Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo here at the full review for you of the HTC status or the Facebook phone also called the HTC ChaCha abroad let's go ahead and see what this QWERTY pack and little guy can dance its way into your hearts and yes it took me a while to come up with that intro all right so let me remind you of the specs of this guy here it's got a 2.6 inch diagonal capacitive touchscreen the resolution of 480 by 800 it's being powered by 800 megahertz Qualcomm built processor it's got 512 megabytes of RAM and ROM on the back it's got a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash it's running Android 2.3 and has a 12 hundred and 50 million power battery which we'll talk about quite a bit all right so when I do my phone reviews the first thing that I talk about is called quality they actually been using this as my dedicated only phone for the past two and a half weeks so I've made many more phone calls and usually my 20 call tests has actually been pretty solid I've only had into two weeks to dropped calls now as well I was driving through a known 80 MT dead area other than that call quality has been outstanding sneaker phone volume was a little bit tinny but quite loud HTC included one of their neat features then if you take your phone you flip it over while you're on a call it's got an automatic convert over speakerphone kind of neat speakerphone is pretty decent on here so if you rely heavily on a speakerphone this is going to be a pretty good choice for you I didn't have any white noise in my and the color to report any white noise on their end so thumbs up for call equality alright let's go ahead and talk let's just get it out in the open the big white elephant in the room is this guy right here the Facebook button if you probably asked what does that do does it just take you to Facebook well it does a couple things let me show you I'm gonna go and push it right now just while I'm on the home screen and it's going to launch my well pretty much launch my wall let me update my status quickly and easily hence the name HTC status this is probably the most appropriately named phone out there and go ahead and select the camera if you want to take a picture or if you want to take photos let me go ahead and show you some interests in here I'm signed in on facebook let me go ahead and try and type a status update so I'll go ahead and type hi so there it is typed hi I'm gonna go ahead post and it's going to go ahead and do its posing thing so now when I go to Facebook I should see that post right on my wall shouldn't i well you think so but here's my facebook and it is not there that Facebook button doesn't work for me and I am signing my facebook all the steps and procedures were done followed perhaps you'll have better luck maybe just a Pollack my review unit that guy doesn't work if I go to the Facebook app and I update my wall have to upload a picture works no problem but this button however does not work if you want to take a picture or you are taking a picture or if you have anything on the screen here that is uploaded to Facebook that button is going to glow as you can see it there it is see it was glowing so you take a picture to let you know that it can be uploaded and in theory when you hit that button it'll take that picture you just took and it will automatically upload it to Facebook at least that's the theory doesn't work and even here when I go in upload a picture so we'll go ahead done I want upload that to my photos it's not going to work so this button here it's really just for decoration it's not really decorating much something to keep in mind certainly it's probably unique to this device but yeah thumbs down on that guy not working alright so we've gotten past that Facebook button let's talk about this keyboard I'm on a bit of a physical keyboard fix over the past couple months amazing blackberries and now the HTC status and I've tested a lot of phones over the past probably about two and a half three years fed my hands on pretty much every phone that's come out whether it has a physical keyboard or doesn't have a physical keyboard I have tested it and of all the phones I've tested over that period of time to phone stand out to me is having the best most usable physical QWERTY keyboards one is the sidekick 4G for t-mobile and number two is HTC status this keyboard is amazing and an absolute pleasure to use the keys have a little bit of rays to them they're oval design a really nice tactile feedback if you ever felt the need to have a physical QWERTY keyboard you're going to be hard-pressed to find one better and that's out of all the phones I've ever tested an HTC status it is absolutely unbelievable so it sort of begs the question okay the Facebook button doesn't work who's this phone gonna be good for this one has been wonderful for me and I do a lot of emails if you need to peck out a ton of emails and blackberry is not your thing you want the flexibility of Android this is surprisingly a very subtly a business-friendly tool works extremely well you might want to cover up that Facebook button piece of tape they're not embarrassed in meetings about the keyboard here is really outstanding something sort of to keep in mind I've loved using this I've been a pleasure using it and I plan to continue to use this for a little while and I'll talk about why it's not gonna be my daily phone in just a little bit let's go and talk about navigation here so it is a touchscreen so all your navigation is done with a touchscreen however there are four buttons here for navigation it's become a bit cumbersome to use these buttons however are extremely small and not the most user-friendly so I wasn't doing any navigation here with those four-way buttons on a phone that has a screen this small flicking and scrolling can be a little bit difficult but get something here like a black beret certainly would be a competitor that's optical trackpad and some Android phones have had this I would have loved to have had