HTC Droid DNA Phone Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,405 words · ~12 min read
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welcome to my unboxing and first look of the Droid DNA from HTC this is called in
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other regions The Butterfly J but there are a couple of changes that have been
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made most notably the removal of the micro SD expansion slot so this is
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something that has caused a little bit of ey but if you're like me and youve
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never actually gone over the 16 gigs of space on your iPhone then it's probably
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less of an issue for you so for starters
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we are going to go ahead and open the box because that's apparently what we do
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on this channel now you'll notice we've got our dual cam set up but we've made
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some improvements so we're hoping that you guys will appreciate them number one
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is there's no audio clicking that is something that we did figure out a way
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to resolve number two is we've got the
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colors matching better on the cameras and number three is you shouldn't see
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any motion blur as I'm opening up the box here the box is extremely tight so
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uh you can tell this is a fresh non deflowered phone that is never been used
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before in a way that would be undesirable to the uh upcoming owner of
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it so here we go just pull a little tab open here the phone comes out the first
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thing you'll notice about the Droid DNA is it's absolutely huge the second thing
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you might notice if you did any reading about it whatsoever is that the screen
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is actually not 720p like most phones
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these days yes it is a 1080 p screen
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that is actually in an area that is smaller than a Galaxy Note 2 so that's
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the one that I have here for comparison that means you have a massive
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440 pixels per inch of pixel density
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which actually just well demolishes pretty much everything else for
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comparison an iPhone 5 is 326 pixels per
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inch so let's go ahead and open up some more stuff here there's a Verizon start
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here there's a SIM tray removal tool handy dandy I'm not really much of a
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phone guy but I'd imagine you need that if you're going to change your sim card
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which has something to do with connecting to the interwebs or something like that start here guide aha Spanish
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because this is not a Canadian phone Global support information and calling
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card consumer holy crap what what in the
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look at this it's like the end it's like a clown car of stuff so there's a SIM
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card that presumably would be included if you were an actual Verizon Customer
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which I'm not and finally a couple of H TC stickers let's go ahead and pull this
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out like the packaging very plain black which of course makes it easy for us to
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show you all the black products against the black packaging on the black table
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includes a charging cable so there's your mini rather micro
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USB charging cable okay also includes a
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wall wart and that is pretty much it
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once we power up the phone obviously the first thing you're going to notice about
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it is that 1080 screen another thing you might notice notice is that HTC has
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altered the UI the stock UI for Android a little bit so they're calling it their
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sense 4 plus UI some people are familiar with this some people aren't I am not so
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I don't really have any comments on it right now in terms of the overall layout
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of the phone on the top you've got actually look at that everything's
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labeled on this handy dandy little thing that I pulled off without actually
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looking at it more than once so this is a power and lock key on the top you've
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also got your headphone jack here that's how you get access to the SIM tray on
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this side you've got volume up and volume down as well as a gorgeous
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looking red accented speaker Grill so this is actually look at that that's a
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metal button feels very nice on the bottom you find a
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USB H there we go USB charging
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port and that is pretty much it so
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there's not much in terms of buttons on the other side you find another red
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accented speaker Grill on the back you find the camera so the rear camera is 8
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megapixel the front camera is 2.1 megapixel the rear camera will take
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1080p video and the front camera will take 720p video there's an included LED
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flash uh one other thing that you guys might care about about this particular
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phone is that it actually has two indicator lights on it so there's one on
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the front of the phone as well as one on the back so that just means that if Oh I
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thought we were getting some choppy frame rate there but we're not so that just means that no matter how you put
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the phone down on your nightstand if you have a Mis notification or whatever else
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then you're going to be able to check it out and make sure that you don't well
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not be able to check it out so other things that are included oh right
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actually I should talk about this so HTC has acquired the rights for the whole
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Beats audio thing so that's no longer
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going to be um that's no longer going to be
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available on sort of such a weird variety of products HTC owns that so
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this phone as well as the Windows Phone 8X which we'll be checking out soon
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actually have Beats Audio so what does that mean Beats Audio inherently doesn't
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necessarily mean anything because Dr Dre
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does not actually use Beats by Dre headphones when he's recording in the
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studio I hope you guys know this I really hope you know this but what it does mean in the case of this particular
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phone the Droid DNA is that it does have a headphone app built into it so if
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nothing else if you are using headphones or earbuds that are higher impedance
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than normal you're going to actually be able to drive those at a reasonable
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volume compared to phones that do not have a headphone amp built in so
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hopefully once I've had a chance to actually try it out a little bit I'll be
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able to say a bit more about that
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looking closer at the screen again I just want to take a moment to talk about
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the difference between super LCD 3 and Amed such as what's used on popular
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phones like say for example that one that everyone buys the Galaxy S3 from
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Samsung so Amed has the advantage of
