welcome to my unboxing and first look of the Droid DNA from HTC this is called in
other regions The Butterfly J but there are a couple of changes that have been
made most notably the removal of the micro SD expansion slot so this is
something that has caused a little bit of ey but if you're like me and youve
never actually gone over the 16 gigs of space on your iPhone then it's probably
less of an issue for you so for starters
we are going to go ahead and open the box because that's apparently what we do
on this channel now you'll notice we've got our dual cam set up but we've made
some improvements so we're hoping that you guys will appreciate them number one
is there's no audio clicking that is something that we did figure out a way
to resolve number two is we've got the
colors matching better on the cameras and number three is you shouldn't see
any motion blur as I'm opening up the box here the box is extremely tight so
uh you can tell this is a fresh non deflowered phone that is never been used
before in a way that would be undesirable to the uh upcoming owner of
it so here we go just pull a little tab open here the phone comes out the first
thing you'll notice about the Droid DNA is it's absolutely huge the second thing
you might notice if you did any reading about it whatsoever is that the screen
is actually not 720p like most phones
these days yes it is a 1080 p screen
that is actually in an area that is smaller than a Galaxy Note 2 so that's
the one that I have here for comparison that means you have a massive
440 pixels per inch of pixel density
which actually just well demolishes pretty much everything else for
comparison an iPhone 5 is 326 pixels per
inch so let's go ahead and open up some more stuff here there's a Verizon start
here there's a SIM tray removal tool handy dandy I'm not really much of a
phone guy but I'd imagine you need that if you're going to change your sim card
which has something to do with connecting to the interwebs or something like that start here guide aha Spanish
because this is not a Canadian phone Global support information and calling
card consumer holy crap what what in the
look at this it's like the end it's like a clown car of stuff so there's a SIM
card that presumably would be included if you were an actual Verizon Customer
which I'm not and finally a couple of H TC stickers let's go ahead and pull this
out like the packaging very plain black which of course makes it easy for us to
show you all the black products against the black packaging on the black table
includes a charging cable so there's your mini rather micro
USB charging cable okay also includes a
wall wart and that is pretty much it
once we power up the phone obviously the first thing you're going to notice about
it is that 1080 screen another thing you might notice notice is that HTC has
altered the UI the stock UI for Android a little bit so they're calling it their
sense 4 plus UI some people are familiar with this some people aren't I am not so
I don't really have any comments on it right now in terms of the overall layout
of the phone on the top you've got actually look at that everything's
labeled on this handy dandy little thing that I pulled off without actually
looking at it more than once so this is a power and lock key on the top you've
also got your headphone jack here that's how you get access to the SIM tray on
this side you've got volume up and volume down as well as a gorgeous
looking red accented speaker Grill so this is actually look at that that's a
metal button feels very nice on the bottom you find a
USB H there we go USB charging
port and that is pretty much it so
there's not much in terms of buttons on the other side you find another red
accented speaker Grill on the back you find the camera so the rear camera is 8
megapixel the front camera is 2.1 megapixel the rear camera will take
1080p video and the front camera will take 720p video there's an included LED
flash uh one other thing that you guys might care about about this particular
phone is that it actually has two indicator lights on it so there's one on
the front of the phone as well as one on the back so that just means that if Oh I
thought we were getting some choppy frame rate there but we're not so that just means that no matter how you put
the phone down on your nightstand if you have a Mis notification or whatever else
then you're going to be able to check it out and make sure that you don't well
not be able to check it out so other things that are included oh right
actually I should talk about this so HTC has acquired the rights for the whole
Beats audio thing so that's no longer
going to be um that's no longer going to be
available on sort of such a weird variety of products HTC owns that so
this phone as well as the Windows Phone 8X which we'll be checking out soon
actually have Beats Audio so what does that mean Beats Audio inherently doesn't
necessarily mean anything because Dr Dre
does not actually use Beats by Dre headphones when he's recording in the
studio I hope you guys know this I really hope you know this but what it does mean in the case of this particular
phone the Droid DNA is that it does have a headphone app built into it so if
nothing else if you are using headphones or earbuds that are higher impedance
than normal you're going to actually be able to drive those at a reasonable
volume compared to phones that do not have a headphone amp built in so
hopefully once I've had a chance to actually try it out a little bit I'll be
able to say a bit more about that
looking closer at the screen again I just want to take a moment to talk about
the difference between super LCD 3 and Amed such as what's used on popular
phones like say for example that one that everyone buys the Galaxy S3 from
Samsung so Amed has the advantage of
giving you deeper blacks because you can actually turn the pixels off they can
