What do you do when you've already created a Sensation? If you're HTC, you repackage that lightning in a
slightly
different chassis, turn the volume (read: speed) up to 11 and borrow a
bit of optical wizardry to add that new smartphone smell. All key
elements that can be found in the DNA of the company's latest
imperatively named product offering - the
Amaze 4G. Clearly, HTC's
throwing caution to the fickle consumer winds here, raising the bar for
Android users' expectations and mixing in just enough razzle dazzle to
win over those hard earned geek dollars. So, what's the hook this time
'round? No, not Beats - that's for its Euro stepcousin, the Sensation
XE. Here, the main attraction is this
handset's
ability to surf along T-Mobile's HSPA+ 42Mbps network. That's right,
Magenta's tiptoeing into LTE speed territory and you've got Sense 3.0 to
help pilot that
wireless ride. Join us after the break as we peel back the layers of this unibodied mobile onion.
Hardware
Right
out of the box, there's no
denying your first impression will be one of shock. The Amaze 4G bucks
the 'thinner is better' trend that we've seen the likes of Samsung and
its
Galaxy S II variants adopt in favor of a large and in charge 5.1 x 2.58-inch design philosophy. Though the handset
may not be much thicker than its competitors, at 0.46 inches (11.7mm)
thick, its 6.1-ounce (0.17kg) heft certainly gives off the opposite
impression. With a similar 4.3-inch qHD super LCD display, the phone
picks up right where the Sensation left off, although in this iteration
that Gorilla Glass-coated screen spills out of its aluminum confines a
tad too much for our tastes. It's an odd design flaw that HTC could have
easily remedied by tapering the edges down into the phone's frame,
rather than subjecting users to indented palms. Still, as the majority
of your usage will most likely have everything to do with data
consumption and less to do with carrying on an actual phone call, you'll
hardly be bothered by this discomfiting quirk.
One of the first
things we noticed when booting up the Amaze 4G was the minute pixelation
on its qHD display. It's not terribly obvious, nor is it particularly
irksome, but when compared to the similarly super LCD-equipped Droid
Incredible 2, this screen is simply dull. Colors on the device appear
washed out, and viewing angles take a dramatic hit at 45 degree tilts.
It's a far cry from the crisp images and vivid hues achieved by its
current competition, the Galaxy S II. And while it would've been nice to
see HTC outfit the phone with a Super AMOLED Plus display, we're sure
the sheer expanse of the screen will override any of your
resolution-centered grousing.
There's no denying it - the Amaze 4G is a handsome handset.
We've seen other past and present high-end smartphones (e.g., the Nexus
S and Droid Charge) belie their internals with cheap-feeling,
scuff-prone frames, but that's not the case here. HTC's wrapped this
HSPA+ present in a unibody mixture of metal and soft touch plastic that
not only inspires confidence in the device's durability, but also goes a
long way towards justifying its on-contract $260 price tag. Embedded
throughout its metallic perimeter are the usual array of inputs and
controls. Down at the phone's base, you'll find both a microphone and
battery door latch - the latter of which makes accessing the phone's
guts an absolute breeze. Up top, a power button and 3.5mm jack preside,
with the volume rocker and dedicated camera buttons over to the right.
On the left-hand side, a lone micro-USB port breaks up the device's
otherwise unblemished chrome trim.
Nestled between the HTC and
T-Mobile branding at the very apex of this 960 x 540 screen is the
admittedly underpowered earpiece which houses an embedded notification
LED. Flanking it on either side are a front-facing 2
megapixel camera and proximity sensor. Around back, we find a speaker grill directly adjacent to an
8 megapixel
shooter with dual LED flash, and lurking below that soft touch back is
an NFC chip - the first for an HTC device, although there isn't much
use for it yet. Moving on to the exposed internals, we have the
requisite SIM card slot, accompanying 1,730mAh battery and vacant
microSD card reader. The handset
comes packed with an ample 16GB of onboard storage, but if you're
looking to load it up with an abundance of audiovisual goods, you better
plan on supplying additional capacity.
Performance and battery life
Let's
not beat around the bush, though. In the rush to get this 42Mbps
capable device to market a few rough edges were overlooked - namely,
battery life. Consider the Amaze 4G a kind of Thunderbolt redux: both
phones unleashed into the market ahead of their time, destined to bear
the torch of heretofore unseen speeds (well, for HSPA+, at least) at the
heady sacrifice of daily usage. It could be the dual-core architecture
or the demands of the "4G" network, but whatever the culprit, expect a
good three to four hours of action before hitting a productivity ceiling
and plugging back in to your nearest outlet. A three-hour charge should
get you back up to 100 percent and running - until the next three
hours, that is.
