Gadgetory

there's another smartphone today not the freshest smartphone in the world but a box that's been sitting there I'm like I gotta get to that one it's a little bit different it's got a little twist so it is a smartphone that I want to check out especially right now as I'm using the BlackBerry key - you already knew that man it's been a bit of a struggle it's been a bit of a thing today we have a smartphone from another company who's kind of up against the wall a little bit that is of course HTC and these guys much like blackberry there's a storied history there there's kind of a nice follow-up to the blackberry video we have a couple of smartphone companies looking to regain their former glory in just cut it at glory regained their former glory can they do that obviously this is not retail packaging here this is a demo unit here's a device type C headset which is actually said to be pretty good it features noise cancellation which ain't bad for a freebee headset now granted it is USB type-c because there is no headphone jack on this device okay and you can just tell by looking at it it's a higher quality earbud than what you're used to getting included in the box we have the main attraction here I'm gonna flip it over here and you're gonna find out that's what's special about it it is transparent I really like how they did it actually around the edges you have this mirrored blueish finish and then this gradual transparency leading up to the region around the fingerprint sensor there's a lot of hype around this transparency concept I do think it's cool to bit Inspector Gadget I like this it's gonna catch some attention and it's different and I'm always up for different now on the side here things get interesting those look like buttons but they are not buttons they do not depress at all at least not physically instead there's a little bit of haptic feedback no moving parts there you do get IP 68 so you get a sealed-off body and presumably something durable the build quality here feels quite nice in fact it's got a nice kind of weight to it on the bottom you have type-c connector as well as your speaker and then your sim tray is over on the other side oh hi there you have dual front-facing cameras as well it's not like one of them is wide and one of them is zoomed in or anything like that it's it's gonna be used for portrait data I kind of wish there was a variance there now we're always looking for a wider angle on the front camera cuz if I am gonna take a selfie it's because I'm trying to capture like a bunch of people or something a family gathering a fun event not just me posing and I can do that too though so yeah just more portrait mode it's all the rage is it gonna really beat the software portrait mode of like the pixel no so then do we need the lens more lenses Google would obviously disagree though with the pixel 3 coming up we shall see did that rhyme disagree we shall see do you see what I bring to the table this table not for long though okay now this is also giving you a look at the bezel situation bit of a chin bit of a forehead I mean I'm just gonna be honest with you because that's my job this looks a little bit old-fashioned try out the whole new touch experience okay alright so it makes like a like a vibration when you press it hmm it's not satisfying it's too much pressure really Oh God not a huge fan still has squeeze which I do like because it's an alternative input method so you can see as I squeeze there it's registering the squeeze you can use that to trigger various things such as Google assistant and so on I'll take that feature I got a blister from going too hard on the Commun like just like properly this was the lake this was me and then this was me on the canoe and then this was the blister and that's a thumbs up cuz you're gonna give me one yeah let's test this fingerprint hmm not the fastest but maybe three to one it's got a video transition on there which makes it feel slower than it is so it can kind of look smooth but it's certainly not the fastest I've ever tried this is not an OLED display which is a little upsetting at this price point the thing starts at like eight hundred bucks this is quad HD it's a nice looking display this is six inches all right and you're thinking that's a pretty big display the phone is not huge to hold though because of the aspect ratio and also how thin the side bezels are so it feels okay even with the whole chin forehead scenario nonetheless a pretty nice screen so it has the Sense UI you see we got blinkfeed over to the left it's a it's a fairly lightweight skin on there it still feels pretty quick processor in here snapdragon 845 it should be quick so this is running Android 8 and it will be upgradable to android P as well let's do the squeeze here squeeze ah so you can set up the sensitivity for this squeeze effect so you don't trigger it accidentally depending on how hard you squeeze your phone allow so boom camera squeeze to take a photo it is taking a photo with the squeeze I don't know it's it is a weird kind of it's a weird interaction a it's not like mind-blowing I'm not like everything should have been like this forever so one of these is 12 megapixels wide angle with HTC ultra pixel bigger pixels more light and so on ultra pixel and the other one is a 16 megapixel telephoto so a little bit of zoom optical zoom there's one and there's two Wow actually check out the detail the dust on the bottle there hopefully you can pick that up a pretty good image that's the wider one there so let's do this selfie mode oh you know what though it's a couple beard hairs there I think you can go you even go 1 for 1 on that bad boy this selfie crushes the BlackBerry selfie from the last video but I guess it's honestly embarrassing a law of getting a little low end out of a smart phone speaker honestly this seems weird but probably my favorite feature of the phone is this sorta transparent backplate is that really enough like I don't like these buttons you got a slightly slower than usual fingerprint reader the build quality feels really good I'm having difficulty knowing who this phone is for I don't think this phones for anyone it's kind of like ah you can find options cheaper that are gonna do basically what this does so now you're gonna ask yourself why are you going from like 500 bucks up to 800 what are you doing you're squeezing your phone is that a $300 squeeze who's the one getting squeezed