stop emitting light however the disadvantage is sometimes text can be
not quite as sharp and not quite as crisp because it doesn't use dedicated
sub pixels so it's just a slightly different display technology I also
suspect that the availability of screens that are capable of running at a 440
pixels per inch density and at 1080p resolution for Amo LED would be less and
that that would also be a significant expense to add to the overall phone
because at the end of the day you can produce as exciting a piece of technology as you want but if absolutely
no one or their dog or their dog's fetchy toy or whoever else if no one can
afford it then it's kind of a a non a non-starter as far as that's concerned
so other cool features it's got wireless charging which I personally think is
freaking awesome because the first thing I would have complained about on a phone
like this is the fact that it has micro USB like all other Android phones seem
to have and I hate micro USB it just breaks all the time it does support 4G
LTE but not for me see there's that 4G LTE logo on the back um not supported
here in Canada with this particular phone I think I'd have to get a different
version um oh yeah right so the hardware
that's running on this guy S4 Pro the S4
Pro uh platform so that's a crate S4 Pro
is actually the most powerful mobile capable platform so normally you would
actually see one of the lower-end chipsets in a phone because of power
draw concerns but they've gone with not only the S4 Pro but also the fastest
adreno 320 GPU to pair with it partly I
think because a it's a multimedia style device It's a larger phone so if you
look at it in my hands you're going to notice that it's actually probably a
little bit too big for me I can only reach about here to here but this
phone's going to be used by my wife anyway and then the other thing is
because of the 1080p resolution you're going to need a powerful GPU just to
draw basic things like Android animated effects and have them not lag out at all
so it's running Jelly Bean which means that you do have the project butter
experience with everything being smoother but without a decent GPU even
that could potentially be compromised so let's go ahead and just kind of check
out I don't know if I ever showed you guys the back in detail so it's just a
got a matte soft touch finish on it looks great feels really good uh what
else am I missing here ah yes back here
2.0 aperture lens so that just basically means it lets in more light a lower
aperture is better it means less Light Lost through the lens which means that
in regardless of because you can only put so big of a sensor inside a device
like this you can only put in so much processing power before it just doesn't
start to make a difference at all so you have to have excellent Clarity to the
Optics in order to deliver as much light as possible through the lens and onto
the sensor itself so that's actually part of HTC's entire platform on this
guy that is called image sense so that is quick image Readiness so they're
claiming 7 seconds from nothing to being ready to take a photo they're also
they've also added things like burst shot subject tracking uh you can record
a video and then you can actually record still images while you're recording a
video and have them saved separately which I also think is kind of cool and
they're basically just saying it's kind of one of those Beats by Audio Beats by
Dre audio beats branding things where they're going okay we don't we we can't
just list all of these features on the phone so we're going to call it image
sense and it's going to include the 2.0 aperture lens as well as all that extra
functionality in the photo taking software
itself I don't think we've actually missed anything this particular phone
has 2 gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of storage space unfortunately like I said before
it is not upgradeable with micro SD it does support NFC which is great as more
devices support NFC you might be able to do things like whip your phone out and
unlock your door or I mean if you're like me and you're lazy you could just
have the phone in your pocket and just be like just kind of jump up to the door
like that and try and unlock it that way again I can't emphasize enough how
gorgeous the screen is the uh the text that's overlaid right now that's showing
sort of pull down to see notifications press and hold an empty space to add widgets and shortcuts Dr an app over
another to create a folder and drag your favorite apps to the launch bar to customize it it almost looks like uh
like e in over top of continue to show quick tips sure why not continue to show
quick tips so let's go ahead and see if we can uh see if we can get the
brightness turned up a little bit here Beats audio it's not available on the
phone speaker okay well that's interesting makes sense I suppose
brightness there we go no no automatic brightness I want to crank
it aha there we are so it probably doesn't
help that it's kind of a dark background there but you can see it's extremely
bright we're going to go ahead and have you look at it from the side so the
colors do not change at all from the side and in terms of just sort of
whipping around inside the UI here it's extremely Snappy I guess if we wanted to
zoom or do whatever else okay so there's
Google ringtone oh okay I bumped the
ringtone there we go so we want to sort
of Zoom around maybe let's go to I don't know nci.com
and it would help a lot if I hit the X correctly never like the Android the
stock Android keyboard as much as I like the iOS keyboard but since there's lots
of options that you can change it to then it should be fine so absolutely
gorgeous quick scrolling there we go I think that pretty much concludes our
unboxing of the Droid DNA from HTC don't
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