Review: HTC HD2 – Software

This is the second installment in the review series for the HTC HD2.  The first installment is here, which covered the hardware.  Due to the number of areas to be covered, the software and performance portion of the review is broken down into two parts.  The second part will have details on the phone’s performance in general, battery performance, as well as my impressions and conclusions; this part will talk mainly about the software that comes with the phone, concentrating mainly on the HTC Sense and its associated applications.

The cornerstone of the HD2 is the HTC Sense user interface, first introduced in the HTC Hero.  As I covered the review of the HTC Hero in some detail, if I miss out on any detail that you would like to see covered, perhaps the HTC Hero software review installment has it.  Just like on the Hero, where HTC Sense “hid” the complexities of the underlying operating system from the end user, so does HTC Sense hide the complexities of the Windows Mobile operating system from the end user on the HD2.  HTC Sense also includes some applications and application enhancement, most notably HTC Peep (HTC’s Twitter client), HTC’s weather widget and an enhancement to the contacts application, which integrates text messaging (SMS), email and Facebook updates into a contact’s interaction history with the user.

When the HD2 is turned on for the first time, there is a set up wizard that guides the user to set up account information for email and social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and the like (such as YouTube).  The user is also asked whether to allow the phone to download location information so that this can be used to download and display location specific data, such as weather information.

Once set up is complete, and everytime the HD2 is turned on, the default screen that is shown is called the home screen, with the large digital clock at the top, the weather widget below it, followed by a row of configurable application shortcuts, and finally the “home screen tabs” – the signature of the HD2.  The user simply taps on an icon on the home screen tabs bar, or taps and drags the across the bar to navigate to the various home screens.  The number of home screens is configurable by the user, and they can be re-ordered.  The wallpaper can be an animated weather wallpaper which shows, for example, animated raindrops if the weather is forecast to be rainy, or the user can select an animated wallpaper, something like an animated GIF file that shows “moving” pictures like the ones you see on some websites.  There is a good selection of pre-loaded animated wallpapers as well as weather wallpapers.

The application shortcut icons, or “quick links” as HTC calls it, shows 3 icons by default, under the calendar widget on the main home screen.  The quick links section can be dragged up to show a full screen of quick links, up to 9 user-configurable shortcuts or quick links.

Let’s take a look at the home screen tabs assuming we enabled all of them, from left to right – the people, messages (SMS/MMS), email, web browser, calendar, stocks, photos and videos, music, weather, Twitter, HTC Footprints and finally, (phone) Settings.

The notification bar right at the top of the screen is useful as a simple tap will bring down a full screen showing the user information such as new email, missed calls, new SMS/MMS, new Twitter messages and so on.  Again, this is part of the HTC Sense enhancement and not a built in Windows Mobile feature.  Also, a long press on the “End Call” button brings up a context sensitive menu where the user can perform a variety of functions – see the screenshot below.

In terms of the “standard” programs that came in the box with the HD2, here are screenshots showing all the items on the main “Start” screen as well as sub-folders when you click the “Start” menu.  The only applications I installed for the review were Panoramic moTweets (Twitter client), Shake And Save (screenshot application which allows you to take screenshot by simply shaking the phone!), MyMobiler (remote controlling the HD2 using my Windows Vista PC when writing this review), and finally, Zooomer (an application specially written for the HD2, which enables multi-touch for those applications where HTC did not enable multi-touch on).  When you swipe down or up, the screen will scroll one page length, which is a nice touch indeed to control “over scrolling”.

While the user can re-arrange the icon order in the screens you see above, the re-ordering is very limited.  Tapping and holding on an icon only gives you an option to “Move to top”, or if it is already at the top, “Move down”, or if it’s somewhere in between, the two choices.  Not very configurable, if you ask me!

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the applications on the phone, and how HTC has enhanced them to work better, and make life simpler for the user by making it easier and integrating information from disparate sources in one screen so that the user has a consolidated view.

