Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe with pocketnow.com and today I've got the software review of the HTC Wildfire s by t-mobile this time it's gonna be great alright so I said this time it's gonna be great what do I mean by that well this guy has a different screen than a lot of phones that I've looked at in the past it's really nice in hand it looks really pretty good there are a couple caveats to it that we'll get to a little bit later in the video but for some reason this little camera is well camera shy and I know this is a phone but a lot of people are going to use this as their point-and-click camera and their all-around multimedia device it's just a little bit ironic that it's so difficult to catch this guy on film and make it look anywhere halfway decent I don't know exactly why that is but let's go into some some of the caveats of this screen now first of all it's a little bit smaller and when I say smaller I mean dimensionally this guy is really small we talked about that in the previous video in the hardware video so if you haven't watched that make sure you go back in the channel and check that out this is only 3.2 inches and the resolution on it isn't all that great it's 320 by 480 and it's got 260 mm colors on it now that's part of the issue let me lift this guy up a little closer to the camera I don't know if you can see it but there appears to be banding on on the display and when I say banding I don't mean traditional banding like less colors so you have striping and whatnot of the colors where it goes from one color to another color without a nice transition in between no I don't mean that in fact that's really pretty good what I mean is there appear to be little interlaced lines going through it that kind of cut the resolution in a little bit lower maybe even in half why that is I don't know I think it's just a characteristic of the screen but it is something you need to kind of be aware of and know that it's okay that's what it's supposed to do it's a lower end with a lower-end display and that's one of the things that they did - well to make it less expensive now that having been said look at this guy you hold it in your hand just like this reflections notwithstanding and it's perfect if it's really nicely it's really really comfortable this is one of the best all-around phones to hold in your hand and and its really a good entry-level phone now I'm a power user so I really like power devices and with those power devices usually come big bulky blocks like my g2 we've shown you this in the previous video but just to do a little side-by-side I'm paying that's a big comparison and I zoomed in deliberately so that the g2 wouldn't all fit on screen but you kind of get the point well let's get back into software first of all what does this guy come prepackaged with well it's Android 2.3 so not the latest version but still pretty good it also comes prepackaged with HTC senses HTC Sense version 2.1 not the 3d version like the e both ridi and some of the other phones out there have this is just the standard 2d and it is version 2.1 not three not three five but 2.1 why did they do that well this guy has a 600 megahertz processor in it and we'll see some of those in the benchmarks a little bit later to see how that impacts it so let's see what it comes it pre-installed with if I can scroll down here that's the radio app okay so first of all you'll notice my little scroll bar over on the side it says that I'm about a third of the way down the screen now one of the things I really like about HTC Sense UI is the fact that it's got a paginate 'add app drawer so I can look at one page and then another page and then another page just like that so I'm not scrolling between an infinite list of stuff kind of nice I really like that it's nothing new so let's go ahead and just look at what it comes with this is a t-mobile device so it's got some t-mobile apps pre-loaded on it not an awful lot it's also an HTC Sense device so it's got some HTC Sense stuff pre-loaded again not enough a lot we've got four one one and more which is t-mobile's four one one and information app lets you get all kinds of stuff directory assistance weather horoscope sports and of course it's paid by ads let's go back Adobe Reader comes pre-installed it's got the nice HTC calculator with the nice big buttons on it just can come in very handy at times the HTC calendar HTC camcorder and camera which are very very functional very nice the HTC clock app which has your alarms and whatnot Download Manager which is coming more and more standard on more devices DT sync now this is doubleTwist syncs up your iTunes library and whatnot so kind of nice sometimes you have problems with that where iTunes kind of blocks stuff like that from happening I don't have an iTunes device so I haven't tried that app out but we'd like to know your comments leave that down in the comments down below if you think that that's a good addition bad Edition if you have any any good experiences our bad experience with it we kind of showed you the FM radio now this is just what it sounds like it is literally an FM receiver in your phone you do have to have your headphones plugged in up here that serves as the antenna to receive those radio stations and then you can come down here and just very easily scan through the stations of course I can't do that because I don't have the headphone antenna plugged in but if you want to get some regular analog radio signals over-the-air you can do that very easily with the FM radio very nice friend stream that's HTC's unified Facebook and Twitter aggregator shows you what all your friends are talking about all in one the gallery is very simply the HTC gallery Gmail Google search you know what all that is the HTC hub kind of the the center of all things HTC and you can see I haven't