This video is brought to you by our trusted partner, Intel. For a limited
time only, with the purchase of any unlocked Core i5 or Core i7 Intel CPU,
get a free Intel beanie with a chance to win an Intel snowboard. Valid for
Canadian and US customers only. Some restrictions apply. For complete
details, visit intelgaming promo.com. Before we start, guys, a word
from our sponsors. If you tweet #inttel inspires to with your favorite game,
you'll have a chance to win a Lenovo Ultrabook. Also, if you haven't already,
check out the VIP Tech Zone app. It's available on Android and iOS, and it's
got things like news, giveaways, um, gaming stuff, all kinds of
interesting things. I think mostly the giveaways are going to be what drive most people to download it. But check it
out. VIP Tech Zone. Welcome to day one
of my Android I switch. So, let's start with the actual phone itself. The screen
is extremely accurate. So, if you're trying to do something like uh make a
correction to a URL, there's a pretty good chance that I can get it even with
my thumb. This is also something that I love about Android compared to iOS and
Windows Phone. You don't have to use the
accurate cursor here. You can usually go, okay, I'm going to try and get it
here. And it'll at least give you a shot at it before it gives you the option to
correct what you've done. So, the screen is very accurate, which makes that
actually work a lot of the time. The stock keyboard layout does feel a little
bit weird. Look, look at what they've done here. So, these middle keys are
actually wider, and I understand why that is, cuz if you have small hands,
they're going to be easier to reach in the middle. But, it does make typing on it a little bit awkward because I expect
the keys to be the same size. I also expect these two bezels to be the same.
So, what I found myself doing sometimes is sort of typing on one side of the
keyboard and missing things like the left shift. It's not the end of the world and I'll just get download a
keyboard app such as Swift Key or Swipe I think are two of the popular ones. No
matter what you want to play play back, they can get extremely loud with no
distortion. They weren't quite as loud as Diesel's Galaxy Note 2, but
definitely loud enough that you could actually be doing something and
listening to it in the in over something else. So, check this out.
So, for contrast, this is me talking in a normal conversational voice with Big
Buck Bunny running in the background. So, it's as easy to hear as someone
talking to you from, you know, like a foot away. NX NFC is a huge plus. So,
I've already used it a couple times. Um, I would have liked to see wireless
charging. I hate micro USB. I think I'm well documented as being a hater of
micro USB. It's an extremely fragile connection and I wish it would just die,
but it seems to have just become a standard for some reason when mini B,
like there's no reason you couldn't have put a mini B here. I'm not convinced
micro USB actually improves the slimness
of devices. Batterywise, I've had a lot of people ask me about this. So, check
this out. I've been using this all day. This is day one. Um, it's midnight is
after midnight now. I've watched at least 3 hours of videos on the phone,
uh, whether with headphones or with speakers throughout the day. I've made some calls. I've done some tweets. I've
used it the way I would in a pretty heavy workload day. This is a weekend.
So, while I didn't make as many calls, I was definitely streaming video over it
much more often. I am extremely impressed. Compared to my older iPhone
4, which in its defense was a little bit on the older side, um this is way more
usable. And compared to the HTC 8X running Windows phone, streaming video
using emit, which is the app that I've got as my replacement for air video. Uh
so using emit is much less demanding on the phone and on the battery life than
the uh Windows phone equivalent which I can't remember the name of for the life
of me. So emit is something I would consider to be actually a suitable
replacement for air video. It starts up extremely quickly. I'm not going to play
this back because I'm worried about any kind of copyright infringement on the
video. But there you go. It starts very quickly, very responsive. You have to run a server app on a computer in the
household. But awesome. Um, so I figure I could get through two light days with
this, no problem, which is exciting. However, I'm not using 4G because this
isn't 4G in my area yet. Uh, hopefully I'll be swapping it out at some point.
And I'm not using wireless AC. With that said, it's pretty sweet that it supports
wireless AC because Anantech actually posted an article on this saying they
got up to 275 megabit tested, not
theoretical, on this phone using wireless AC. So, I have an AC router in
the mail on the way to me, and hopefully I'll be able to update you guys on that
uh sometime soon. The auto rotate's a little bit hyperactive. Um, so this has
been this has been bothering me a little bit. So, let's say I wanted to reply to
a tweet. Uh, normally I would um I'd go,
okay, maybe I'm, you know, laying doing something. Watch how quickly it auto
rotates. And there it goes. So, I'm actually only I'm I'm only halfway
between horizontal and vertical, and it's auto rotated already, which for
some people, maybe this seems like a a fairly small complaint, and it actually
is. It's a beautiful phone. There's no way I'm going back to the iPhone 4 after
this, having spent only a day with it so far. But I wish it was a little bit more
like, yeah, I want you to rotate, then it then it would rotate versus I'm
halfway in between. Like, with the iPhone 4, you could kind of go, yeah,
no, do this. And then you could kind of play with it a little bit and and get it
close so you could kind of use it. Um, also I wish that like TouchWiz, I wish
that HTC's interface had a quick auto rotate here. However, there's got to be
an app for that or something. Uh, screen's amazing. The viewing angle's
outstanding. Here, I'll just give you guys like a browser page to look at or
maybe like here's a Here, let's play back an unboxing. You guys can see what
it looks like. Unboxing. Speakers are loud. So, you can see what
it looks like headon and then you can see what it looks like from the side.