Dialer

The dialer screen appears when the “Make Call” hard button is pressed.  It features smart dialling, where the phone can suggest contacts whose numbers and names match the numbers you are tapping on.  For example, tapping on the number “4″ will show contacts with “4″ in their contact numbers, as well as contacts with the alphabets “g”, “h” and “i” in their names.  In the screenshots below, I tapped on the number “6″, so the number 6 is highlighted, as well as the letters “m”, “n” and “o” if they exist.

Call Quality

I’ve spent in total about an hour making and receiving voice calls on the HD2 during my tests.  I actually used it as my main phone, using both voice/data features when writing this review.  Calls were clear – no hissing or crackling.  No dropped calls.  The receiving party did not complain about the poor quality of the call, nor did they ask me to speak up or speak softer.  Overall, the earpiece and microphone was excellent; in fact, I would say that the call quality is better than other smartphones I have tested.  Bear in mind that your network also affects call quality – I was using DiGi.

People

This is the contacts application, renamed “People” in HTC Sense.  When you tap on the people tab in the main home screen, it shows you a grid of your 15 favourite contacts or people in your address/phone book.  Tapping on a contact will dial their number, and this screen also shows the contact’s picture, if available, and assigned one.  At the bottom left, tapping “All People” will show a screen of all contacts in list view.  There are options to view only your favourites in list view, view groups, view events and updates of your contacts to whom you have assigned Facebook profiles as well as a call history showing your entire call history will your contacts.  If you have a lot of contacts, you can scroll to the one you need by dragging the scroll bar, or tapping on the (very) small alphabet that is the first letter of your contact’s name.  When you tap and drag, the centre of the screen will show the alphabet you are stopping at, so there’s no need to guess which small letter is under your finger!

Strangely, I could not find a way to assign a special ringtone to a group once I have created it!  When you tap a contact another screen will show you options such as sending a SMS/MMS message, calling the contact, editing the contact information.  The bottom of the contact card will have options to view the interaction with the contact using SMS/MMS messages, and a call history with the contact.

Creating or editing a contact’s details throws up a wealth of options – all the standard stuff, plus other information such as birthdays, picture, custom ringtone and association with a Facebook profile.  Once you have entered your own Facebook credentials, the HD2 will retrieve a list of your contacts from Facebook and show them in a screen where you can associate Facebook profiles to a particular contact – very easy and intuitive indeed!

Messages

This is the SMS/MMS application.  There is a variety of preset messages that the user can choose from.  For MMS messages, the user can choose to attach files such as pictures, videos, and other files such as a vCard or vCalendar.  The messaging application supports “threaded” SMS, ie. it will group all messages from the same “conversation” together, but in a linear mode, not like those fancy “conversation bubbles” that you see, for example, on the iPhone.

Mail

The email application supports Outlook Activesync emails, GMail as well as a host of other email accounts.  Set up is easy, and push email is supported using Microsoft’s Exchange Activesync technology, although the user is restricted to one such account.  The rest of the accounts will not have the push feature supported, and the shortest interval for mail checking and retrieval is 10 minutes, which should suffice for most people.  I found the push email feature reliable, though not as fast as the one on my iPhone or the Blackberry.

One annoyance is the Outlook email client which is part of Windows Mobile.  Whenever an email is received and the HD2 is in portrait mode, the user has to tap a “Tap to scroll right” link so that the entire email can be read; to me, this is one tap too many just to read an email!

Calendar

The calendar application is not spectacularly different from other calendar applications out there – it allows the user to view calendar by day, week, month or year.  Selecting the “agenda” option will show the appointments for the day.  Selecting the day view will show the events for the day as well as the weather.

Camera and Videocam

I have uploaded some photos I took earlier using the HD2′s camera to a Picasa folder here, and I have added some more into the folder, so feel free to check them out.  These photos were uploaded as-is, with no post-processing whatsoever.  Feel free to check out the EXIF data, and comparison purposes, I have also uploaded 4 identical photos taken with the Samsung Omnia 2′s camera, to this Picasa folder.  The Omnia 2 is running Windows Mobile 6.5 as well.