set that back up for this version of the video HTC likes that's well the stuff that HTC likes some recommended apps and whatnot Internet is your browser it's the the HTC version of the browser so it looks very HTC ish latitude I don't remember that came on the phone or if I installed that later but it's a Google app to help share your location with your friends Linpack pro is a benchmarking utility that I installed we'll get to that male is the HTC email client Maps is Google Maps market you know that messages is the messaging client again the HTC version of that music is the HTC music player my account and my device these are both from t-mobile they help you get more information about your device and your account including minutes used and all of that fun stuff navigation goes along with latitude and maps it's the Google GPS app news is kind of fun it's basically just an RSS aggregator for HTC cents this actually ties in with the web browser pretty well and lets you get RSS feeds through the browser which you don't normally have by default on a stock Android device peep is HTC's Twitter utility the their Twitter app if you will people is the contacts app phone the phone app Places is yet another one of the Google Maps things that helps you find stuff locally based on either a location you input or your GPS location so that's really nice quadrant is another benchmarking tool we'll get to that settings and setup kind of go hand-in-hand these are all the settings after the fact this is the setup that walks you through all of that alright picking back up we've got slacker which is a streaming radio station really kind of cool very similar to Pandora with a lot of different features that I'm sure if I said it's like Pandora I'd get a lot of hate mail down in the comments so no it's not like Pandora it's like Pandora smart bench and speed tests are more bench marking utilities again we'll get to that t-mobile Mail is our t-mobile model rather is well the apps the t-mobile wants you to get make sure I'm telling you the truth they're on that one yet we all agree to that yes we know ok already yeah kind of a pain in the neck so this is not really the t-mobile android market but kind of it is it lets you get ringtones caller tunes apps games all kinds of stuff really has kind of a neat interface I kind of like this over the stock Android Market just saying but anyway one of the cool things that it comes with talk is Google Talk for chatting and whatnot someday they're going to integrate audio and video on all phones and not just the Nexus S family let's hope transfer is a utility that lets you transfer stuff from your old phone to your new one once you've got an Android powered device you really don't need that anymore but that's going from like a non-smart phone over to to this one visual voicemail is t-mobile's version of Google Voice it tries to transpose your voice messages and whatnot Google Voice is something that I add and on of course because I use Google Voice voice search is a Google Voice Search app utility it kind of enhances things so you can do more fun stuff with your search button down here searching with your voice whether it's the weather app YouTube is the YouTube app Wi-Fi calling like you see right up here is a t-mobile thing that lets you make and receive calls over Wi-Fi when you're under a Wi-Fi bubble now this includes t-mobile bubbles it includes work bubbles that includes your home Wi-Fi bubble that includes your your dorm you know all that fun stuff if you don't get good reception in one of those places not a problem now whenever you're under that bubble you're good to go it's a very simple app you simply have well there's a tutorial there that we're just going to try and skip however we can skip it you've got a button down here on and off so right now it's on it sees what network I'm connected to and everything's great now the downside to this is you do have to have your Wi-Fi turned on all the time if you want to receive calls over Wi-Fi when the screen is off making calls is no problem because your screen is going to be on for that but if you want to receive incoming calls you've got to have Wi-Fi on and that kind of drains your battery so those of you who have said do reviews with a full battery I'd like to but it kind of sucked the battery cuz I got Wi-Fi colleague on now you can disable that feature in the Wi-Fi setup so it's not going to be sucking down battery all the time just when the screen is on which is what I have it set to of course that means I'm not going to receive calls unless I'm under the the cellular network which I am here and in which case it's going to come over the cellular network now the first thing you're going to notice this is a 600 megahertz processor inside of here as far as processors ago it's not that fast but scrolling between screens even with the Sense UI and the animations really is nice it's fluid the animations are quick it looks good it's really an all-around good phone now where you'll run into some problems let me see if I can get these specs for you and we talked about them in the hardware review the the RAM that is on this phone and the the hard drive space if you will the internal storage are both really really limited so limited in fact that they don't go over them on their spec sheet they really don't want you to know so not a lot we're talking you know half gig tops we'll get into specifics in the write-up over at pocketnow.com so make sure you go and look at that what that means is when I sync this up with my account and it started pulling down all of the apps for me I ran out of space really really quick because it filled up the internal memory and and that was it so I had to get rid of a whole bunch of stuff this is a relatively fresh install that I've been using for the last several days so let's go