Gadgetory

greetings all this is deke Adams with pocketnow.com and today we're taking a closer look on the software on the motorola photon 4g for sprint so sit back relax and enjoy the show so the motorola photon 4g is running android version 2.3 point for Gingerbread and it has been updated to the most recent update that just came out for the photon recently we go up here to display we can see another kind of a new interesting feature in pocket detection is a kind of a neat functionality when you put the device in your pocket if the screen is on it will automatically turn off if you have this enabled and the kickstand enable allows you to turn on a new mode when you kick the kickstand out which will show you in just a second here so I've got the kick and send out now and you see here I've got a couple of options and I didn't set it remembers my selection yet because I want to make sure to see you could see what happens here when you kick the kickstand out you get the home screen or widget clock and if you choose widget clock then it launches into this mode here where you get a large nice large clock the weather a couple of pages of icons that you can cycle through and use you've got some alarm clocks you can close this view and then this little button right here changes the brightness and I tap this it's going to get really dark because we've got a lot of light on this camera there on this device right now so it goes so dark that you can't even see this device right now but in the nighttime mode this is actually very handy to be able to see and when you close the kickstand it goes right back to the standard view if you have that enabled under battery and data manager we have data saver and battery mode which allows you to modify how the battery is used nighttime saver to get you a little more battery life in the evening times or performance mode you can customize those savings the same thing with data saver you can tell data to turn off at certain times and to use data in certain ways especially important for those who are on small data plans are on aren't online limited plans this is a sprint device is not a whole lot of non unlimited data plans out there but since this is a world phone that feature is important because when you're overseas data can cost you a lot more when you're using the the internal SIM card or another sim card as far as the home screen is concerns you can see that comes with a lot of extra widgets I happen to add that one the power control but a lot of other functionality that's here on the widgets also these notification buttons here to tell you what's on like the GPS and 4G service and the cycle 4G are not available up here in the sprint notification bar area like on some devices data widgets the screen you simply tap and hold like you would expect on any other Android launching application if you want to move one around it creates kind of this green hazy and with the pin tile screen it's really hard on the eyes it's kind of makes this they can kind of see it on the screen there the sliding back and forth almost like a bad tie on a TV show as far as the star bar down here it comes default with the phone dialer browser Sprint ID and the app launcher and you can see the multiple sliders down there at the at the bottom that the indicator to which screen you're on you can replace these icons by tapping and holding and then choosing whatever icon you like thankfully the Sprint ID is not stuck there if you move this print ID it's also under the settings menu as well of course there's a lot of splode on here I got the nascar app you've got the sprint music plus print radio sprint TV and movies which the sprint TV and movies only works on 3g service doesn't work through your Wi-Fi so that means the quality of the service is not all that great even when 4g but you can uninstall some of these applications as you can see here I've got NASCAR air and I can actually pull this nascar app out if I go down here to sprint zone on the other hand there's no options you can add these two groups and if you go up here to apps you can see there's a sprint group so you can create your own custom group to kind of hide those or you just ignore them like most people do or root the device and take them all yourself it's also got a nice little market access button up here at the top and it is running the new market view interesting note skype although it's supposed to work with most gingerbread devices does not work with the front-facing camera or any camera really on the motorola photon 4g which is a little disappointing Netflix does run just fine although the video can be a little blurry because of the pentile technology some of the other software that's on here that's pretty typical of motorola's social networking or the media I find that with the social networking when you add a social account you can choose Facebook or Twitter and pose to that but I found that really the the content that's produced or what you see on the widget for those type of applications in this messaging system is not as good as the native apps such as the Twitter app or facebook app etc far as a browser is concerned it's relatively fast I it got a little bogged down when especially with our site with a little bit of fun in the flash piece or any animation that appeared in the middle of the screen and again because it's pentile when you start scrolling up and down it has a tensile to get blurry but you can see here I'm scrolling up and down here it's still trying to finish loading it seems up just a little sluggish and that's possibly to do that I'm taking this more in account because i've been using another newer device recently that has been just butter smooth on the browser but as you can see here this is our site and it's a little sluggish probably because of this little