I also shot three very short videos, almost identical, using the HD2, Omnia 2 and the iPod Nano 5th Generation.  These videos are all shot in 640 x 480 pixel resolution, all in MP4 format.  I uploaded the source files as-is to YouTube without any post processing.  Codec information, according to VLC Media Player, for the three video files are as follows:

1. HD2: audio = mp4a, stereo, 48000 Hz; video = mp4v, frame rate = 500(?)
2. Omnia 2: audio = mp4a, stereo, 32000 Hz, AAC extension: SBR; video = mp4v, 30.303030 frames per second
3. iPod Nano: audio = mp4a, stereo, 44100 Hz; video = avc1, 30 frames per second

HTC HD2 Sample Video

Samsung Omnia 2 Sample Video

Apple iPod Nano 5th Generation Sample Video

If you are interested, you can download the source video files from this rapidshare link.  Check out the picture and video quality for yourself, I won’t influence you unnecessarily, but suffice it to say that the quality is not the best that I have encountered on a smartphone!  Camera speed, in terms of taking still photographs, is acceptable and of average performance, for a smartphone, though not as fast as a dedicated digital camera, nor the camera on the Samsung Jet which I reviewed earlier.

The camera application does not have any “scene” modes popular in dedicated digital cameras which are also present in some smartphone camera applications.  The settings application allows the user to adjust the white balance, brightness, ISO (maximum 800), where pictures are stored, timer, resolution of the picture, turning touch-anywhere-on-screen-to-focus, adding a timestamp to every picture, turning on/off shutter sound, adding special effects such as sepia, etc.  There is a panorama mode, as well as capturing videos for MMS messages.  The user can easily navigate to the photo albums from within the camera application, to review photos taken.

In the video recording application, the user can adjust the white balance, brightness and storage medium for the videos taken with the phone.  The largest video resolution is 640 x 480 pixel.  The user can also adjust the shutter sound, whether to record audio with the video, and apply special effects such as sepia, grayscale, etc to the video.

One strange thing I discovered was that although the camera lens resolution is 5 megapixel, the largest photo resolution I can take using the camera was 5 megapixel, at 2592 x 1552 pixel resolution – unless my math is bad, that only translates to around 4 megapixels, not 5!

And the widely reported pink hue right in the centre of a picture when you snap a white surface is sadly present on the review unit.  HTC says that this is a software issue rather than a hardware one, and hopefully it will be fixed in a soon-to-be-released firmware update.  See a sample picture below to see what I mean.  Also, look at the video to see if it exhibits more of a pink hue compared to the other videos I took for comparison too.

Music

HTC redesigned the stock Windows media player that is in the Windows Mobile operating system, and replaced it with its its own media player, with effects it calls “coverflow”.  The application is finger friendly, and supports kinetic scrolling as well as support for landscape mode.  As with all modern mobile media players, album art is supported.  The usual “filtered” views are there – by artist, genre, album, playlist, etc.

The sound from the speakers was good – no distortion even at the highest volume.  I was surprised that even for a smartphone with a single speaker, the sound output was good for a speaker of that size.  I have to say that the dual speakers on the i8910 HD sounds better, simply because it has two speakers, but the HD2 more than holds it own when it comes to sound quality through the tiny speakers.  For listening through the earphones, an audio booster application is provided to further improve the sound quality.  The default (virtually unusable) Windows media player is still on the phone, but hidden away so that only “hardcore” users will find it.  There is no reason to use the Windows media player for playback, ever, when there is the enhanced HTC media player!

Look out for a short video in the third installment of this review to hear what the phone sounds like when playing back music through its speakers.

Browser

The default browser, which can be launched from the homescreen is Opera Mobile 9.7, which HTC has customised to provide an excellent experience on the HD2.  It supports pinch zooming, aka multi-touch.  This version of Opera Mobile is customised because when I attempted to install the latest version of Opera Mobile 10 Beta, multi-touch support disappeared, and I had to hard reset the phone to restore it to factory settings as it messed up some other features as well!  Although the browser is supposed to support Flash, I could not get the visitor counter, below the visitor map on my website to display at all.  Nor could I get the embedded YouTube video to appear, and this explains the reason why there is a dedicated YouTube application on the HD2 just to view YouTube videos!

