Gadgetory

what's up guys John rettinger from technobuffalo here and I want to show you something it may have not seen before that is HTC's Sense UI running on the nexus one now before I start and give you a tour of what's new and what's here there are a few people that I need to thank first and foremost I want to thank Carlos graves you can follow him on Twitter at Carlos graves from droid a dog calm and fantastic Android resource for really holding my hand through this whole process I am a novice when it comes to rooting and a bit of hacking and he was really patient walking me through it so Carlos thank you this is the HTC desire rom it's a new phone coming out from HTC it's essentially the same guts as a nexus one but just with the sense UI sitting on top of it this rom came from modaco a paul one of their admins posted it and if you won't do this yourself which is not for the faint of heart I promise you you can follow some instructions that the good folks at redmond pie posted and i'll put a links to all these in the sidebar including links to carlos's twitter page and droid dog so let's go ahead and get started here you'll notice this looks very different than android 2.1 that you see in the past first let me show you that this is in fact still running android 2.1 it's not a skinned version of two point oh so we'll jump right into settings and you notice a new settings menu here as well go to about phone and we'll check the software information you can see right there is still is running the newest version of android 2.1 update 1 the update one was the update that gave it to multi touch capabilities which are still present up throughout this now this rom is just a alpha release this is by no means a final ramen are still some bugs in it but for the most part it's been really stable and really reliable really the one of the one bugs i have seen is that light right the indicator light seems to always stay on let's go ahead and get started one of the biggest things that I like about android 2.1 was the live wallpapers and with cents you while you can actually still have those live wallpapers let me so we'll go back into settings I'll go up to the top and go to personalize you get a whole bunch of new wallpapers here and you can pick different scenes that you like in the background and you still have the option for live wallpaper so if you were wondering we'll go ahead and set that sense UI itself is a bit of a battery killer and of course live wallpapers are as well but they still do work i'll show you what that is in just a minute still works just as normal live wallpapers in the past and you guys got sort of a sneak peek at one of the really cool innovations that in HTC's new sense why and that's pinch to zoom in the operating system previously we've seen pinch-to-zoom utilize in web pages and picture galleries but now it's actually follows through without the operator throughout the upper system so let me show you take two fingers and actually pinch in and you get almost a Mac like expose of all of your different home screens of which there are now seven there's one down there I'm not using but you can jump right to any of these so I want to go back to the home or check out whether I can jump right on over to whether if I want to get back any of them I can hop right in or I can just zoom right out zoom right out things sometimes doesn't always work there is awesome there was a little bit inaccurate but it really is a nice way to jump around home screens with standard android 2.1 you had the little icons on the bottom that you can jump to hear on the sense you can move via that new pinch to zoom or you can see that little bar on the bottom right that start to move along as i scroll and again there are now seven home screens so let's go ahead and show you some of the other cool new features that are found in sense UI let's jump right to the camera and you also notice a sort of a new menu trade well you don't have sort at 3d folding back effect you have a 2.1 we also notice a lot of new programs and applications in here God peep it's a built-in Twitter client you've got new set up stocks application in quick office you've got an FM radio tuner in here which I tried to test and it does not work I thought maybe the next one had a hidden FM tuner in there even with the headset plugged in to use as an antenna it doesn't work and you still get the htc's Teeter game which is sort of like a labyrinth marble so let's jump into camera go ahead and find that for it and I'll show you what the camera icon looks like and just some some new tweaks here which are pretty hella handy I think so standard camera let's go ahead and show you what you can do here go ahead and pull out that drawer you go to photo or video hit that icon right down below you actually get a whole bunch of effects that you can do aquafx Solarize negative stuff yet nothing that fancy but you know they are sort of handy start rinsing a bit blue as you can see in there a few other that have the standard features you can have a few more settings I can go through and show you everything is to be a probably a four hour long video but i just want to show you that some of the camera functionality at least will be different on sense UI go ahead and quit out here and i'll go ahead and continue sort of the tour android has a fantastic keyboard HTC decided to put their own on here and they've had some of their own keyboard since you first saw sense and the HTC hero let me show you what that keyboard looks like case you haven't seen it there you go it's very easy to use quickly easy to type on and supports landscape orientation as well and it still has the same auto correction features that you've sort of known to to love in android to show across the top and just tap them and you are off to the races so let me continue the tour here there are a lot of widgets that you can choose from a lot of HTC custom which i'll show you some of the few that i have right here running on the nexus 1 i'll show you what some of the other ones are as well so here's your built-in twitter application you can scroll right through and see all your different tweets if you want to open one particular you can just click on it and you get sort of a functionality across the bottom you can scroll at see your tweets your mentions direct messages favorites and all the like and notifications will show up in the drop-down menu as well we'll go ahead and close out of that will continue with some of the widgets that I've got right here we've got a friend Fiat sort of pulls in all your friends tweets I'm not useful it is but something kind of fun to have and i wanted to show demonstrated you've got weather of course you can sort of scroll through different locations London Paris Here I am in irvine now one thing that i should mention is that when you set this up you do have of course english options but there is not an option for united states english the closest was the UK so some of the words have sort of the UK spelling of things and i'm still playing around figuring out how to get this from celsius to fahrenheit i was able to get the clock from 24-hour time to standard 12 at least 12 standard in the US let me show you some of the other witness that we've done here's HTC stock widget so here we have up pictures in the picture gallery let me show you how this is handled standard android 2.1 had a really cool sort of 3d picture effect since you I doesn't have sort of the same cool effects but it's pretty useful here some pictures I took just about side you still have the pinch to zoom and to go the next picture you just sort of do a sample swipe and videos show up right in there as well you're the sample video I took just sort of outside of my balcony plays pretty nice it was very short with video and I'll play right in that same that same screen and if you'd like as well go to go back to phone the pictures for free flowing there so here's a picture of cat Mercedes and you have some options for for sharing this quick that one more time so if you want to send this wherever you like instead it to facebook facebook HTC Sense sort of a custom Facebook widget for HTC Sense flickr gmail order a mail account you have set up messages you want to send it as an mms picasa or if it's a video you can upload it directly to youtube this is all sort of one touch you set up the account you click it and it automatically upload and up for YouTube it will upload in the background so you have to keep the YouTube window open here all the time or something that annoyed me with a few other devices go ahead and close that here so that was pictures then we've got sort of a blank screen here on the 7th and let me show you what some of the other widgets are go to widgets and you've got sort of your array of HTC options bookmarks calendar clock Facebook footprints which is geo-tagging french stream i showed you mail just pulls in your mail messages music sort of get the android music and HTC music news to pull in all your news feeds people it's sort of a quick dial shows you a thumbnail of their picture if you like and you can call them photo album the sample it what that looks like let's go back stock settings on the same things weather and YouTube so let me show you one or two other things they have noticed it in kind of interesting one of my concerns when I flash this rom which again was quite a hassle was Android Marketplace Android Marketplace still going to work with the sort of cooked rom and it does work and work just as I'd expected with this is what is if this was native so Android Marketplace Warped no problem and things are here summer in dollar summer in pounds so let's go ahead and check out the internet since does use a looks like a bit of a different browser so here we've got on technobuffalo load speeds were just as fast as you'd expect with tmobile who is i'm using on here 3g network or Wi-Fi pinch-to-zoom is certainly still there landscape orientation there as well it's actually relatively quick as far as rotating speeds it's renders fast scrolls fast and pinch to zoom works very quickly do it and quit out of here a few other sort of different things to be aware instead of having it's a 3g it's gonna have an h4 hsdpa so the icons across the top are going to look a bit different than what you might have been used to with android 2.1 the lockscreen you guys saw when i first turn this on is definitely different as well sort of the HTC Sense lockscreen you to slide that down and your home screen is revealed now i'm sure they're a lot you can see the cloud you can see the cloud sort of go across the home screen we saw that with the HTC hd2 if it's raining you'll see water drops will show up they're cloudy you'll see the clouds if you just saw its snow it was these sort of snowflakes the HTC Sense UI is really full featured and goes all the way down through most parts of Android it's I'm going to really enjoy the nexus one has a processor speed and the RAM to handle running all these widgets to handle the live wallpapers and have things run very smoothly now I have not tested battery drain I assume this is going to be a complete batteries suck but right now it's been been working pretty well I've had it for for a few hours and things seem to be running nicely and again this is just an alpha build of the wrong I assume as so the community starts to build and go from alpha few other alphas and finally into beta and a release that you're really going to see a an improved experience right now I think I could use this on a daily basis to probably use this quite happily so guys once again if you're considering doing this is certainly not for the faint of heart I don't think I could've done this on my own without Carlos's help and his definite hand holding something to keep in mind and at the very least to sneak preview of what you can expect with the HTC Desire which I'm guessing is set for just a European release judging by the language options and I guys hope you enjoy it for more coverage of the sense UI on the nexus one be sure to check out the youtube channel and of course technobuffalo com where you can get all your tech news even create and monetize your own text sub blog talk and create friends talking about technology with our own custom-built social network anyway jon rettinger from technobuffalo i hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video bye bye