ahead and run a couple tests first we're going to run speed tests now this is connected to my Wi-Fi it is 802 11 n go ahead and begin that test for you so you can see it we're going really quick here so really not too bad on my g2 I tested it just this morning I was above 10 megabit per second down and above 3 megabit per second up so this is performing pretty well you know not all that great but 6.4 kilobits per second down and for kill or megabits rather and 4 megabits per second up with a really low ping time so that is really not too bad this is like I said an 802 11 and it also does BMG it does not do a let's go ahead and go back and run this again over see if I can get into my settings here we'll do this again over the cellular network so we'll turn off Wi-Fi well long press on home get us back to our recent list okay and we're gonna run this again it's got some communication issues because I was too fast and it's still handing off to the cellular network there so this is a HSPA compatible phone now when I say HSPA I don't mean HSPA+ okay that's a big difference HSPA+ lets you do super fast speeds 21 megabit per second some day 42 megabit per second I don't know are we already there yet I don't have any phones that have reported that fast so it really doesn't matter to me but looks like we're there we go 3G is what we're getting right here again HSPA try that again here and this time we're all connected up now with t-mobile the ping is usually pretty good we're seeing this a little bit high in my opinion anything below 300 milliseconds is generally acceptable I like to see that in the double digits down here you can see we're getting right around one megabit per second up and on the flip side we're seeing usually about half that excuse me one point one down and about half that up this case is written a little bit slower than that so having an HSPA+ compatible phone really helps speed things up in this case you can see some of the limitations of not having that Plus at the end but it's still very respectable and reasonably fast so let's go back and do some other benchmarks shall we that's okay smart bench quadrant standard and Linpack pro are our three standard benchmarking utilities water benchmarking Utilities well there's a lot of people who comment on my videos that say that one is biased over another and it's fake and it's not reliable you know what that's true of all benchmarks a benchmark literally goes out and it runs a series of tests and the tests are supposed to be the same and then you're the only difference there then is the device that you're running them on the processor speed the RAM file i/o and whatnot the graphics processing as you can see here that way since those are the only variables and the tests are there the standard they're the control factor they're not changing their the constants that's the word I'm looking for then what you're measuring is the difference in speed between one device and another kind of makes sense so different benchmarks test different ways and they test different things that's why we run through several of them hopefully so you can see kind of a wide variety of various different tests you know just looking at them it's kind of fun but you can also see how they perform what they do and and then of course get the end result which is the benchmark result the score itself so that you can take that and then compare it to other devices so this is going to run through a series of several other tests we'll come back in when the results are up so you can see how well I did okay so I just ran smart bench 2011 on my t-mobile g2 it is running CyanogenMod seven point zero one seven point one release candidate and it is overclocked a little bit but you can see my productivity and my games index are 17 17 and 16 14 respectively show you where that falls you got to come way down here into these guys so the Nvidia core biz 5 the Samsung Galaxy S samsung galaxy s HTC EVO 3d Samsung Epic 4G so right where you'd expect it to be some of the devices that are faster than that are of course the galaxy s2 and some of the lg optimus 2x the phones that you'd expect so why am i showing you the g2 well I want to show you the results rather than yeah it didn't finish well it did finish but it kind of failed if you can read back here says it's got invalid results for pi please don't switch out of the benchmark during the test well I didn't I ran it straight through in fact this is the second time running through and it keeps giving me these problems so we have to give this they did not complete if you have been able to successfully run smart bench 2011 please post your productivity score and your game score in the comments so we can know what this benchmarks that but that having min said let's go ahead and get out of there and move on to the next benchmark shall we okay we're back to the g2 I want to show you a Linpack Pro for Android we're gonna run this in multi thread and this says it could take 30 seconds or more now this is gonna run through a bunch of tests look it's done it shows me that I've got 40 2.08 three mega flops took 4.0 1 seconds the normal result is 3.2 fours that resolution anyway really pretty good I didn't want to show you that over here on the Wildfire s main reason because it took twenty five point eight five seconds now the mega flops on this one are 6 point 5 to 6 rather than the other one which was 42 and the normal res is three point to 4 which is the same thing this got an inconsistent result now in all honesty so did this one the first time I ran it so that's not necessarily a bad thing running a single thread usually takes a little bit more time but this is just again a test of how fast the processor is how fast you can get stuff in and out of RAM and you can see here really where the 600 megahertz processor compared to the