When you zoom in/out, the browser re-flows the text to minimise side to side scrolling, definitely a very useful feature when in portrait mode.  Loading websites was fast, one of the fastest on any mobile platform that I have tested.  The engadget website, the source of many a headache for mobile browsers, loaded perfectly.  Bear in mind that the speed of a webpage loading is also heavily dependent on the wireless network (whether you are using a WiFi network or wireless cellular broadband to connect), and is not strictly a function of the device’s processor alone.

When scrolling fast, the “checkerboard” effect can still be seen, though not very noticeable.  I think is where a dedicated graphics processor will come in handy to eliminate these graphics issues.  To be fair, even the iPhone’s mobile Safari browser has this effect when scrolling up/down a webpage quickly.  Scrolling up/down on engadget’s homepage was effortless for the HD2, with the page content refreshing very quickly indeed.

As for Internet Explorer mobile, the less said, the better.  It is a long way behind Opera Mobile, and there should not be any reason for a user to have to resort to using it, ever.  Watch out for a video in the third installment of this review to show the performance of the browser.

Photos and Videos

From the photos and videos tab on the homescreen, the user can navigate easily to browse the photo albums on the phone, as well as run a slideshow for the still photographs residing on the phone.  Albums are categorised into camera shots, wallpapers, and other pictures depending on where they reside on the phone.  There is also a tab to show photo albums from your own Facebook account, as well as from the albums of all your contacts in Facebook.  The photos and videos application supports landscape mode using the g-sensor/accelerometer and kinetic scrolling.

As for video playback, the subject of many readers’ interest, I tested it using a few video files provided by a reader, Ken77.  He took the time to upload some video trailers as well as advertisements to a web folder that I downloaded from; if any of you wants access to these files for your own testing, drop a comment and I’ll ask Ken77 whether it is OK to share them.

Here are the results of my testing, when all videos were played back in fullscreen mode:

1. there are two media players in the phone – the HTC media player, as well as the built in Windows Media Player.  MP4 files played on the HTC media player, while WMV files played on the Windows Media Player (naturally).
2. AVI (Xvid video codec, 624 x 352 resolution, 24 frames per second;audio codec = mpga, stereo, 48000 Hz, 128 kb/s) files do not play at all.  The AVI file was downloaded from the internet, and meant for playback on PCs (it was Heroes Season 4 Episode 10 downloaded for testing purposes).
3. MOV (QuickTime) videos do not play at all in either player (not surprisingly, as there is very little built in support for Apple’s format!).
4. as long as the video was in a supported format, it will play if the video resolution did not exceed the HD2′s screen resolution of 800 x 480 pixels.  If any of these dimensions were exceeded, the video will not play.  You simply get a nice black screen, although the audio is supported.  I encountered this on a video with the following codecs: avc1 video codec, 852 x 362 resolution, 24 frames per second; mp4a audio codec, stereo, 48000 Hz.
5. installing the CorePlayer version 1.3.6 Build 7427 on the HD2 allowed the AVI file with the codec information above to play.  CorePlayer also plays back MOV format files.
6. playback, when it happened, was silky smooth for AVI, MP4 and WMV files.  There were no “jerkiness”, “stuttering”, nor dropped frames as far as I can tell.  Audio and video were in synchronisation.  Dragging the timer slider bar to fast forward or rewind was also smooth – there were no “freezes” while the HD2 buffered nor attempted to what it had to do to forward/rewind the file quickly – playback simply jumped to the point where you dragged the slider to.
7. playback for the MOV file that I tested (avc1 video codec, 852 x 480 resolution, 24 frames per second; mp4a audio codec, stereo, 48000 Hz) had a very slight stuttering, especially when the movie scenes were particularly intense.  When this happened, the audio and video was very slightly out of synchronisation.  This was tested using the “Twilight Saga – New Moon” movie trailer in MOV format.
8. CorePlayer does not support the avc /H.264 video codec.  A movie trailer I downloaded simply refused to load.
9. a sample high definition video (1280 x 720 pixel resolution) recorded using my Creative Vado HD pocket camcorder refused to be recognised by the HTC Media Player.  Clicking the file in File Explorer opened up the HTC Media Player, which froze with the word “Loading…”.  CorePlayer refused to playback any video with a resolution wider than 1008 pixels; see below.  I also downloaded a 1280 x 720 pixel resolution MP4 movie trailer encoded using the H.264 codec from the internet for the 2012 movie – CorePlayer refused to play the file with the same error (see below), while the HTC media player could only play the audio with a blank screen.  I think we can safely conclude that HD videos are not supported on the HD2!
10. if you have downloaded the first “How To Train Your Dragon” movie trailer in MOV format (480p), you can compare your device’s CorePlayer benchmark to the HD2′s as seen in the screenshot below.