t mobile ad here but it's still hesitant not very screw smooth scrolling not very usable I mean it's usable but it's it's it's frustrating when you're trying to scroll in and out as far as keyboard options go with the motorola photon 4g you have this multi touch keyboard which see here as predictive text or you can go with swype which also comes default installed the mobile hotspot is enabled on this particular device but the PR documentation is quick to point out that you have to have a sprint account in order to be able to do that of course there are ways around this as you all are probably aware as for the camera in the camcorder there is no way to turn off the shutter sound every time it takes a picture you're going to hear the shutter sound there is no setting to turn it off and I've checked several places to try to disable it unfortunately it doesn't exist as far as the built-in camera app there are some settings available as far as scenes go and effects you can turn the flash on and off rotate the camera and you can switch the camcorder here or switch the gallery the colors on the device when it takes a photo are a little muted and don't quite match up rights in fact it it's hard to see on the screen but the difference between this orange color and the red color are are really hard to tell although it is lacking the bluish tint that was prone to the droid 3 you can press and hold on the shutter button up here and it will focus on whatever you want if you want it there's no tap to focus but you can tap and hold the square to set the focus point there is a camera button up at the top but it's single phase only as you press it down and it takes the shot automatically there are a few more settings here picture resolution is set to wide screen by default I have it switched to large so I can take some pictures for the final review video resolution is 720p only and you can see you can change the exposure in the storage location there but other than that you don't get a whole lot of functionality and the camera is just okay it's not really anything right all about it's an all right device for what you get but with some caveats gallery for this device kind of gives you this stacked look there's not a whole lot you can do to change that view you can have it show your friends activities or you can go right in the camera roll and see pictures from there as well some other apps some note on the motorola photon 4g that are included by default google books is they're managed a sim card because this is a world of phone obviously needing to have that a quick office rich location all pretty standard apps as far as the phone world is concerned there is a task manager built in which is nice so not the download third-party app TeleNav gps navigator is just like TeleNav gps navigator on any other sprint device that you've used web talk connector we'll get to in just a moment this is the HD station the productivity series from Motorola for the photon 4G it comes with a little remote and the remote has a directional keypad on it to navigate not the mouse but to navigate through scrolling up and down left and right it's got the same menu buttons we got a Settings button the home button a back button and then maybe a little bit difficult to see in this view here you can also change the volume up and down and mute it other than that this doesn't do a whole lot it's got a small battery in it it does work fairly well for what it is I your device in this case the photon becomes a little touch mouse it does that this dock has some USB ports on the back and got a left and right mouse button and they pop up keyboard as appropriate and then as far as the screen goes you can see that in over here we have our mobile view and it is the same as what you would normally see on your phone is what's in the desktop mode right now up at the top we've got notifications and then over here you get your usual information like settings and 3G service and battery life new gmail messages pop up as usual and then down across the bottom here we've got the dialer contracts contracts contacts music gallery manager apps for web top firefox facebook and sprint firefox is a older version its version for i believe in as you can see it takes a good amount of time to actually start up and then suffers from some problems as far as how things run you know i'm bringing up a video here in this case which will run just fine in a small view but as soon as you go a large full screen it goes quickly to gets really chopping as far as performance goes on the main screen and on the device itself running gingerbread the performance is pretty good i did find that it has a tendency to get bogged down every once in a while has a tendency to need to go into the task manager and kill apps as you can see it count just locked up there for just a moment kind of stuck in one spot this may be partially due to some of the animation but i think it's just this particular device is is just struggling a little bit with speeds now you may be asking yourself why would i buy this particular device over a device that happens be coming out another couple of days that is the same price with the same software and probably run smoother and the answer to that is remember this is a world phone and the other device that comes out which will be doing a hardware and software review on shortly he's not a world phone and can't be used overseas well can't be used overseas on GSM networks that wraps up our closer look at the software of the motorola photon 4g for sprint if you have any comments or questions leave them below if you'd like to have us answer a specific question in the final review or have a question about the device that you would like to see covered in the final review please leave us a message below as well thanks for watching you