In our short time with it, we've found the phone
will consistently drain from fully juiced to about 30 percent after just
three hours of light to moderate use - that's with Twitter, Google
Reader and two
email accounts
synced. Toss in some casual web browsing, a YouTube video or two and a
half an hour GTalk session, and the aforementioned four hour limit is
easily reached. Power users should heed this warning and turn a blind
eye to the Amaze 4G's tantalizing promise of next-gen wireless wonderment, as the oft-recommended need for an extra battery would here be multiplied by two.
You
want benchmarks, you say? Well, we've got 'em by the loads. In the name
of a fair fight, we've lined up these various CPU / GPU stress tests
against Magenta's own Galaxy S II variant. For Quadrant, Sammy's beastie beat out the Amaze 4G,
scoring
2,576 vs. 2,514. Linpack averaged about 51MFLOPS, easily topping the
GSII at 42MFLOPS for single thread and, again, yielding 77MFLOPS vs
70MFLOPS in multi scoring. And the benchmark dominance
continued on, with our handset's Neocore
score inching over the GSII's 57fps at 59fps.
How
does all of that translate into real-world performance? Truth be told,
you won't even notice the dual-core chipset chugging away beneath that
rapidly warming back. In fact, an average consumer coming from a
single-core 1GHz device would be hard pressed to spot an appreciable
speed boost. The real vim and vigor becomes apparent when running
several apps at once, a feat commonly known as multi-tasking. We ran
Pandora in the background while responding to emails, running Google
Talk and Maps, browsing the web and scouring the New York Times app for
the latest on Occupy Wall Street. To HTC's credit, the Amaze 4G stood up
to the test and passed with uninterrupted flying colors.
Network speed and call quality
By now, you're most likely wondering what sort of downlink pizzazz is in store if you
do
choose to claim this phone as your own. Well, in our jaunts around New
York City, we've recorded inconsistent HSPA+ network speeds. That's not
to say T-Mobile's service around the farther reaches of the Big Apple is
spotty. On the contrary, 4G signal strength was surprisingly strong,
dropping down to 2G only twice to our knowledge. But when that 15Mbps /
1.7Mbps magic did happen, it was primarily on the outskirts of the city.
Within Manhattan's crush of people and buildings, download speeds
hovered in the 6Mbps to 8Mbps range, only occasionally topping out at
10Mbps down - nothing to sneer at, but certainly nothing to applaud
either.
If you absolutely insist on using your handset to make
(gasp!) phone calls, get set to dig that earpiece and the edges of the
screen deep into the side of your head. Even with the volume cranked up
to the max, we had a hard time hearing our callers, who sounded distant
and muffled. On the upside, loudspeaker performance is quite robust, and
should enable you to move freely around while carrying on that gossip
fest. Reception, too, was relatively strong and our voices came across
crisp and clear on the other end.
Software
Of course, this is the Android show - 2.3.4, to be exact - but you
wouldn't know if from the Sense 3.0 smothering at play. It appears as if
HTC didn't want to load up the Amaze 4G with an accompanying suite of
freshly updated software, and instead saddled prospective owners with an
outdated version of Gingerbread and its penultimate UX. Perhaps the
company needed to reserve the Sense 3.5 fuel for its gimmicky stab at
mobile fashion, a.k.a. the Rhyme. No matter, the Amaze 4G's 1GB of RAM
and dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S3 CPU handily beat out any further OEM
embellishments or flashy plum-colored finishes.
We have to tip
our hat to that beefy Qualcomm chip, as not one iota of lag cropped up
in our testing. Transitions between Sense's carousel of homescreens were
fluid and devoid of hiccups. Web pages on the inbuilt browser rendered
swiftly, capably handling the demands of Flash and other various
plug-ins. And equally as impressive was pinch-to-zoom, which responded
immediately to our touch with nary an instance of checkerboarding.
Unfortunately,
it wouldn't be an Android device if it didn't come bogged down with an
array of carrier-installed bloatware. For the Amaze 4G, however, the
pre-loaded shenanigans don't quite incite frustration the way Verizon's
crapware-heavy devices normally would. Here, the operator-inserted apps
like 411 & More, Adobe Reader, Lookout Security, More for Me,
Polaris Office and Qik Video Chat are arguably useful, though definitely
not essential to the experience.
