Saturday, November 19, 2011

HTC Rezound

I just got the new HTC Rezound and I love it.  I'm lucky enough to live in a 4G area and the speed
is just insane.  It actually goes slightly faster with downloads than my FIOS connection does, although uploads are still significantly slower.  This is pretty impressive since it's compairing a wireless device to a fiber-optic landline.

By default it tries to connect to any wifi networks you have saved.  It was actually tricky to get it to stop this and just use 4G, but since I'm on the old unlimited plan and the 4g is faster than most wifi networks I use, I did turn that off.  For most users this is probably a positive feature to save their data.

The screen is just insane.  Everything looks better, but you don't really appreciate it until you watch an HD video.  It ships with 2 HD videos in the gallery, so I'd recommend pulling one of those up to test in the store.

The audio quality is just as good as the video.  The headphones that are included are excellent (and retail for $130-$150!), but even with other headphones the sound is much clearer than on my old phone, iPod nano (which to be fair doesn't sound anywhere near as good as a normal iPod), and laptop.  That's not because of the Beats audio, it also shows through in 3rd party apps like Pandora.  It's just got better sound processing than the average device.

My last phone (Incredible 2) also had an 8 megapixel camera just like this one, but the camera on the rezound is so much better.  It works noticeably better in low light and the overall picture quality is much
clearer with better color.  It's not just the screen on it either, they look better when I put them on my computer as well.  It also takes pictures faster.

One of my favorite things is the app launcher on the lock screen and the new notification system on the lock screen.  They make the core functions of the phone much more convenient.  The rhyme has these as
well and they're some of the really big selling points to Sense over vanilla and the competitors' UIs.

The textured back is a nice touch.  I thought it was just there for looks, but it makes the large size of the phone much easier to handle.  There are some things I'm not as crazy about though, it feels noticeably bigger in my hand and pocket and just doesn't have that incredibly solid feel like the incredible 2 and iPhone 4/4s do.  I really like the feel of those two phones, they just come off as being really solid (even though the iPhone has turned out to be a very not solid phone from my experience).

Battery life also leaves something to be desired, although I'm sure the fact that I've been playing with it non-stop isn't helping that.  Sometimes it gets pretty warm too, but given the beast of a computer that it is I'm not surprised.

The browser on it is more advanced than on the incredible 2 and has some cool new features.  Overall I'm disappointed with the browser though, it can hardly view the two sites I happen to have bookmarked: Facebook Mobile (I like the site better than the app) and BBC News Mobile.  Everything else seems to work better, but the two sites I frequent hardly work at all.  I tried using Firefox for Android instead but didn't like it, I'll just have to use the Facebook app for now.  Weird coincidence that I'm sure won't be an issue for most customers and I'm sure will also improve with an update at some point.