Footprints

Footprints is HTC’s application to “store” interesting locations that you stumbled upon during your daily travels or holidays.  You can geotag the pictures, and attach details to the location, as well as categorise these locations, whether they are for shopping, leisure, dining, etc.

In earlier videos on the HD2′s performance, the Footprints application seemed a little laggy – I am happy to report that “flicking” between the various sample footprints photos in the application was a smooth experience.

HTC Peep

This is HTC’s Twitter application.

Adobe LE PDF Reader

Rather unfortunately, HTC decided not to include their own version of the PDF reader for the HD2, opting to use the Adobe LE Reader instead.  The Adobe Reader does not support the g-sensor, ie. when you rotate the screen sideways, the display does not rotate accordingly, and the user has to use the “View” function within the Reader application to manually rotate the screen.  Even more disappointingly, the Reader does not support text re-flow, which means that as the user zooms in or out, the text is not re-flowed automatically, unlike the PDF reader on the HTC Hero – which essentially means that the user will have to scroll four ways – up/down/left/right instead of only two ways.  The Reader therefore is not particularly useful for reading ebooks on the device.  There is at least multi-touch support, ie. pinch zooming, in the Reader though.

Stocks

This shows the stock market data for selected markets in the region, and thankfully the Bursa Malaysia index is included!  The user can view the index movement by day, (trading) week, month, year etc.

QuickGPS

This is an application that enables a faster locking of GPS coordinates using the cellular data network so that GPS applications can lock on to the user’s location faster, especially useful as a precise lock will require the user to be outdoors and sometimes may take some minutes.  This is an HTC application and not part of the standard Windows Mobile operating system.

Other applications

1. weather widget – shows the user the weather for selected, user configurable cities around the world.
2. G-sensor – otherwise called the accelerometer.  Controls screen rotation.  Silences the phone if it is turned face down when it rings.  Reduces the ring volume when the user picks up the phone while it is ringing from its “resting location”.
3. digital compass – shows the direction; also integrated with Google Maps to show the direction of travel from starting point to the destination.
4. search phone – searches the phone’s messages, contacts, calendar, etc.  However, it does not search for applications.
5. MP3 trimmer - trims MP3 files to be used as ringtones, for example.
6. FM radio – built in FM radio application; only works when the headset is plugged in.
7. streaming media – connects to the internet to listen to streaming audio using the rstp protocol.
8. comm manager – application to quickly toggle the various communication features on/off, for example, the data connection, phone, bluetooth, WiFi, push email, and WiFi Router.
9. WiFi Router – application to share the HD2′s wireless broadband connection over 3G using its built in WiFi radio.  This is where other WiFi equipped devices can connect to the HD2 to share the HD2′s internet connection.  Otherwise known as (wireless) tethering.
10. voice recorder – application to record audio.
11. Worldcard Mobile – business card scanning and recognition software, to convert a scanned image of a business card into contact information to save on manual entry.
12. Jetcet Print – wireless printer application that allows the HD2 to print to a WiFi or Bluetooth printer.
13. Jblend – HTC’s application to allow the HD2 to run Java MIDlets or MIDlet suites.  It supports J2ME.
14. internet sharing – share the HD2′s internet connection via USB or Bluetooth.  Similar to WiFi Router, but only shares it with one device, whereas the WiFi Router application can share the HD2′s internet connection with multiple devices.

Soft keyboard

Since the HD2 is a touchscreen only device with no physical QWERTY keyboard, the importance of the soft or virtual keyboard cannot be understated.  In this case, HTC has completely replaced the stock Windows Mobile keyboard with a keyboard that they designed.  The HTC soft keyboard features auto correction, which is strangely turned off by default, and predictive text, which is strangely turned on by default.  The reason I say this is because I found the predictive text (aka “T9″) to be a major pain in the behind, constantly “correcting” my input when I did not want it to, a problem especially acute if you use a mixture of proper/slang/shorthand English, as well as some “localised” English words (aka “Manglish”).  When I needed text input to be corrected, I discovered that auto correction was not turned on, and I had to hunt in the settings to turn it on.  I don’t know about you, but I hate predictive text – it’s the first thing I switch off when I get all my smartphones!

The keyboard supports Chinese character “selection” (it does not support handwriting since this is a capacitive screen, a special capacitive stylus is still under development by HTC).  So, if you’re a person who is used to handwriting character recognition on your Windows Mobile devices, sadly, I have to say this is not a device for you.  When entering text, a long press will bring up a context sensitive menu for text selection to be cut, copied, or deleted.

I find that the soft keyboard is better than the stock Windows Mobile one on other Windows Mobile devices.  Due to the large screen, there is more space, even in portrait mode, to accommodate the soft keyboard, which makes the typing experience a pleasant one.  In fact, I would say that the keyboard is almost as good as the one on the iPhone.  Watch out for a short video in the third installment of this review for an attempt at fast typing on the soft keyboard!

Firmware

Here’s the firmware version running on my review unit of the HD2 in case you want to do a comparison with your unit:

This concludes the second installment of the HD2 review.  As a prelude to the third and final installment where I will cover the phone’s performance, battery life and conclusions, let me end by a small section on annoyances.  Whether these annoyances are minor or significant depends on what is important to you; it’s not for me to say one way or the other.

1. for the vast majority of the time, the phone’s performance is snappy and fluid.  I have not encountered any temporary “freezes”, although there was one instance when the phone completely stopped responding, but could still be turned off by long pressing the “End call” hard button.
2. as long as you don’t leave the HTC Sense interface, you will encounter very acceptable performance.  Once you dive into the core underlying Windows Mobile interface, the issues arise – inconsistent location of buttons (most times the OK button is at the top right corner, sometimes it is underneath at the bottom of the screen), ugly screens, etc.  Remember – Windows Mobile (“WinMo”) 6.5 is still Windows Mobile 6.x – it was tweaked slightly for performance, as well as touch input, which leads to point 3.
3. although WinMo 6.5 is “optimised” for touch input, ie. you don’t require a stylus to operate it unlike previous WinMo versions, there are still instances when the “OK” button at the top right is just too small to be poked with your finger, especially if you have large fingers.  And since this is a capacitive screen, you can’t use your fingernail to poke at the tiny “OK” button, which can make for a somewhat frustrating experience.  In addition, pressing those “drop down” list boxes can be a frustrating experience – sometimes the finger tap does not register, sometimes it takes a few taps to get the drop down list to appear!  Finally, when there are “check boxes” to select items or indicate acceptance of a term/condition, the user has to tap in exactly the box for the check mark to appear.  One can’t simply tap anywhere on the sentence to register a check mark, unlike on desktop Windows.  So, if the check box is small, like the “OK” button I described earlier, it may take a few taps for the check mark to appear.
4. sometimes, a quick flick on the screen opens up an application or SMS or email, when all I wanted to do was scroll up.  This is yet another instance where we see that WinMo 6.5 is only a “stopgap” measure while Microsoft works on optimising the operating system for “true touch” like that on the iPhone.  I do apologise for bringing up the iPhone constantly as a basis for comparison, but I am not the only one who is benchmarking smartphones against what the iPhone provides – it’s because the iPhone still sets the bar, as far as true touchscreen phones go.
5. for the life of me, I just could not log in to my YouTube account, whether on the Maxis or DiGi network.  I am uncertain whether this is a network problem or a device problem; in any case, it would have proven frustrating if I uploaded a lot of videos to YouTube from my smartphone.  But knowing the state of our wired as well as wireless broadband upload speeds in Malaysia, one would be rather silly to be uploading a lot of videos to video sharing sites anyway!

That’s it for now.  While I work on the next installment, I’m sure you will bombard me with comments, so, fire away!

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