Wednesday, November 23, 2011

HTC Titan 8 MP Autofocus Camera

The HTC Titan gives you a 8 MP titan autofocus camera that has a few tricks under its belt : it utilizes a 28mm wide-angle F2. 2 lens as well as a BSI (back-side illuminated) sensor. The effect is stills of 3264x2448 pixels image resolution. It also features a 1. 3 MP front-facing titan video camera for self-portraits and video dialling.

What the fancy camera requirements actually mean in real life is that a result of the wide-angle lens it is possible to fit more into the snapshot than with regular 35 mm the len's phones. The F2. 2 aperture number shows that the phone's camera can capture images to comprehend light, which coupled with this BSI sensor produces very well-light graphics even in darker environments. More on that that you follow in the image quality section down the line.

The camera UI is pretty simple – you could have your viewfinder and some controls within the right. From top to bottom there're the still/video camera toggle, minute video-call camera toggle, virtual zoom buttons and a lengthy settings menu. On the left you could have an arrow that takes someone to the images taken with this camera, alternatively you can start a swipe gesture too.

The video camera app on Windows Phone delivers very extensive settings, ranging by scenes and effects to light balance, contrast, saturation, sharpness, ISO and even more.

Interestingly the camera key will wake the unit with a single press – that is certainly unlock it and start this camera. Unfortunately it doesn't operate the proximity sensor like before and from now on the camera app can be accidentally opened with your pocket.

The noise reduction is usually too aggressive, giving photos of which dreaded watercolor painting look. Element is smeared over but possibly then, there's still some coloration noise visible. The HTC Titan finds an even better balance between the clipping on the highlights and shadows than most but it really suffers from the same yellowish oversaturated colors for the reason that XE. There was a noticeable pink spot to the vast majority of samples too.

Photos in the dark while using the HTC Titan were noisy with quality detail. The flash was strong but but could possibly tint affecting the whole photography. Other than that low-light images are pretty usable.

The HTC Titan incorporates a wider angle lens that it is competitors, which gives it a good sharp edge in landscape shots, at the expense of lower fine detail and more lens distortion after you get up close.

HTC Titan Fiture Picture, Music, and Video

The Pictures hub have been polished up a bit throughout Windows Phone Mango. There's a whole new People tab, which lets anyone browse photo albums by particular person contacts or groups.

You can set a single photo as being a background for the hub (it had been the last photo viewed) or you'll be able to set it to shuffle distinct photos.

And of course, the point of hubs is actually the go-to place to accomplish things, instead of apps. New functionality allows apps to integrate in the Pictures hub, so for case in point, a photo effects app might make its options available right inside hub. Devs need to help that into apps however.

The principle view of the Pictures link offers four options - digicam roll, albums, date and men and women. A swipe to the quit reveals what's new, which demonstrates your Facebook friends and appreciated pages' new picture galleries. Yet another swipe shows your favorites segment, where the photos you've faved are displayed lastly applications, where on the HTC Titan there are the Photo Enhancer app.

Pictures features the camera roll, the preloaded system pictures and your Facebook albums. A flick left shows all your pictures fixed by date. You can't determine individual camera roll photos straight into albums, though.

Read also HTC Titan Messaging

The people section is which you could select your friends or closed ones to ensure their galleries on Facebook get displayed at that time in your Pictures hub. It's actually a nice feature for social network users but are going to be only an empty section for the people that aren't too fond involving Facebook.

The camera roll unifies all of your collection of photos and video clips, taken with the device, in a very grid of 4x5. You cannot change the view in the camera roll. Viewing a photo is possible in either portrait or panorama mode. Zooming in on a photograph is done by either increase tap or pinch to glide. We appreciate that the digicam roll doesn't downsize pictures and you'll enjoy them in full solution.

Windows Phone 7 used to get quite restricted when it located sharing - it's still certainly not perfect (it still downsizes images before emailing them, for one) but anyone can share videos too, either through email or on Facebook. Expressing options include messaging, email, Zynga or the cloud-based SkyDrive.

Even though uploading photos to Facebook as well as Windows Live, the OS will detect any untagged faces and let you tag them before proceeding while using upload.

The camera roll carries a dedicated auto-fix setting, which tries to further improve your photo. It's a nice feature but the one which produces unrealistic results at periods.

The video player is built-into the Pictures hub. It has an easy interface - you have rapid forward and rewind controls, a moment scroll and a video sizing button that toggles full-screen seeing.

