HTC Titan review

We knew once we first clapped eyes in this hulk of a phone that it’d make a brave purchase. It is not just the 4.7-inch screen that requires a leap of religion, but in addition the Windows Phone operating system, that is presented here in all its Mangofied glory but remains to be a great deal an early adopter’s ecosystem. In fact, whenever you love the Titan’s hardware but prefer a more established OS, you could always look forward to the Sensation XL , that’s essentially a similar phone running good ol’ Android and which must have an analogous £480 ($750 converted) SIM-free price ticket. The question is, do you’ve the center to make that jump to something more exotic? Yes? Maybe? Then read on before you start your run-up.

Hardware

The Titan’s build quality still gives us a buzz each time we pick it up. If dwarves carved a smartphone out of an alien meteorite, it is precisely how it’d look. Detach the aluminum unibody case and it is all black and gold underneath, with exquisite molding and excellent rigidity. How far things have come for the reason that plasticky flab of the 0 TyTN 0 and 1 TyTN II 1 , when HTC smartphones couldn’t even spell out their mythical names while keeping a straight face.

The 131.5mm (5.2-inch) height and 70.7mm (2.8-inch) width may appear intimidating, but only until you know that the Titan is a trifling 5mm (0.2 inches) taller and wider than a well-recognized 4.3-inch smartphone just like the Sensation XE. Moreover, the 160g (5.6-ounce) weight is purely nine grams (0.35 ounces) heavier than the XE — a barely noticeable difference. What’s more, the Titan’s slim 9.9mm (0.39-inch) waistline puts the XE’s 11.6mm girth to shame and goes some distance in canceling out its other excesses.

So, is the Titan’s size really that gigantic of a problem in everyday use? Only occasionally. We found that it was generally easy to forget when tucked away inside the pocket of our straight-cut jeans. However, don’t assume putting your car key or bank card wallet or the rest in there — the inability of maneuverability increases the probabilities of a scratch, and actually we managed to get an uncongenial nick after only a few days by making precisely this error, despite the Gorilla Glass screen. Apart from all this, as you will see below, we believe the Titan’s mass is justified by the truth that it has major pay-offs in the case of how enjoyable it’s to make use of for everyday tasks.

For the sake of thoroughness, we’d better mention a minor issue with the build quality, which shouldn’t put you off unless you’re really fussy: the way in which the core of the telephone slots into the aluminum case just isn’t quite perfect — in the event you squeeze the telephone through its z-axis you get a slight movement. However, this flex is silent in place of creaky and hence easily forgotten.

The headset that includes the Titan is predictably cheap and awful. HTC will be banging the 2 Beats Audio drum 2 with its latest Android handsets, but you will see no Dre-approved headphones here. Nevertheless, for the sake of experimentation, we switched out the traditional headset for the YourBeats headphones that came with our Sensation XE and everything sounded great, especially once we turned at the ‘Loudness’ EQ in Windows Phone settings. Moral of the tale? Don’t fret in regards to the loss of Beats Audio branding in this phone, just buy yourself some decent headphones in case you haven’t already. Artists like Kanye and Jennifer don’t bust a gut for a pittance simply so you possibly can destroy their art without-of-the-box cans.

Now for the downer: the Titan’s musical abilities are severely hobbled by its loss of storage. It was disconcerting to transfer across a small sample of albums to check the music playback and discover that we might already used up 1.5GB out of our 12.6GB allowance. Wasn’t cheap and plentiful storage meant to be one of many main benefits of avoiding an iPhone? In fact, we’ll in the future store everything within the cloud, but that day is not very yet here. Ask a ticket inspector at the London Underground whether we’ll ever be capable to stream Spotify tracks within the tunnels and she’ll probably fine you for being obnoxious. Dependent on your listening habits and music collection, the shortage of a microSD card could well be a deal-breaker.

Performance and battery life

The Titan’s 1.5GHz second-gen Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 may only be single-core, however it destroys HTC’s older WP handsets just like the 1GHz 3 Trophy 3 . WP Bench gave our Titan an overall score of around 96, versus just 50 for the Trophy. This superiority extended through every thing of the system: the CPU completed tasks in half the time, data transfer rates were almost doubled and the GPU also delivered double the frame rates.

Is it an issue that this phone is barely single-core? Nope, not unless you’re really going to overlook 1080p video recording. For many other tasks, the processor will serve you simply fine: sites like Engadget and the BBC rendered quickly, apps opened and closed directly, and the voice recognition feature of Bing processed our mutterings efficiently. Nope, if you are held back by the behavior of the Titan it won’t be as a result of hardware quite a bit as to Mango. The young OS still doesn’t handle multitasking rather well, and the browser often shows glitches within the way it lays out an internet site: the key BBC News page often nudged the lead picture out of its column, as an example, that’s something we have not witnessed on Android, iOS or perhaps BlackBerry devices. Incidentally, the Sun Spider browsing benchmark gave the Titan a poor 6,500ms result, but we are not sure what to make of it because there isn’t much to check it against: the newest Sensation XE scored around 3,500ms, however the WP7 HTC Trophy scored took an improbable 45,000ms — so we aren’t sure this benchmark can handle cross-platform comparisons.

