Gadgetory

from pocketnow.com and today I'm going to go over some of the applications that come with the verizon hub last time we left off on the home menu which presents the time whether messaging center and call features let's go to the menu and this is where the applications come up you've got essentially your communications application which is your phone contacts messaging directories movies chaperone which is a service that allows you to I know the location of your family's phones great keep tabs on kids be cast which is the verizons of video service verizon relay which is a way to display threads of text messages that you associate with members of your family or other friends that have verizon phones go to page two we've got the calendar a calculator I can check on traffic you've got your settings a widget bizarre and basically that's their little application store where you can actually download small applications that run on the verizon phone feedback internet radio you can listen to the internet radio the recipes is one of those widgets that I was talking about it's allows you to view some recipes online and then photo viewer is another application that i downloaded which turns the verizon hub into a photo viewer so let's go back to the first page and let's try a couple of these applications out one real interesting application is the move the application so let's say you want to go to a movie theater and find out what's playing at that theater you would press on theater and let's say we picked this regal ballston we can look at showtimes and it basically tells you what movies are playing at that theater and let's say we wanted to we're interested in going to knowing we press on knowing and it gives us the Showtime more interested in a trailer from that movie click on trailer and the trailer for that movie appears which is a really pretty cool I want each of you to draw me a picture of what you think the future is going to look like so the quality of the image is actually pretty good obviously it could always be better but it's not natural and as you can see the video quality in terms of the motion is excellent so there's no stuttering whatsoever I am on verizon fios so I wouldn't expect that most other offices you decide to stop it you can go back you decide this is the movie theater you want to go to you can actually let's say we want to go to the four o'clock showing and it's checking the availability of tickets and the ticket sales is actually handled through fandango so that's a very nice feature then let's say you don't know where this theater is you can view the map it shows you where the theater is and one of the great features that verizon has and it's a service feature is this verizon navigator i can actually send verizon navigator to my cell phone let's say we'll just put in movie here click enter and send the message and then once that message is successfully sent it will actually come out on my Anya and you just heard ionia saying that there was a message received here it is and I can actually view it and it's downloading the message and it says here we go real ballston common and I can actually map it where it shows me where that location is and I can route to it so that's a really cool feature where you actually don't have to fumble with your mobile device to enter addresses it send it directly from the hub and you can say I could do this all with my windows mobile device and that's true but usually when picking a movie you know you need several individuals to make a selection it's nice to have the hub with larger screen than your mobile device so let's go back to the menu and another nice feature is the V CAST feature and the V CAST feature allows you to view different categories of videos so 4 into sports right here and ESPN and fox sports are the providers so pick off so let's say we want to see this video or SC tops plays three to twenty eight then we can actually go fullscreen and the quality you can see with action images there is some pixelation that occurs but that's I think the problem with the pcat system is not high quality video so we're going to go back another nice feature is the iheart radio system and you can have by location alphabetical so I've got a favorite which is at WK x q in New York and you can play that and the quality of that is pretty good we're listening to Pink Floyd here so it's a nice radio to have on your desk and the radio keep playing until you stop it so if we want to stop it we can actually here stop it right here so then we'll go back to menu one last thing I wanted to show today was the ability to have a radio widget on the home screen so you can actually go into settings in home screen settings and down here display radio widget click OK now when you go to the home screen you can actually move this around and there's the radio so you can actually access the radio directly from the home screen raft so that's a nice feature so you can see that the verizon hub has quite a bit functionality and it has quite a bit of potential as well it would have been quite interesting had verizon chosen the windows mobile platform i think they would have gotten a lot more out of the box but that said I think there's a lot of promise to the verizon hub and there's even talk of adding a browser which seems to be a big request from the current users out there I'll be back to take a look at some other features of the verizon hubs such as messaging and the photo display features on my next video