What do you do when you’ve already created a Sensation ? In case you are HTC , you repackage that lightning in a marginally different chassis, turn the quantity (read: speed) as much as 11 and borrow a bit optical wizardry so as to add that new smartphone smell. All key elements that may be present 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 combining in precisely enough razzle dazzle to win over those hard-earned geek dollars. So, what is the hook this time ’round? No, not Beats — that’s for its Euro stepcousin, the Sensation XE . Here, the major attraction is that 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 have Sense 3.0 to aid 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 isn’t a denying your first impression could be considered one of shock. The Amaze 4G bucks the ‘thinner is better’ trend that we have seen the likes of Samsung and its 3 Galaxy S II variants 3 adopt in favor of a big and guilty 5.1 x 2.58-inch design philosophy. Though the handset is probably not much thicker than its competitors, at 0.46 inches (11.7mm) thick, its 6.1-ounce (0.17kg) heft certainly gives off the other impression. With an analogous 4.3-inch qHD super LCD display, the telephone picks up right where the feeling left off, although on this iteration that Gorilla Glass-coated screen spills out of its aluminum confines a tad an excessive amount of for our tastes. It’s a strange design flaw that HTC may have easily remedied by tapering the perimeters down into the phone’s frame, as opposed to subjecting users to indented palms. Still, because the majority of your usage will probably have everything to do with data consumption and not more to do with carrying on a precise phone call, you’ll hardly be bothered by this discomfiting quirk.
4 Among the many first things we noticed when booting up the Amaze 4G was the minute pixelation on its 5 qHD display 5 . It is not terribly obvious, neither is it particularly irksome, but if when compared with the similarly super LCD-equipped 6 Droid Incredible 2 6 , this screen is barely dull. Colors at the device appear washed out, and viewing angles take a dramatic hit at 45 degree tilts. It is 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 determine HTC outfit the telephone with a 7 Super AMOLED Plus 7 display, we’re sure the sheer expanse of the screen will override any of your resolution-centered grousing.
There is not any denying it — the Amaze 4G is a handsome handset. We have seen other past and present high-end smartphones (e.g., the 8 Nexus S 8 and 9 Droid Charge 9 ) belie their internals with cheap-feeling, scuff-prone frames, but that isn’t the case here. HTC’s wrapped this 0 HSPA+ 0 found in a unibody mix of metal and soft touch plastic that not just inspires confidence within the device’s durability, but additionally goes some distance towards justifying its on-contract $260 price ticket. Embedded throughout its metallic perimeter are the same old array of inputs and controls. Down on the phone’s base, you could find both a microphone and battery door latch — the latter of which makes accessing the phone’s guts an absolute breeze. Up top, an influence button and three.5mm jack preside, with the quantity rocker and dedicated camera buttons over to the proper. At the left-hand side, a lone micro-USB port breaks up the device’s otherwise unblemished chrome trim.
1 Nestled between the HTC and T-Mobile branding on the very apex of this 960 x 540 screen is the admittedly underpowered earpiece which houses an embedded notification LED. Flanking it on each side are a front-facing 2 megapixel camera and proximity sensor. Around back, we discover a speaker grill directly adjacent to an 2 8 megapixel shooter 2 with dual LED flash, and lurking below that soft touch back is an 3 NFC chip 3 — the primary for an HTC device, although there is not much use for it yet. Moving directly to the exposed internals, we’ve got the requisite SIM card slot, accompanying 1,730mAh battery and vacant microSD card reader. The handset comes filled with an ample 16GB of onboard storage, but when you are looking to load it up with an abundance of audiovisual goods, you better plan on supplying additional capacity.
Performance and battery life
4 Let’s not beat across the bush, though. Within the rush to get this 42Mbps capable device to market a number of rough edges were overlooked — namely, battery life. Consider the Amaze 4G one of those 5 Thunderbolt 5 redux: both phones unleashed into the market prior to their time, destined to bear the torch of heretofore unseen speeds (well, for HSPA+, a minimum of) on the heady sacrifice of daily usage. It usually is the 6 dual-core 6 architecture or the demands of the “4G” network, but regardless of the culprit, expect an excellent three to four hours of action before hitting a productivity ceiling and plugging back in on your nearest outlet. a 3-hour charge should get you back as much as 100 pc and running — until the subsequent three hours, which is.