One area that definitely benefits from having only a single core is battery life, and we haven’t any complaints concerning the Titan on this regard — despite the additional demands inevitably be made by the bigger display. We utilize it all day and the 1,600mAh battery still had plenty left in reserve by the point we hit the sack. Of course , at some point we forgot to plug it in for an overnight charge so we left the home with battery already at 60 percent and yet we still made it to bedtime with room to spare. We’d stop just shy of saying two full days of low-to-moderate use — it’s more like an afternoon and a half. For the record, the WP Bench battery test gave us three hours at medium brightness, which was virtually just like the HTC Trophy, with its meager three-inch screen and 1GHz processor.

Network performance seemed average at the UK’s Three network, with 3G reception and knowledge speeds matching other handsets we carried around. Calls sounded crisp, although we won’t say we noticed much of an impact from the Titan’s secondary noise-cancelling mic. Usually our surroundings was quiet enough for it to not be necessary, or so loud that any beneficial effect was drowned out — but we will be able to believe it’d make a difference in certain situations.

Display

The Titan’s WVGA resolution equates to simply 198 pixels per inch. In spite of how much HTC tries to gloss over this issue, the truth remains that those pixels are visible on text and vector graphics (although not a lot on photos), they usually do nothing so as to add to the otherwise delightful aesthetics of the OS. Zooming out on a webpage quickly causes the text to become blocky and unreadable, which partially cancels out the gigantic panel’s ability to display vast swathes of a page in a single go.

Arguably, this is not HTC’s fault, because 480×800 happens to be the resolution currently required by Windows Phone. Microsoft clearly just desires to keep things simple at this stage, and in spite of everything it’s gazing 4 Windows 8 4 for the tablet form factor, so it’s made no room for varied screen sizes with WP 7.5. But does the top user really care who’s fault it’s? We’ve come to expect effective resolutions more than 300dpi, that is the purpose at which we will be able to truly forget that we’re even gazing pixels, and the Titan falls well wanting that.

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Nonetheless, resolution isn’t everything and the Titan’s Super LCD display actually has quite a bit going for it. For a start, it is a higher quality panel than the single utilized in some HTC handsets just like the Sensation and Trophy. Whereas those handsets would look slightly washed out when viewed at anything than head-on, the Titan’s brightness and color rendition remains consistent even from extreme angles. At the optimum angle, the blacks look deep, the colors look rich and saturated in keeping with the WP style, and photos and video come across absolutely fine. It’s not Super AMOLED, but should satisfy the majority of users.

Camera

Just like the display, the camera unit in the Titan is also significantly better than some of HTC’s other recent models. Everything about it is faster, smoother and more intelligent in how it deals with automatic focus and exposure. The dedicated camera button is tactile and responsive, the software gets into gear fast, and settings are readily accessed and altered. We love the fact that you can actually hear the whir of the autofocus shifting the lens inside the camera — it tells us it’s a big unit.

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The f/2.2 maximum aperture really does make a difference with low-light performance. We took a shot in our kitchen, which was poorly lit with a single main energy-saving bulb, and we were blown away by the quality of the skin tones and the lack of noise. Overall image quality was also aided by sensible jpeg compression, which generally reduced our eight megapixel images to somewhere between 1MB and 1.3MB. We’d still rather have control over the level of compression, rather than HTC deciding for us, but at least this camera doesn’t ruin images by pulping them into a 600KB mess — like the 1 Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo 1 does, for example.

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The same applies to the 720p video: a one-minute clip was generally compressed to around 80MB, which preserves just about enough information to make it watchable on a TV or desktop, even during fast pans and wobbles. In comparison, a one-minute 1080p clip from the HTC Sensation XE is compressed down to a mere 65MB, which looks terrible and goes to show just how irrelevant video resolution is unless you get a higher bit-rate to match. Another key upside to the Titan’s video recording: it adjusts auto-exposure smoothly and relatively slowly, as opposed to the sudden switches we saw in the Sensation XE, which means videos are less jarring when the light changes.

The camera software lives up to the promise of the hardware, with a whole range of clever touches from Microsoft and HTC. For example, when you’re scrolling through photos and you reach the end of the camera roll, it automatically switches to camera mode, as if to say “go on, take another one.” Plus, you’ll find HTC’s Panorama feature in there, which is incredibly fun and easy to use and gets some decent results too. The only problem we had was that sometimes OS X failed to recognize the proper orientation of shots we’d taken at the Titan — but then it’s perhaps too much to expect complete harmony between rivals. (Incidentally, the Windows Phone Connector icon on the OS X dock is indisputably ugly.)