To get a real sense of the
newly bestowed powers of 42Mbps HSPA+, you need go no further than
T-Mobile TV HD. The app, which offers a mix of live and on demand
content, has been around since the introduction of the Samsung Galaxy S
4G, and gets a real jump start from Magenta's new wireless threads. A
live MSNBC program played back almost instantly, however the quality of
video stretched across the device's 16:9 dimensions was noticeably poor,
and undeserving of the HD labeling. As for that on demand content, a
full episode of ABC's
Happy Endings downloaded in its entirety
within seven minutes - all thanks to T-Mo's zippy (at times) 4G
network. Curiously enough, on both the streaming and downloaded video,
audio was noticeably out of sync, rendering the couch potato on-the-go
viewing experience a trifle annoying.
Camera
No doubt, T-Mobile intends to lure willing customers in with the promise
of super network speeds, but the true crown jewel of this HTC flagship
device is actually its camera. The Amaze 4G borrows the same
backside-illuminated 8 megapixel module found on the myTouch 4G Slide,
and unsurprisingly, it performs just as well here. It's clear the
company intended this phone to be a replacement for your
point-and-shoot, tacking on camera shortcut keys and bundling it with
user-friendly photo software. We put the 3.69mm lens and its various
scene modes to the test and came away mostly convinced - this might be
all the camera you need. That's not to say we don't have our gripes.
While the incessantly autofocusing sensor definitely has it perks, we
struggled on more than one occasion to get the focus ring to settle and
let us snap a clear shot. Additionally, low light shots, even when taken
in Night mode, often resulted in grainy, oversaturated pictures. As for
video, recordings made in full 1080p HD came off largely without a
hitch, displaying good contrast and sharpness of detail, although we did
note an occasional decrease in frame rate from time to time.
Keeping
the camera tech fresh for amateur photogs are two new HTC-added
features - SmartShot and PerfectPics. Despite its promise to sample
multiple shots and deliver a smile-laden
composite photo,
SmartShot is essentially a useless and ineffectual mode. After dozens of
failed and frustrating attempts, we were only able to procure five
successful images, with the rest being a blurry mix of happy / sad
faces. As for PerfectPics, well that's less of a mode and more of a
smart gallery.
Using an algorithm, the software parses through your photo collection
and deposits your Avedon-worthy series of still lifes in a separate
gallery. It may just be our artistic bias, but we're inclined to believe
PerfectPics' critical eye is all a bunch of hooey. Bizarrely enough,
many of our least favorite photos made their way into this A.I. curated
collection, leaving our vastly superior photos lumped in with the rest.
We
have to hand it to HTC on this one: the zero lag shutter and constantly
autofocusing f2.2 sensor lend themselves well to fits of sudden
photographic inspiration. If you see something that catches your fancy,
all it takes is a drop of the camera app into the lockscreen ring and,
voila!,you're
right there, finger on the shutter, capturing the moment you thought
would slip by. This ease of use gradually becomes addictive and, in
time, you're likely to take it for granted. As you can see in the
galleries above, our tour of Central Park gave way to fleeting moments
of filmic brilliance that would otherwise have been lost with a
lesser-equipped phone.
Wrap-up
So, does HTC's new flagship manage to live up to our high expectations
and its hyperbolically named state of awe? We'll put it this way: a
better moniker for this girthy handset would've been the
Kind of Awesome 4G.
As a daily driver, the Amaze's bound to leave you high and dry a few
short hours into your day, critically hampering your busy work / social
schedule with its power-hungry demands. Sure, you can obsessively
monitor your screen's brightness, manage syncing and hold off on the
mobile video consumption until you're close by to an outlet, but the
name of this industry game is
wireless,and T-Mo's Galaxy S II's
already out of the gate. Ignore this phone's battery life shortcomings,
and you're left with an elegant camera module and T-Mobile's just out
of reach 42Mbps HSPA+ dangling carrot. Simply put, it's just not
practical to opt in for a high-end device that will, sporadically, treat
you to downlink speeds that are
half of what's been promised,
and desert you in the process. At the end of the day, the purchase
choice is yours to make, but for our money, we'd hold out for something
packing a wee bit more milliampere-hours. The Amaze 4G XL with Beats,
anybody? It's inevitable, and you know it.