The video player doesn’t acknowledge. AVI files – in various other words, don’t expect DivX as well as XviD support. However, the Zune software on your hard drive will automatically convert such data to. MP4 – so, you can view those formats on the HTC Titan, it’s just that the transfer on the device can take a while (depending on your pc's capabilities).

It’s interesting (and useful) that one could pin individual items to the homescreen – as being a song or video, even an Radio frequency.

The media players reside together inside Music & Videos hub, which in turn bears the Zune logo. Once you start it, it shows the Record, which gives you quick entry to the last two things played out, or you can go fully menu and start the tunes or video player, listen/watch podcasts (the two audio and video podcasts are generally supported), start the FM radio or visit the Marketplace.

The music section consist of albums, songs, playlists, genres along with artists. Videos features all, television set, music videos, films and personal - imagine them like more of categories you'll be able to assign your videos to while synching with Zune. The third section is podcasts which you could store all of your delivered electronically audio and video podcasts.

You additionally get radio and marketplace links inside Music & Videos tile. It doesn't offer the option to be handled by online radio stations so you might need to insert the headgear to find reception.

You have the current frequency in substantial digits – swiping left along with right changes the frequency and also a swipe and release automatically mission to find the next available station in this direction. You can mark a number of stations as favorites, which will help you pin them to the homescreen. RDS is on board and you'll switch between headphones and loudspeaker.

The music carries a simple and straightforward interface. You won’t have any difficulties with it. However there are some issues missing, like an equalizer. Another missing feature is to be able to scrub through a song with your finger – you will need to press and hold on your FF/rewind buttons to simply jump between the two.

Mango brings along a slight change in design on the now playing screen. The favourite, repeat and shuffle buttons are placed horizontally next to the album cover as an alternative to hidden behind it.

HTC Titan Messaging

Messaging has been heavily retooled for version 7. 5. Threads are the inspiration of all non-email messaging. Although a kind of conversation view, threads mash with each other SMS, Facebook and Windows Stay messages.

That's the thing concerning Windows Phone: the Messaging center removes the old division among texts, IMs, social messages. One other hubs do the same for your other functionality, making the complete thing simple yet powerful.

In any case, Titan Messaging is separated into a couple of tabs - threads and on the web. Online shows you who's online with all the people you've talked to of late on top. This makes finding you to definitely talk to very easy.

Threads is where this hub's impressive features activate. A new thread is designed for each person you start a speak to. Messages are displayed as speech balloons plus a label on the left shows the sort of message - text, Facebook or Messenger. Labels are placed only when the conversation moves to a new platform so it's not jumbled.

You can choose which platform to utilize to send a reply as well as the text box will remind an individual what you're currently using using a message like "chat on Facebook". Individual messages may be copied (the whole message is copied being pasted later, you can't copy only an integral part of the message), they may be deleted or forwarded. Whole threads may be deleted too.

You can't affix anything to Facebook messages, you will have to use MMS for that.

The visual voicemail functionality is also area of the new OS (that will depend on the carrier and your program). It works as you'll expect, by letting you read your voicemail messages as opposed to listening to them.

Moving to email where Mango contributed also.

One of the highly required feature was a unified email for email - and House windows Phone 7. 5 delivers. It's simple to link multiple inboxes (and also unlink them individually later), so that you will have a single place to test for new messages.

Linking several inboxes may also automatically combine their live tiles. It is possible to browse individual folders for each and every account, which lets you view messages from only 1 email account even if it really is linked.

Conversation view was expected : it lists emails between you plus a contact chronologically, grouping them simply by subject. It’s the display style in which Gmail popularized and is the ultimate way to keep track of a dialogue over email.

Each email conversation is listed using a subject and number of emails, plus how many of people are new. A tap over a conversation expands it to show the messages and also a line from each message.

It is possible to tap on an individual message to learn it, as well as omit messages back and forward to be able to navigate the conversation. We expected in order to swipe between the messages, but that wasn’t the truth.

You can mark individual email messages, make them read/unread, set hole, clear flag and more.

Text input on Windows Phone constitutes with the default QWERTY keyboard and presents portrait and landscape modes : that's it. The layout remains the identical on all WP devices as well as the only options you have are changing the language with the keyboard and resetting the thesaurus that displays word suggestions.

The WP QWERTY keyboard is quite comfortable to use and presents sound feedback. There's no haptic vibration feedback and there isn't any way of enabling it.

The keyboard will come in many sizes, depending on the unit. On the HTC Titan it is rather comfortable and given that the smallest WP7 screen found over a phone is 3. 5" there cannot be any size complaints.

