T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide Review - Photographers Wanted
by Vivek Gowri on August 12, 2011 8:45 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Snapdragon
- HTC
- 4G
- Mobile
- T-Mobile
- MyTouch
- Slide
The camera interface, too, is really well thought out, starting with the excellent two-stage camera button. It’s a machined aluminum bit, with an interesting circular ridge pattern milled into the top. HTC took an idea out of Microsoft’s playbook and implemented the same idea with pressing and holding the camera button to open directly to the camera application. You can disable the feature in settings, but it’s brilliant kinds of useful.
The camera button works in practice too, due to the rolling image capture. I tend to have major issues with physical camera buttons, because they usually end in me taking a blurry picture. Having no shutter lag takes that out of the equation for me, because it pulls an image from when it registers a shutter click instead of directly afterwards, when the force I apply on the camera button destabilizes the entire phone. That isn’t to say that it completely eliminates the issue, as you’ll see in a bit. For the most part though, it’s brilliant.
The camera application takes over from LG’s as the best in the business for me. Beyond the headlining SweepShot, ClearShot HDR, and BurstShot modes, there’s also an Auto mode, a Night mode for low light pictures, Action mode for settings that require a faster shutter, Macro and Portrait modes, and a Manual mode, where all the options come out to play. You can mess with exposure, contrast, saturation, sharpness, white balance, ISO (up to 800), aspect ratio (16:9 or 4:3 only), and resolution.
There are four translucent buttons on the left side of the camera application, overlayed on the preview image - mode selection, flash on/off/auto, front/back camera, camera/camcorder. The right side has a compact shutter button, along with a camera roll shortcut in the bottom right corner. Hitting menu brings up the camera settings, with the self-timer, various effects (sepia, grayscale, distortion, others that probably interest preteens and nobody else), resolution settings, autofocus, geo-tagging, whether or not there’s a fake shutter noise when you take a picture, etc. If you’re in manual mode, this is where all the exposure and ISO options live, but they’re greyed out in all the other modes.
You can tap a specific part of the preview image to focus in a particular spot, and from there it’s just point and click. It’s just a very sleek looking app that has a lot of features and goes about it’s business with a minimum of fuss. HTC clearly put a decent amount of thought into designing a clean and intuitive app with no odd interface actions.
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Impulses - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
" Anand is going to do a deep dive into the dual-core Snapdragon microarchitecture in our forthcoming EVO 3D review. "Been hoping it'll come out already for a while! Any ETA? Also, can you share some specifics about how the battery tests are run? I'm not doubting the results, I'd just like to do my own testing here, my EVO 3D (which I'm still unsure if I'll keep) doesn't seem to be in the same league as the Sensation despite nearly phenyl identical internals.
Impulses - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
Great review btw, as always from AT... You guys go into way more detail than anyone else out there, it's really appreciated. I think the software side could use even more depth tho, ultimately people will customize phones and install their own apps, launchers etc but if you're gonna harp on manufacturer skins for what they get wrong, you should also highlight some of the value that some of them do add, beyond the obvious (lockscreen, camera interface, etc.).Take the print feature for instance, I dunno if the MT4G has it but the Sensation and EVO 3D sure do, and it's really really handy... True Wifi printing that works without a computer or a cloud service and seems to work even with older printers (at least it worked with my 5+ year old HP AIO).
Or how about the ringer settings for pocket mode, speaker on flip, and quiet on pickup? How about the power saver mode? Sense's FB contact integration tho done in a less-than-elegant manner (adds a tag to your Gmail contact notes) at a technical level still works better at a user level than FB's own app imo. The calendar is a vast improvement over past versions of Sense, tho I guess that's not saying much since they had really butchered it.
My biggest beef with Sense, besides the launcher (easily remedied) continues to be the browser. Generally it works pretty well, I like the big previews of open windows and bookmarks, the couple extra settings HTC tucks in, and the full screen mode... But why do they continue to limit you to four open tabs/windows at a time?! It's maddening, to an extent it keeps me from leaving stuff I intend to read/do open in the browser forever, but AFAIK everyone else is doing 8 no? 16 on tablets?