Unlike HTC’s pre-Mango Windows Phone handsets, the Titan also has a front-facing camera. It has typically poor resolution and dynamic range but its good to have it — even though there’s still none of our 2 promised Skype action 2 . Sure, there’s 3 Tango 3 , but we had no one to test it with and frankly, who’s got the energy? We’d rather just wait for the app that everyone already uses.

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Software

The Windows Phone OS is an amazing experience at this screen size. Sure, we don’t have the resolution needed to cram loads of shrunken live tiles into our home screen, but that’s not what this OS is about. The overall aesthetic is one of minimalism, boldness and space to breathe, and spreading those tiles and apps over 4.7 inches takes this to another level. We have never felt so calm and relaxed when using a smartphone. Whether we’re searching for media, loading up Bing to recognize a music track, or bashing out an email, the experience is serene.

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The huge keyboard might look like a series of simple rectangular blocks, each with a single character within the middle, but it’s actually triumph of design — and just about the exact opposite of the busy mess that handles text entry in HTC’s proprietary Sense UI on its Android devices. As soon as you start entering your login details to connect up to your email accounts, Twitter and so on, you notice something totally unexpected: you’re no longer hitting backspace all the time. The button press somehow always ends up being precisely the button you want to press, and it’s a breath of fresh air. We’re not going to start writing full-length feature articles on the Titan, but in an emergency we probably could.

Now, there are many times when the serenity breaks down due to bugs in the software. We’ve been over the key weaknesses of Mango in our 4 full review 4 of the updated OS, but we can’t resist mentioning a few more minor issues here too. You’ll be surfing the net and suddenly realize that the ‘back’ button takes you back to the home screen rather than to the previous page. You’ll be typing in a ‘Name’ field to register an email account when you realize that it doesn’t capitalize the first letter, and the ‘Email’ field doesn’t present you with the @ symbol. You’ll try to connect to the Marketplace only to get some random error number, even though you have a strong WiFi signal and you connected fine just a few minutes ago. When you finally gain access, you’ll discover that the Search button stops being context sensitive and instead of searching the Marketplace it annoyingly transports you to Bing. You’ll finally get over the general dearth of good apps and decide to purchase one, only to discover that you can’t add credit card details because a few decades ago you registered your first ever Hotmail account in a different country. (If this happens to you, you’ll have to reset the phone and create a fresh Windows Live account with your current home country, and then add your main account back in as a secondary account — even though this will lose your Xbox Live avatar and achievements.) It’s obvious that this OS is still having teething problems, and they can be infuriating — but they could all be rectified in future updates, and we’re optimistic that they will.

We don’t want to go out on a sour note, because it just wouldn’t be fair. The fact is, we’ve used Windows Phone on a range of handsets by now, but the big and bold Titan is the first that’s really allowed to us to tune in to what the software designers at Microsoft have been trying to achieve, and how they want to differentiate themselves from the others. Aesthetically speaking, we sometimes think of Android as a house that you build yourself: the base materials are relatively neutral, but there’s plenty of scope for personalization in the way you fit them together. Meanwhile, iOS is like somebody else’s house, built by a super-creative person with strong opinions who really doesn’t care if you love it or hate it. So what about Windows Phone? Well, on the Titan’s glorious display, it too feels like a house built by somebody else — but this time it’s the handiwork of someone who’s primary goal is to make you happy. You’ll notice neat little features that you might have missed on a smaller screen, like that indisputable fact that you may read all your notes on the Notes app’s corkboard without squinting or having to open them up, because the text is just about large enough even despite the poor resolution. Animated tiles remain animated even while you’re scrolling down the home screen — subtle but delicious.

Wrap-up

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Of all the different handsets that pass through our hands, many are good, some are bad, but there’s only very few that surprise us. The Titan can certainly count itself among that standout minority, thanks to the way its oversized display, superb camera and overall build quality jibe so well with the generally slick and wonderful Windows Phone OS.

Not all the surprises are positive, though. The WVGA panel delivers poor pixel density, the 16GB of flash storage is inexplicably non-expandable and the shortcoming of apps and occasional bugginess of the OS may all be bothersome, depending on your priorities and temperament. Perhaps there’s an argument for waiting to see what Nokia has 5 in store 5 for us — those guys also know a 6 thing or two 6 about design, and Nokia World is just ten days away. However, in case you’re able to make room on your pocket for a phone this big, and room on your heart for a fledgling OS that occasionally requires some patience, then you definitely will love the Titan.

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This post is tagged: early adopter, inch waistline, mythical names, noticeable difference, straight face