Finally searching your entire mail for individual emails - it's really a very useful feature, especially for anyone with large inboxes.

Text selection and copy-paste features were desired functions even ahead of the 7. 5 Mango update. They became possible with the pre-Mango No-Do up-date. Selecting text is very basic, but does require some being employed to. You hold your finger over some text to get a second or two and next release. The text area gets highlighted and then you can certainly move the beginning and end cursors to modify how much text you would like to select. A little icon arises for copy and the selected text can be acquired to paste anywhere in the particular OS.

HTC Titan Mango Windows Phone

The HTC Titan's graphical user interface is the same Windows Phone one you'll receive on any competing device working the OS. The only differentiating thing could be the HTC green preloaded as a layout color. The interface is very clear and simple - it's composed of live tiles that show information just like the current date, calendar events, overlooked calls, unread emails and a lot more, all without the need to open up some of the applications.

Pushing the unlock option reveals the lock screen, which displays the existing time and date and displays calendar events, emails and overlooked calls. The background of the lock screen may be changed from either the settings menu or from your picture gallery.

Swiping the lock screen up unlocks the unit and reveals the live-tile Metro graphical user interface. It's a very fluid top to bottom grid of Live tiles that shows 1 or 2 tiles organized in bricked type. Each of these can be reorganized where ever order you like and you may place almost anything in the particular grid by holding your little finger over it and selecting the Pin to start out option, titan design.

The Live tiles, the essential building blocks of the Commence screen of Windows Phone are already revamped. Now they are quicker and provide more info. For example, the Pictures tile shows an animated slideshow of one's images. The Group tile (Groups can be a new feature to boot) databases friend updates. The application list has exploded a virtual Search button, helping to make finding apps easier for people that have many apps installed.

One with the main novelties brought by the newest WP build - 7. 5 Mango : is multitasking. It still just isn't true multitasking; things are getting done the iOS way. Apps not inside the foreground are suspended, but the OS has approaches to take over and carry out the job for them.

We only worry that logic can be too restrictive for a few apps, but we'll see just how things pan out. Of training course, there will be a transitional period of time when some apps will support multitasking among others won't. We've been there with all the iOS, when it first still left the realm of single-tasking – it’s not necessarily that bad.

Anyway, to switch between apps you press and support the Back key (that's proper, the Back key, not the particular Windows key). The app switcher itself looks just like that of Symbian or WebOS: thumbnail snapshots with the apps, ordered chronologically left to be able to right.

You can scroll the list horizontally to choose an app and a tap provides you back to exactly the method that you left it. Usually, the previous 5-6 apps are here. You can not "kill" any of those programs, this is more of a brief history of the recently used programs.

Eventually, as you open a lot more apps, the old ones start to drop out from the list. Once an app is fully gone, you have to launch it again the old-fashioned way, which has the drawback of starting it over right from the start. Finally apps with active backdrop tasks (e. g. streaming online radio) help keep on working.

Multitasking can be disabled from your settings to save battery. There you'll also find a listing of all installed apps that help multitasking.

Opening the settings food selection reveals two sets of alternatives - system and applications. System covers every one of the settings you can think regarding like sounds, color theme, Wi-Fi, Wireless, Accounts, etc. The Applications settings lets you configure individual settings for each app you might have installed on the device - individuals hub, Phone, Maps and a lot more.

Windows Phone 7. 5 may be controlled through voice only - it is possible to dictate a text, have the device read out the reply, you can initiate searches etc. Other OSes are doing that too (*cough*Android*cough*) but voice commands certainly are a big part of iOS (plus a loudly touted one at in which), so WP7. 5 can brag regarding it too.

The People hub coming from Windows Phone 7 was remarkable, but the 7. 5 update helps it be absolutely brilliant. Part of that is because of the better social network help, complete with Twitter and LinkedIn.

The rest is pretty quite similar. You still get the clever means of jumping to contacts starting using a specific letter, the What's new tab in which aggregates status updates from all contacts as well as the Recent tab, which lists simply recently viewed contacts.

And deeper social media support makes things even far better. When viewing a contact's report, you get everything from contact, text, send email, write about wall, mention on Twitter etc. The contact photo, along with all the latest status update, are visible at the top.

The What's new tab works like its namesake inside the People hub, but only shows updates from your specific contact. Pictures is the location where the contact's Facebook albums are.

One of the most interesting addition is the fresh History tab. The complete history of exchange using a contact is in one spot listed by day. Everything but status updates is right here - calls, texts (actually threads from your Messaging hub) and email messages.

