that are out there today that wraps up our closer look of the hardware on the motorola photon 4g for sprint if you have any comments or questions leave them below if you have a questions you would like to specifically answer it about the software which is the video review they'll be coming up next leave a comment below and we'll try to address that question very specifically in the next review thanks for watching hm