FrederickL - Saturday, August 13, 2011 - link
"But why do they continue to limit you to four open tabs/windows at a time?! "
I cannot of course say for certain but might it not be that the average smartphone even high-end still has a relatively limited amount of RAM (max currently AFAIK is 1Gb) and they are concerned about the browser crashing?
Impulses - Saturday, August 13, 2011 - link
Crashing or getting cached out of memory? I rarely see my stock browser crash on Gingerbread, I don't think it happens more than once a month... I used to see it get closed and tossed out of memory a lot on my EVO 4G whenever I switched to other apps (games, gmail oddly enough, or a combination of various apps would often do the trick). On the EVO 3D it seems to rarely happen thanks to the extra memory, which is really nice.I haven't taken notice of how much memory each tab may consume while open, but the browser as a whole usually hovers at around 100MB; higher than most other daily use apps but low enough that it still leaves 100-200MB free (while also having another dozen apps loaded I'm memory, totaling about 150MB). It seems the OS itself and Sense + the stock widgets consumes a beefy 400MB...
I've avoided customizing it too much while I make up my mind about it, freezing the Sense launcher and using ADW with some lighter widgets would probably free up a decent chunk of that 400 MB.
FrederickL - Saturday, August 13, 2011 - link
Yep, I suspect you are right as far as the amount of RAM being used by Sense in Gingerbread is concerned (although I have not had any big issues with my updated Desire Z). Certainly the less than stellar offering from HTC to its original Desire customers of a crippled Gingerbread/Sense upgrade, "install at your own risk", would seem to confirm my suspicions that the producers are (all of them) currently putting the absolute minimum RAM in most of their phones that they think that they can get away with at the time. Until there is a bit more customer pressure over the issue I do not see the tactic changing any time soon. The current attitude of the producers appears to be "if you want more than one upgrade, buy another phone". Given that the price of a modern high end smartphone lies in the range 650 - 800 dollars (unlocked), I find that attitude pretty contemptible. The only reason they can get away with it IMHO is that the US market is the leading market world wide and most in the US buy on a "plan" from the carriers. If a significant proportion of the customers in the US bought unlocked then the producers would probably be experiencing a much more negative attitude from their customers than they currently get.
Impulses - Saturday, August 13, 2011 - link
Problem is there is no incentive to buy unlocked, plans cost the same on all carriers regardless of whether you got a subsidized phone or not. T-mobile's the only exception to that and a) the discount is only like $10 b) it looks like they'll soon be part of AT&T.Nevermind that buying unlocked isn't even an option for customers withe two other major carriers (Version and Sprint), since they use CDMA.
FrederickL - Saturday, August 13, 2011 - link
Indeed, I see your point. That then raises the question of what is going on here with regard to prising. How is it, that there is no "bonus" in regard to plan costs if you buy unlocked? There is something very wrong and illogical with a "market" where that could possibly be the case. It is very strange that a deal that involves signing up for a "plan" which in *addition* provides you with a phone should (apparently) cost you the same as if you bought unlocked and *then* bought your plan. A market where such a phenomenon is possible ought to be the subject of *very* close investigation by the federal competition authorities. There is something that smells here and it is not pleasant.
andrewbuchanan - Sunday, August 14, 2011 - link
Yeah. I am pretty upset with the attitude that one or two upgrades is all you get. But I'm also upset that htc cuts corners.I had an htc dream with android 1.5, it never got any upgrades. Even though the dream got 1.6 on other carriers... The phone had very little internal flash which didn't leave much room for upgrades.
I have an htc desire, which is a nice phone, but they cheaped out on flash so it doesn't have room for htc's version of android 2.3 (the desire z, desire hd, got it because they came out slightly later and have more internal flash).
Anyways, if I had known they would stop supporting the phones after 6 months, I wouldn't have bought them. Carriers push 3 year contracts, but then the phones are only supported for 6 months. I'm sure a motivated individual could sue. And hopefully somebody does.
I'm not much of an apple lover, but they support their stuff for at least 3 years. And the microsoft ones seem to be as well.
Impulses - Saturday, August 13, 2011 - link
It'd be interesting to get those kinda memory usage stats in reviews, it'd probably explain some of the performance drags that manufacturer customizations often incur.FrederickL - Saturday, August 13, 2011 - link
Agreed, that would be most useful information.