The HTC Titan's user interface could be the same Windows Phone one you'll receive on any competing device working the OS. The only differentiating thing could be the HTC green preloaded as a layout color. The interface is very clear and simple - it's composed of live tiles that show information just like the current date, calendar events, overlooked calls, unread emails and a lot more, all without the need to open up some of the applications.

Pushing the unlock option reveals the lock screen, which displays the existing time and date and displays calendar events, emails and overlooked calls. The background of the lock screen may be changed from either the settings menu or from your picture gallery.

Swiping the lockscreen up unlocks the unit and reveals the live-tile Metro graphical user interface. It's a very fluid top to bottom grid of Live tiles that shows 1 or 2 tiles organized in bricked type. Each of these can be reorganized where ever order you like and you may place almost anything in the particular grid by holding your little finger over it and selecting the Pin to start out option.

The Live tiles, the essential building blocks of the Commence screen of Windows Phone are already revamped. Now they are quicker and provide more info. For example, the Pictures tile shows an animated slideshow of one's images. The Group tile (Groups can be a new feature to boot) databases friend updates. The application list has exploded a virtual Search button, helping to make finding apps easier for people that have many apps installed.

To acquire things going, here's a video demonstrating HTC Titan doing his thing.

One of the main novelties brought from the latest WP build - 7. 5 Mango : is multitasking. It still just isn't true multitasking; things are getting done the iOS way. Apps not inside the foreground are suspended, but the OS has approaches to take over and carry out the job for them.

We only worry that logic can be too restrictive for a few apps, but we'll see just how things pan out. Of training course, there will be a transitional period of time when some apps will support multitasking among others won't. We've been there with all the iOS, when it first still left the realm of single-tasking – it’s not necessarily that bad.

Anyway, to switch between apps you press and support the Back key (that's proper, the Back key, not the particular Windows key). The app switcher itself looks just like that of Symbian or WebOS: thumbnail snapshots with the apps, ordered chronologically left to be able to right.

You can scroll the list horizontally to choose an app and a tap provides you back to exactly the method that you left it. Usually, the previous 5-6 apps are here. You can not "kill" any of those programs, this is more of a brief history of the recently used programs.

Eventually, as you open a lot more apps, the old ones start to drop out from the list. Once an app is fully gone, you have to launch it again the old-fashioned way, which has the drawback of starting it over right from the start. Finally apps with active backdrop tasks (e. g. streaming online radio) help keep on working.

Multitasking can be disabled from your settings to save battery. There you'll also find a listing of all installed apps that help multitasking.

Opening the settings food selection reveals two sets of alternatives - system and applications. System covers every one of the settings you can think regarding like sounds, color theme, Wi-Fi, Wireless, Accounts, etc. The Applications settings lets you configure individual settings for each app you might have installed on the device - individuals hub, Phone, Maps and a lot more.


Windows Phone 7. 5 may be controlled through voice only - it is possible to dictate a text, have the device read out the reply, you can initiate searches etc. Other OSes are doing that too (*cough*Android*cough*) but voice commands certainly are a big part of iOS (plus a loudly touted one at in which), so WP7. 5 can brag regarding it too.


The People hub coming from Windows Phone 7 was remarkable, but the 7. 5 update helps it be absolutely brilliant. Part of that is because of the better social network help, complete with Twitter and LinkedIn.

The rest is pretty quite similar. You still get the clever means of jumping to contacts starting using a specific letter, the What's new tab in which aggregates status updates from all contacts as well as the Recent tab, which lists simply recently viewed contacts.

And deeper social media support makes things even far better. When viewing a contact's report, you get everything from contact, text, send email, write about wall, mention on Twitter etc. The contact photo, along with all the latest status update, are visible at the top.

The What's new tab works like its namesake inside the People hub, but only shows updates from your specific contact. Pictures is the location where the contact's Facebook albums are.

One of the most interesting addition is the fresh History tab. The complete history of exchange using a contact is in one spot listed by day. Everything but status updates is right here - calls, texts (actually threads from your Messaging hub) and email messages.

One of the new top features of the hub is Groups, a handy solution to organize your contacts, with "text everyone" and also "email everyone" features. All the status updates from your grouped contacts are pulled in from other various social networks, and you access their online photo albums also.

The Me card is your own personal profile. From here you can easily post status updates, set talk status, check into locations (there is certainly more location goodness coming about later). You can also change your profile picture (limited to Facebook and Live though, not necessarily Twitter).

Another tab inside the Me card lets you see notifications (e. g. Twitting mentions) and, finally, What's new allows you to view your own status revisions.