overclocked to 1.5 gigahertz processor it was 800 when it shipped by the way it really can come into play but let's not dwell too long on that we've still got quadrant standard and this is one of my fans most favorite benchmark utility so I always have to include it it's not too exciting up front it just runs through some tests where it gets fun is where it gets into the 2d and 3d graphics and we'll see if if it's going to run it with any kind of speed I'll go ahead and start the g2 kind of side by side here just so you can see so I just barely started the g2 see if we can fit those both on screen and you can see we're already down into graphics with the g2 and the Wildfire s is still kind of plugging along doing what it can it's working on the IO right now the database writes now that's internal memory it doesn't have anything to do with the external memory the SD card it does come with a Samsung branded 2 gig microSD card which generally speaking is somewhere between a class 2 and a class 4 I believe in this case it's a class 4 so it's really not that bad you can see the graphics not bad I mean it looks pretty good it's just a little bit slower let's go ahead and look at the results the results over here on the g2 are 25 36 again that's overclocked from 800 megahertz to 1.5 gigahertz we're still running through the test over on the Wildfire s which is wrapping up go ahead and submit that so we can share it and this result is 720 that means it's faster than the original Nexus 1 and HTC Desire which are basically the same phone it's faster than the original Motorola Droid and the the Xperia x10 I slower obviously than the Samsung Galaxy S the Droid X the Evo 2 point 2 plus and basically anything that runs Android 2.2 or higher so how well did it perform in this test well not that great but still it's faster than the original Nexus 1 in the the benchmark results so all in all not too bad so that's going to bring us right to the end of our software review for this little guy and we're just going to conclude with the overall how well did it fare results of course to get the full write-up head over to pocketnow.com so you can see more detail about what we go into what we test and our overall impressions what we put it through first and foremost I use this thing heavily as my daily driver for about a week in fact a little bit you're so t-mobile who lent us this device we appreciate that I've kept it a little bit longer than I was supposed to I hope you don't mind and again as part of the FCC disclaimer all of these results are our own and they're not influenced at all by t-mobile other than the little references I've been making over here to the the specifications and features list that they included with the phone which basically tells me what the hardware specs are and whatnot and some of the software that's included with it but it's a great all-around device if you are looking for an entry-level Android powered device or even if you're just looking for a new phone that's a little bit smarter than a dumb phone this is your phone very simply this is it this is the one you want this is the one you want for your kids this is the one you want for your mom this is the one that you want for your wife if your wife isn't a really high-end power user my wife is a power user she needs a higher end phone she has a nexus one this phone wasn't fast enough for her my daughter my son they both love this device it fits their hand better and it goes in their pockets easier it's just an all-around good device it works and it does everything they wanted it to the one area that they're gonna run into a little bit of a problem is because this is a smaller phone because it's a cheaper phone and by that I mean less expensive it's HTC so it's really high quality it's not really all that fast as far as graphics goes now that means games are gonna work well and that's part of their demographic is kids teenagers they're not gonna like this all that much because it doesn't play games that well now when I say games I'm talking more the high-end stuff the opengl stuff games like cut the rope works great games like Angry Birds works just fine games like gun brothers not gonna do it games like some of your car games racing games again not going to do it that well it'll still run and it still works okay but again they're gonna be a little bit disappointed there for an overall feature phone I mean this blows away your flip phones this blows away your future phones this this is fabulous this is a wonderful first step into the smart phone and I think that's what t-mobile is trying to do with the Wildfire s of course the Wildfire s is nothing new it's new to t-mobile it's new to the US but nothing new to the rest of the world who've had it in Europe and Asia for quite some time and I can see why they'd like it overall I'm gonna have to give this phone high marks if you want to see exactly how high those marks are head on over to pocketnow.com it's gonna take us a day or so to get the final review up of the entire review of this device but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with it of course if you like this video and seeing stuff this in-depth give the the video a thumbs up subscribe to our video channel so you can make sure to see new videos and of course that includes hardware and software reviews and my favorite our new unboxing so make sure you subscribe so you can see those and again head over to pocketnow.com so you can see not only the write-ups on this phone but on other phones as well if you're new to the channel we also get really into some some daily news and into how to hack these things to do anything you want just kind of a plug there so without any further ado make sure you leave your comments down below and for pocketnow.com showing off the HTC Wildfire s for t-mobile I'm Joe Levi