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giving you deeper blacks because you can actually turn the pixels off they can
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stop emitting light however the disadvantage is sometimes text can be
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not quite as sharp and not quite as crisp because it doesn't use dedicated
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sub pixels so it's just a slightly different display technology I also
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suspect that the availability of screens that are capable of running at a 440
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pixels per inch density and at 1080p resolution for Amo LED would be less and
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that that would also be a significant expense to add to the overall phone
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because at the end of the day you can produce as exciting a piece of technology as you want but if absolutely
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no one or their dog or their dog's fetchy toy or whoever else if no one can
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afford it then it's kind of a a non a non-starter as far as that's concerned
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so other cool features it's got wireless charging which I personally think is
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freaking awesome because the first thing I would have complained about on a phone
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like this is the fact that it has micro USB like all other Android phones seem
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to have and I hate micro USB it just breaks all the time it does support 4G
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LTE but not for me see there's that 4G LTE logo on the back um not supported
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here in Canada with this particular phone I think I'd have to get a different
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version um oh yeah right so the hardware
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that's running on this guy S4 Pro the S4
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Pro uh platform so that's a crate S4 Pro
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is actually the most powerful mobile capable platform so normally you would
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actually see one of the lower-end chipsets in a phone because of power
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draw concerns but they've gone with not only the S4 Pro but also the fastest
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adreno 320 GPU to pair with it partly I
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think because a it's a multimedia style device It's a larger phone so if you
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look at it in my hands you're going to notice that it's actually probably a
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little bit too big for me I can only reach about here to here but this
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phone's going to be used by my wife anyway and then the other thing is
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because of the 1080p resolution you're going to need a powerful GPU just to
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draw basic things like Android animated effects and have them not lag out at all
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so it's running Jelly Bean which means that you do have the project butter
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experience with everything being smoother but without a decent GPU even
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that could potentially be compromised so let's go ahead and just kind of check
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out I don't know if I ever showed you guys the back in detail so it's just a
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got a matte soft touch finish on it looks great feels really good uh what
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else am I missing here ah yes back here
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2.0 aperture lens so that just basically means it lets in more light a lower
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aperture is better it means less Light Lost through the lens which means that
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in regardless of because you can only put so big of a sensor inside a device
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like this you can only put in so much processing power before it just doesn't
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start to make a difference at all so you have to have excellent Clarity to the
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Optics in order to deliver as much light as possible through the lens and onto
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the sensor itself so that's actually part of HTC's entire platform on this
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guy that is called image sense so that is quick image Readiness so they're
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claiming 7 seconds from nothing to being ready to take a photo they're also
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they've also added things like burst shot subject tracking uh you can record
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a video and then you can actually record still images while you're recording a
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video and have them saved separately which I also think is kind of cool and
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they're basically just saying it's kind of one of those Beats by Audio Beats by
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Dre audio beats branding things where they're going okay we don't we we can't
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just list all of these features on the phone so we're going to call it image
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sense and it's going to include the 2.0 aperture lens as well as all that extra
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functionality in the photo taking software
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itself I don't think we've actually missed anything this particular phone
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has 2 gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of storage space unfortunately like I said before
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it is not upgradeable with micro SD it does support NFC which is great as more
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devices support NFC you might be able to do things like whip your phone out and
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unlock your door or I mean if you're like me and you're lazy you could just
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have the phone in your pocket and just be like just kind of jump up to the door
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like that and try and unlock it that way again I can't emphasize enough how
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gorgeous the screen is the uh the text that's overlaid right now that's showing
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sort of pull down to see notifications press and hold an empty space to add widgets and shortcuts Dr an app over
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another to create a folder and drag your favorite apps to the launch bar to customize it it almost looks like uh
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like e in over top of continue to show quick tips sure why not continue to show
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quick tips so let's go ahead and see if we can uh see if we can get the
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brightness turned up a little bit here Beats audio it's not available on the
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phone speaker okay well that's interesting makes sense I suppose
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brightness there we go no no automatic brightness I want to crank
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it aha there we are so it probably doesn't
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help that it's kind of a dark background there but you can see it's extremely
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bright we're going to go ahead and have you look at it from the side so the
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colors do not change at all from the side and in terms of just sort of
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whipping around inside the UI here it's extremely Snappy I guess if we wanted to
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zoom or do whatever else okay so there's
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Google ringtone oh okay I bumped the
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ringtone there we go so we want to sort
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of Zoom around maybe let's go to I don't know nci.com
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and it would help a lot if I hit the X correctly never like the Android the
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stock Android keyboard as much as I like the iOS keyboard but since there's lots
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of options that you can change it to then it should be fine so absolutely
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gorgeous quick scrolling there we go I think that pretty much concludes our
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unboxing of the Droid DNA from HTC don't
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