In our few minutes with it, we’ve found the telephone will consistently drain from fully juiced to about 30 percent after just three hours of sunshine 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 definitely reached. Power users should heed this warning and switch a blind eye to the Amaze 4G’s tantalizing promise of next-gen wireless wonderment, because the oft-recommended need for an additional battery would here be multiplied by two.
You wish benchmarks, you assert? Well, we have ‘em by the hundreds. Within the name of an excellent 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.
7 How does all of that translate into real-world performance? Truth be informed, you will not even notice the twin-core chipset chugging away beneath that rapidly warming back. As a matter of fact, a regular consumer coming from a single-core 1GHz device will be hard pressed to identify an appreciable speed boost. The $64000 vim and vigor becomes apparent when running several apps directly, a feat generally known as multi-tasking. We ran Pandora inside the background while responding to emails, running Google Talk and Maps, browsing the internet and scouring the brand new York Times app for the newest on Occupy Wall Street. To HTC’s credit, the Amaze 4G stood as much as the test and passed with uninterrupted flying colors.
Network speed and phone quality
By now, you’re probably wondering what kind of downlink pizzazz is in store in case you do prefer to claim this phone as your individual. Well, in our jaunts around Ny city, we’ve recorded inconsistent HSPA+ network speeds. That is not to mention T-Mobile’s service round the farther reaches of new york is spotty. In truth, 4G signal strength was surprisingly strong, dropping all the way down to 2G only twice to our knowledge. But if that 15Mbps / 1.7Mbps magic did happen, it was totally on the outskirts of the town. Within Manhattan’s crush of folk and buildings, download speeds hovered within the 6Mbps to 8Mbps range, only occasionally topping out at 10Mbps down — nothing to sneer at, but certainly nothing to applaud either.
0 8 In case you absolutely insist on using your handset to make (gasp!) phone calls, get set to dig that earpiece and the rims of the screen deep into the side of your head. Regardless of the quantity cranked as much as the max, we had a tough time hearing our callers, who sounded distant and muffled. At the upside, loudspeaker performance is very robust, and may aid you move freely around while carrying on that gossip fest. Reception, too, was relatively strong and our voices stumbled on crisp and clear at the other end.
Software
1 9 Obviously, that’s the Android show — 0 2.3.4 0 , to be exact — but you would not know if from the 1 Sense 3.0 1 smothering at play. Apparently as though HTC did not 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 corporate had to reserve the Sense 3.5 fuel for its gimmicky stab at mobile fashion, a.k.a. the Rhyme. Whatever, the Amaze 4G’s 1GB of RAM and dual-core 1.5GHz 2 Snapdragon S3 CPU 2 handily beat out to any extent further OEM embellishments or flashy plum-colored finishes.
We need 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 with out hiccups. Websites at 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 slowed down with an array of carrier-installed bloatware. For the Amaze 4G, however, the pre-loaded shenanigans don’t quite incite frustration the way 3 Verizon’s 3 crapware-heavy devices normally would. Here, the operator-inserted apps like 411 & More, Adobe Reader, Lookout Security, More for Me, Polaris Office and 4 Qik Video Chat 4 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 5 Samsung Galaxy S 4G 5 , and gets a real jump start from Magenta’s new wireless threads. A live MSNBC program played back almost instantly, but 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
2 
3 
4 
5 
6 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 2 myTouch 4G Slide 2 , 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 would like. 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 mixture 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.
7 
8 
9 
0 
1 
2 
3 
4 
5 
6 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 at 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
7 5 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, however the name of this industry game is wireless, and 6 T-Mo’s Galaxy S II’s 6 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 within the process. On the end of the day, the acquisition 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 also you are aware of it.
White House gets behind online ‘bill of rights,’ companies to adopt ‘do not track’
Samsung Rugby Smart officially coming to AT&T March 4 for $100
