Gadgetory

what's up everyone John retinue from TechnoBuffalo here and I want to give you a full review of the HTC surround powered by Windows Phone 7 I know a lot of you are interested in the operating system and this is one of the flagship devices on AT&T let's go ahead see if it's worth your hard-earned 199 bucks all right so before I get to the phone review and go over all the specs I generally like to start a phone overview of what talking about call quality if the phone doesn't make good phone calls no matter what the operating system is or what it can do it's not gonna be much use to you the HTC surround does make excellent phone calls call quality is absolutely outstanding it was able to pull in the strong 5 bar signal really most of places that I went where most phones would get me maybe four bars of 3G this is pointing in a much stronger signal certainly bars are a bit arbitrary from device to device but this did have a very strong antenna speakerphone I'm gonna hold off on so we're gonna talk about a little bit later that's sort of the reason that this device is called the surround I'm from a call quality standpoint was absolutely outstanding alright so now that we've discussed that let me review the spec to this guy with you it has a 3.8 inch that's diagonal WVGA resolution screen which means 480 by 800 it's got a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor with just sort of the minimum requirements for Windows Phone 7 and I will say the Snapdragon processor feels very fast on Windows Phone 7 devices that I've tested that would be the HTC surround and the Samsung focus really seems to be optimized it feels much as if e'er then the Snapdragon processor feels on even the Android device it has 16 gigs of internal storage 512 megabytes of from 448 of RAM it's gone on the back a 5 megapixel camera it just will do autofocus LED flash of course and a video capabilities which will record at 720p it also has this sort of Dolby mobile we'll talk about in just a few minutes it's got a digital compass 802 11 N which is sort of a little bit rare now for mobile becoming more commonplace it's got a 1230 milliamp hour battery and this thing weighs it's actually a little bit on the heavier side a Wang 165 grams or 5.2 8 ounces or 5.8 2 ounces rather with the battery in there so let's just jump in and talk about the battery first this is a very media centric device if you saw my overview on Windows Phone 7 you know this phone does a lot of stuff with these live tiles playing information and even though it doesn't have multitasking support for third-party applications there's a lot of stuff in the background for the native apps and that sucks battery this 1230 milliamp hour battery you're going to have a hard time getting through a full day of use with regular email and having sort of send push messages using the phone probably 2 to 3 hours a day and sort of checking and replying to email and doing some light web browsing but I mean the end of the day came around I was searching for an outlet because I thought this was going to die on me any day or any minute rather that was typical of pretty much every day so if you are going to use this device you may want to consider picking up an extra battery or really monitor how you're using the phone you might not want to set your email push you might want to set it to sort of pull the stuff in every 15 minutes or 30 minutes and going back to the weight the phone feels very heavy it's got sort of a sturdy feel to it and a little bit heavier than you'd expect from a mobile device it certainly has HTC is really solid build quality it feels good it looks kind of industrial and as you slide the phone up you don't have a keyboard but I actually have this sort of Dolby mobile surround which is really one of the through the key offerings of this device which also on the back reveals a kickstand so you can push this guy up and you can watch or listen to your content now I do a lot of meetings a lot of conference calls without a device like this would be perfect with this really big speaker will be great for conference calls and serve this is the first time we've seen this Dolby virtual surround sound mobile sobs very excited let me give you a demonstration as to what this sounds like I'm gonna go ahead and play a YouTube video and one of the novice devices does not actually have a native e2 player you the download and app which will let you watch videos from YouTube comm from the mobile site here's a video of that I did actually of the Motorola Droid unboxing a while back and this is with the Dolby Digital offline here it it sounds like and this may not be the best test to show on video kuzia microphones not gonna capture the true sound so you sort of the standard speaker now let me turn the Dolby Digital home and it sounds no different and that is don't bother adjusting your speakers really doesn't do much though how you pauses here I was quite surprised and really disappointed actually in this Dolby mobile I really didn't do anything other than just drink battery a little bit more a speakerphone for something this loud was a little bit on the tinny side and wasn't even close to what I expected of the quality from a device that calls itself the store round so wallet should be usable and it's a fine speakerphone