There's no color shift. It uses super LCD 3, so you don't get any of that
weirdness that Samsung has with their AMO LED screens where they are actually
slightly higher resolution in some colors versus other colors. Text is
extremely crisp. This is the kind of thing I can't convey through a video
like this. But um no matter how small the text is on the screen, I can read it
clearly even at a distance because it is
so crisp. It's really really nice. Uh Zoe's Zoies or whatever they're called.
So, you open up the camera app and there's an option that you click on
right here and you go, "Okay, I want to record a Zoey." So, let's have a look at
my FPS Doug poster here. So, I go, you
can see there's a little bar going. So, it's taking some still pictures as well
as a video. And what it does with uh
with those is it allows you to either see like a sort of a one to two second
video capture moment or a still image. And so, it's a neat way of capturing
both at full res at the same time. and uh and and getting a moment sort of even
if you would have missed it with the uh and the shutter's quick so the odds of
missing it are slimmer but even if you would have missed it check out the gallery for a minute though guys uh so
here's the I want to show you guys the highlight reel feature okay so here it
sorts things into events so my photos events so I can go I can pick a day you
can you can move things in and out of different events and it does so up at
the top so all the individual things are down here and then up at the top it as a
highlight reel. So, it'll automatically set it to
music and it'll add a bunch of cuts. It'll add some kind of effect. I'd love
to see what HTC is going to do with this over time in terms of adding more music,
uh, more effects, more cool stuff like that. But, it's a really neat way to
review the photos and videos that you took throughout a day in about 30
seconds. So, if you're showing someone with a short attention span, which let's
face it, we all have short attention spans these days. Um, it's a it's a just
a really cool effect. Let's uh let's watch the highlight reel for this day.
It just does it automatically. So, there's the baby
using the phone. It puts like a film grain effect on it. All of this is
without any work whatsoever. Here he is trying to drink
some water.
And just the fact that it's jumping around to uh to different different
angles, different points in the movie all the time makes it very impactful. So
I'd love to be able to put my own music on it, which is another thing. Uh the
haptic feedback on this phone is excellent. So some uh some phones, some
devices, you touch it and the whole thing kind of goes and it just feels
crappy. It feels cheap. Uh not on this one. It's very tight, very very
responsive. The default app loadout is not bad. I'm not sure if I'm a big fan
of the blink feed here. So, this is just uh social media and like sort of other
things like updates. Uh but you don't have to make that your home. You can set
to more of a standard Android home. Um and then this interface here is a
vertical scrolling interface, kind of more like gingerbread. Um not sure if
I'm a big fan of this either. So, I think I'm going to go for the default
Android layout once I've had more time to personalize it and add the apps that
I want. Oh, speaking of apps, the default
app loadout is not bad. So, I mean, they've got things like Soundhound on
here, which is awesome. The music app needs a lot of work. The UI is uh not
great on this one. So, things like uh like just little simple stuff like if
you search for something, uh so, so I
don't know, let's find my Ace of Bass. If you search for something, it doesn't
have this option here to add it to a playlist. Whereas, when you're just
going through your songs, you can see there's here there's a bunch of options for things you can do with it. So, it
needs some uh it needs to be refined a little bit. I just found it not that
easy to Oops. Not that easy to navigate.
Um, but here, let's go. So, you've got your media apps, your Google apps. It
comes with Twitter. Uh, it comes with car, maps, clock. Productivity wise, it
comes with Dropbox. Almost everything you see here was preloaded on the phone.
Nothing unnecessary and stupid. So, um, I mean, okay, I don't know if all of
it's necessary. I haven't dug through it. This is all stuff that I added so
far. Uh, Beats audio seems to be just an EQ setting. not that impressed in terms
of the overall audio quality over headphones coming from the iPhone 4. So,
let's uh let's talk general Android. I wouldn't mind if there was an easier way to see battery life percentage, but I'm
sure there's a widget or an app for that or something. Moving from a platform
that does not have great app support, like Windows Phone 8, is uh is just a
breath of fresh air. Being able to go, okay, I need I need a scanner app. I
need a movie streaming app. I need whatever. There's something there for
sure. you want to change the fonts on your phone, you might have to root it for that. Actually, I'm not sure. I
recently rooted my wife's Droid DNA um and installed a custom ROM on it and
everything. So, I'm familiarizing myself with the with the platform as much as I
can. And there's a lot of really cool options when you do that, but I won't be rooting the HTC1 during my 30-day period
with it. I'm going to be using actually Sense 5.0 hasn't bothered me yet. So,
this is this is one thing. I mean, I'm not this isn't something that I think
I'll end up using. Um, and Blink Feed's kind of the kind of thing that I would,
it's uh, it's sort of like the people app on Windows Phone 8 where it's like, okay, here's another some interesting
stuff and I love highlight reels and those are good. The camera on this thing
is awesome. So, here's just a video of the baby eating eggs. Just Oh, looks so
good. Okay, well, that was a very short video. Oh, that was Oh, that was a Zo or
a Zoey. Native Twitter app is so
superior to the iPhone one. On the iPhone one, you'll reach the top and
it'll go loading, loading, loading, and then you can scroll up again. So, when
there's been a lot of them, it used to be you could double click on it in the iPhone 1 and it would just go to the
top. But, uh, yeah, this one's butter smooth interfacing with this thing,
which is just awesome. So, overall, I'm
pretty much sold on Android at this point, but there will still be more updates. I'm not just going to cop out
and go, "Yeah, day one, Android wins." Uh, so stay tuned, guys. Don't forget to
subscribe to Lest Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer