Geekly Articles each Day
📜 ⬆️ ⬇️

Review T-Mobile G2, aka HTC Desire Z: Opening the box

Foreword



Most recently, T-Mobile unveiled its new phone, the G2, creating a page with an incomprehensible white silhouette especially for it. After some time, the picture changed, and it became clear that this is HTC Vision, also known as HTC Desire Z for Europe. The main difference, it seems, is that the European HTC Desire Z will be with HTC Sense, while the T-Mobile G2 will be in stock Froyo.


')
The phone fell into my hands almost a week before the start of its nationwide sale in America on October 6th, therefore, since there is a chance, let's open the box and see what assurance it is.


National sales, as announced by T-Mobile, will begin on October 6th, with the option of pre-ordering T-Mobile customers.
It was also announced that the phone will begin to be sold at BestBuy stores on October 6 at a price of $ 199, and even RadioShack’s price of $ 150 was announced .

I made a pre-order, and, as far as I understood them, I waited for the phone on October 6th. But, oddly enough, the phone came to me just a few days after the pre-order, September 30th. Repeated research of this question showed that yes - those customers who can pre-order, will receive a telephone on September 30th.

Let's see what's in the box and how it all looks.

What is in the box



The box came a bit crumpled in the corners, which is not surprising - they sent it in a simple plastic room, UPS Ground. Package weight is one and a half pounds. UPS, as usual, left the package under my door. It went instead of the stated 5-7 working days for UPS Ground for only two days.



The box is made of hard plastic, fairly well made. Tearing off the top and bottom stickers, you can remove the cover.



The phone is in the groove, especially uncovered. The screen, the keyboard is protected by transparent plastic, there is also a plastic insert between the top and bottom of the phone.



In addition, the box contained instructions, a guarantee, for some reason another SIM card, a battery in the phone itself and an 8 Gb microSD in the phone.

A charging cord with a USB at the end, and an adapter socket - a USB mother so that this cord can be plugged into a wall outlet.
Stereo headphones, extra pads on the earbuds.



Price issue



The price, subject to the conclusion of a two-year contract with T-Mobile is $ 199.99. This is taking into account the so-called mail-in rebate - a discount that they send you later by mail. In this case, this is a Visa card with $ 50 in 6-8 weeks. In addition, if you only become a T-Mobile client, you have to pay for the activation of the line, if you are already a client and just upgrade, you have to pay for it. Taking into account taxes and any additional similar fees, the price when ordering was about $ 290. Of these, $ 50, as I said, should be returned in the form of a card. Payment can be made in installments - in three or four payments.

Housing



Let's start with the bottom of the end - there is only a microphone hole. Also visible part of the design of the sliding screen, the so-called Z Hinge. At the bottom of the phone is an optical trackpad and several soft keys.



On the left side - the volume rocker and jack for USB cable, it is charging. As far as I can tell, this is microUSB. They say that it seems to be a standardized charging for all phones in the end. It somehow does not smile to me - now I have to buy a new cord in the car, at work, and so on. Well, okay ...



Top - 3.5mm headphone jack and power button. Again visible manifestations of the mechanism of Z Hinge.



On the right side there is a camera button (the button is not marked in any way, so I only guess that this is a camera button, you can certainly hang something else on it). Next to it is a button for opening the back cover. The button is quite tight, you can not open it by accident. However, if you pull this button - the back cover itself falls into your hands. The lid, by the way, is one piece of metal, heavy enough. That sticks out in the middle of the gap, between the buttons, is a protective piece of plastic.



Z Hinge works ... very well. It is necessary to adapt to where and at what angle to make an effort to open the phone, but it works clearly, without a backlash, with which G1 sins. If you compare the tactile sensations of opening the G1 and G2 - the difference is very large, in favor of the second, of course.

The keyboard is three-row, the numbers on the top row, which, I think, is not very convenient. There are three buttons to the left and right of the space bar, which can be assigned using the appropriate software.



On the back of the phone is a flash, a peephole of the camera. The aluminum surface is a cover, everything else is the phone case. The cover also covers the speakerphone.





Everything is done very well, massively.



Under the lid - there is already a plastic-lined battery.



You can see the speaker, and under the speaker - a place for a SIM card.



The place for the microSD card is under the battery, no hot-swappable, as in the G1. By the way, a white round blotch on the case, in the photo is visible just under the corner of the battery - this is a sensitive material to water. Indicator of whether you dropped the phone in the water. When you call with a request to send a new phone instead of a broken old one - it is necessary, besides IME numbers, they ask for the color of this rounder. I always say - "white", in fact, never dropped a phone into the water. But if the water on this kruglyashok falls, it should change color, it seems, to bright pink.
This phone has the same blotch on the battery.



Further, for comparison, a few photos from its predecessor, the T-Mobile G1.









Specifications



You can see them at least on Wikipedia or on the official T-Mobile G2 page on HTC.

However, it is not difficult for me to list them here.


I would like to note that, of course, it was some disappointment to see the 800 MHz processor after phones like the N1 and Motorola Droid 2 with gigahertz processors. However, searching the Internet is a bit reassuring. They say that the processor may not be so bad and may even be better than gigahertz.
At least it says here that the expected performance should be comparable to the performance of the Samsung Galaxy S and the Motorola Droid X / 2. In the same place, by reference, you can look at some benchmark test of a number of phones.

In short, this Qualcomm processor is a second-generation processor, made on 45nm technology, which gives reason to expect less power consumption and longer work from a single battery charge. In addition, there is a GPU Adreno 205, which is 4 times more productive than its predecessor Adreno 200, which was in the original Snapdragon.

Soft



On the phone, unlike the European HTC Desire Z with HTC Sense, it costs Android 2.2 Froyo. The pictures are clear, juicy, everything flies, nothing slows down right out of the box. Voice dialing hardly recognizes my Russian accent, but if it is not there, it should work fine. Interestingly, you can switch the language in the search engine, but in the voice dialing of the phone - it seems impossible. Being switched to Russian, voice search understands me without problems.

In addition, I can’t say anything special - Froyo is already used by many people, there are also a lot of reviews. Because something special after a few hours of use I can not say.

Conclusion



I only have this phone for a few hours. All I had to do was open the box, turn on the phone, play around with voice dialing and write about it to you. The phone seems solid, quite heavy, made very high quality. The only thing I didn’t like was that with the keyboard open, if you click on the edge of the screen, which is just above the keyboard, the screen can either bend or tilt.

After a few days of use I will try to write a more detailed review about the software, about my impressions of the phone and all that, so do not judge strictly for the incompleteness of this review.

Regards, Miguello

UPD.: At the request of LeeMiller I upload photos taken with the camera of the phone: first , in good lighting conditions, the second - with a double zoom, and the third - with a flash. The photos are somehow not very good, but it seems to me that I had a lens smeared. Habrastorage.org refused to take these pictures, I had to post it like this.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/105315/

More articles:


All Articles