another way to navigate this phone oftentimes a wish that I had that trackpad in the middle it's certainly usable and it's not unusable but on a film in this small pinching and zooming sometimes your thumb hits the edge here it's just capacitive buttons and doesn't always register something to keep in mind if you've got big fingers you might want to try this phone before you buy it so there's a lot of custom stuff that go into making HTC Sense work on a screen this small so this isn't the newest version of HTC Sense it's not 3.0 but it has some 3.0 ish stuff take a look this lockscreen looks very familiar right and go ahead and say whatever icons you want you can drag it right in and launch the applications I'll go ahead and just unlock it here so you have sort of that subtle tweaks applications are redone and you've got these menus here that show up on the right-hand side and that's true throughout all the applications your menus or mail you get sort of the three wave buttons there across the side it's very nicely done with this take away from the screen real estate and looking at it horizontally this is being powered by 800 megahertz Qualcomm processor and I would have loved to have shown you what the quadrant score was but unfortunately quadric kept crashing whenever I tried to use it so I don't know what the score is gonna be but I will say the phone felt very quickly I was using it pinching - zooming was very smooth and really no issues with opening applications let me go ahead and open one for example so ty very nicely into what I want to say next let's go and open up something like speed tests which is going to test my internet speed look how it opens up in a weird orientation clearly not meant for phones like this you got to turn it to the side often time that's what I found with a lot of applications is it's not meant for this portrait orientation so you're gonna have to hold your phone like this which is a bit awkward especially if you're playing a game or something that needs this screen so bear that in mind as well all right so let me go and open a few applications here I'll show you what the speed looks like let's go ahead and try something like where's I got Angry Birds on here somewhere so it's a good test subjects go ahead see if I can find it Angry Birds Angry Birds if you were an angry bird where would you be you guys probably screaming at me there it is Angry Birds let's go and open it up so look not a speed demon certainly not a dual-core or even quad-core coming out soon or not even a ho gigahertz power processor but it's pretty quick and if you're just sort of doing everyday things I really had no slowdown I haven't had to do any program management I have no task killer on here other than what's others go ahead and shut that down here a lot of speakers are other than what was installed come standard with Gingerbread it's worked actually very nicely let me go ahead and pull us aside for just a second we're going to open up a web browser and let me show you what a website looks like so I'll go ahead and launch TechnoBuffalo let me show you what the pinch-to-zoom looks like pretty fluid as you'd expect from a modern Android device but again the small screen some you're gonna have to experience for yourself you can't do at the text though on the 42 800 screen it's pretty sharp you can definitely read websites on here and they wouldn't read an e-book but you could so scrolling is pretty smooth still loading even I'm not having any bit of that checkerboarding pattern I have flash turned off I've got it set to turn on if I want to go ahead and pinch to zoom it's pretty smooth this is actually nice very nice implementation here of the Android browser so if you can deal with that small screen if you're used to maybe a blackberry that's going to be a very welcome addition so I'll go ahead and close that the weird orientation thing is something to keep in mind if you are gonna use this phone for email if you're gonna play some games on it maybe make some phone calls you're going to want to bring another battery this guy is 1215 milliamp hour battery is abysmal it barely barely gets me through three-quarters of a day take the phone off the charge around 8 o'clock two email accounts pulling an email about every 15 or 30 minutes depending on the account probably about two to three hours of phone calls and some light web browsing and I am dead dead as a doornail down to zero percent by about five o'clock you can see it right now it's one forty four and I've already gone through about 40% of my battery certainly some of that has been for testing but you can see how quickly this thing is going to go this is a phone that surprisingly I really wanted to like I wanted have a full chorded keyboard I liked it I had Android on here and I liked that I sort of had that Blackberry feel but the functionality of Android and certainly the app choice that Android provides if this thing had a better battery or had better battery management or add a bigger battery in there I could wholeheartedly recommend this phone it's thin it's got a sort of unique form factor its arched it feels nicely in the hand that's great in the pocket it's got decent call quality and all-around very well rounded phone but I just can't use it every day without having to plug it in when I'm sitting at my desk I have to plug it in because of that I just can't hold hardly recommend it to the business user or the heavy texture or internet browsing folks unless you have a charger with you you may want to pick up another battery or look at some sort of external option here or some sort of external battery charger if you're willing to deal with the bad battery life this phone definitely gets a huge thumbs up but if you're on the road you don't have access to a charger you're going to want to look elsewhere hopefully guys this answered some your questions about the HTC status not sure what's going on with that Facebook button I'm John Retton jerk and TechnoBuffalo and I'll see you in the next