I certainly wouldn't call it a flagship feature of the device it works it works alright the Dolby thing is more of disapprobation anything else the speakerphone doesn't sound any better than any other mobile phone that I test it something definitely to keep in mind if it's around it this is one of the reasons you're looking to purchase it go ahead and slide this got closed so Microsoft is sort of put in limitations for what phone manufacturers you can do with the operates with them as a core but what sort of separates Windows Phone 7 is that these manufacturers can make their own sort of hubs actually see you're sort of done that right here so your experience using any Windows Phone 7 the operating system is going to look the same let's get differentiate it though are these hubs which is kind of a cool middle ground between what Apple does keeping things locked down and these sort of wide openness of Android where your user experience can vary from device to device let's take a look at the HTC hub which you want things that really separates it from the other mobile phones and if you've used HTC Sense on an Android phone or previous generation Windows Mobile Phone you look very familiar to minute looks really nice as a great interface they actually have access to download exclusive HTC applications which you can see right here so you got sound announcer stocks photo to answer and there's some more and when you go into the good place here you actually get a separate almost app category for your particular manufacturer device I'm go ahead open up the market place here and you'll notice that there is a separate category for HTC if you're using a Samsung device it'll say Samsung there so go ahead and jump on into apps and you will see that which is kind of neat lets you get through the custom experience that you want from your phone that you don't really expect to get so you get sort of a different way to get your application this you've got the application store and you go ahead and download these sort of HTC applications that won't show up on other devices and that would be most particularly the HTC weather application and such now I'm sure would be ways around that but for the most part that's the best way to get on here sort of have the manufacturer put out these applications so you can sort of download all these and they work very well they're sort of nice you can get some more photo enhancement features sound enhancer I'm not going to go through the nuances of each application for the interest of time but suffice to say do work well and you sort of control the customization of your device which I really like I'm going to keep this sort of not a review of Windows Phone 7 I did certain overview and a review of that but sort of a summation is I really like the operating system I think it's got a lot of potential in the marketplace it's certainly new and it is sort of striving to find its own but I think by time we get to version 2 and 3 it's really going to be a competitor the browser works well the internet speed is very quick pinch-to-zoom works fantastically I've served demonstrated all that in previous videos I will say as a whole package the HTC surround is a great phone the screen looks bright and vibrant however if you're sort of looking at it in the cache of other 18t devices you look at the super-mo left screen of say the Samsung Focus you can really see a difference here with the quality even though the resolution is going to be the same so the screen quality isn't necessarily going to blow you away with the way it looks but it is very passable and it has a nice resolution compared to other mobile phones it's a bit on the thicker side let's do a quick size comparison here here we've got an iPhone 4 screen and just a little bit bigger here on the HTC surround a three point eight inches but to go ahead and stack them you can see there's quite a big thickness difference answer the size device as you expect full slide-out QWERTY keyboard words instead you just have that surround sound speaker out of much rather had a thinner device at a standard speaker or the same size with the full QWERTY keyboard take a look at it next to the little bit larger here samsung focus it has a 4 inch screen I can see the thickness and thinness here is really tremendous so it's a larger device and again it certainly weighs a little bit more so you're definitely going to feel this guy in your pocket however if you're looking for an HTC made Windows Phone device on a teen teen it's going to be a very solid choice on a one to five I really give it a very solid three-and-a-half would have earned much higher stars if that Dolby Surround if you really was one of its flagship features I had worked just a little bit better and devices maybe just a tad a bit lighter I'd really like to sort of feel my device I know it's got some strings to it but this guy is almost downright heavy if you're looking for a Windows Phone 7 device on AT&T you may want to look at the Samsung focus of the review of this guy coming but the sneak preview of that is it's a fantastic phone and you guys many questions almost pure - leave them down below I am John wreckage or some techno buff so be sure to check out the website for all your Windows Phone 7 news I will see you in the next video buh-bye