HTC Amaze 4G Android Phone, Black (T-Mobile) - Get the Best Deals of Cell Phones with and without Plans

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E. Brown “EB” (The Wilds) –

  

  

Most beautiful, highest-quality hardware on the market. You can tell HTC takes a lot of pride in this phone. It’s stylized down to the ‘Sense’ user interface, surely the most impressive UI on any device.

Aside from obvious aesthetic appeal, ‘Amaze’ is a significant upgrade from the Sensation. HTC addressed most of my gripes w/ Sensation by giving Amaze a hardware camera button, more onboard memory, more RAM & more ghz. Multi-tasking is effortless. Amaze can run a number of memory-intensive programs without as much as hiccup, and does so with style. To put it bluntly, Amaze throws down the gauntlet.

The device also runs on T-Mobile’s 42mbps 4G network, provided you live in one of T-Mobile’s 4G regions. I do, and the service is no where near as consistent as their 3G service. The highest download speeds I’ve reached on SpeedTest is 4mbps download. Theoretically, it can reach much faster speeds & some tests on YouTube have reflected as much as 12. I’m less impressed w/T-Mobile’s 4G, but that’s no fault of HTC’s.

As with any device, and impressive as the Amaze is, it comes w/a few disappointments. The ability to shoot in 1080p is a big deal and, as w/the Sensation, the audio recording quality is unacceptable. You can hear a sample by searching YouTube for (HTC Amaze 4G 1080p Camera Test| Booredatwork) or (HTC Amaze 4G 1080p HD Video Sample). HD looks, LD sound. The end result of the video is more important than style & process. So, if you’re looking to take advantage of one of this phone’s major selling points – recording in HD – this might not be the best device.

Secondly, although the screen in quarter HD, it’s not quite as vivid, bright or impressive as some of it’s competition.

iPHONE 4S (Requisite comparison)
The iPhone isn’t really in the same league. It’s an incredible device, but it’s just an app tray – squares on a screen. As a result, iPhones are generally far more consistent. They are also less glitch/bug prone than Androids. If you’re new to Android, this will take getting used to. The Apple is a bit smoother because it doesn’t have to do much more than launch apps. We don’t expect a multi-functional SUV to be as smooth as a basic car. iPhones have no widgets, no multiple homescreens, (still) no full flash browser, no customization, no memory card, no removable battery, no keyboard options, no homescreen replacements, smaller screen… You get the idea. iPhones don’t do much more than host/open apps. iPhones are well-designed, user-friendly & have wonderful cameras, but they’re tract phones. Pretty basic & that has broad appeal. If you think you need Siri, Android already has Vlingo & Iris. If you’re a busy career and/or family person, or not too good w/ technology, however, the iPhone is definitely better for you because it takes less time to configure, learn & operate. Not a matter of better/worse. There’s something for everyone.

As HTC comes out with a new flagship seemingly every month, however, this phone will not hold its value as well as an iPhone, which is released only once a year. Like Samsung, HTC is known for creating buyers’ remorse by coming out with something better only weeks after a flagship release. Be prepared for that.

ANDROID & de Führer Google
There is *a lot* to configure & customize on a high-end Android. Busy, older folks will either be overwhelmed, or proceed w/o a clue as to what this device can actually do, in spite of having paid for it. Secondly, Androids are *very* Googley. When you sync your Google account, be prepared for folks you’ve emailed once, 8 years ago, to show up on your phone. If you have a Picasa album, all of your photos will be automatically downloaded to your phone. If you erase them, all of the images will be deleted from Picasa online as well. Even storing phone numbers poses you with questions of storing to phone, SIM card… or Google. The same with calendar entries. Google is very invasive. Android has a lot of options, choices, customization, questions, combinations, permutations… It’s like asking for water & the waiter spends 5 minutes asking – sparkling or flat?… chilled or room temp?…. w/ or w/o ice?… large or small?… green glass or blue?… with straw or w/o?… It’s overkill & obtrusive. Android won’t win any prizes for being user-friendly, but it will for being thoroughly customizable.

GALAXY S II
Amaze’s only real competition on T-Mobile, at the moment, is Samsung’s Galaxy S II. The GS2 has a larger screen which, depending on your tastes & size, may or may not be a plus. The GS2 can be used on AT&T’s network, should you hold onto the device long enough to weather the possible merger. The GS2 has the most beautiful screen colors & saturation, but Amaze has slightly higher pixel density. They’re both very competitive.

In the end, this is a dual core, HD device. If you provide HD imaging, you should…

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My original review was for the white version of the Amaze, but I realized that won’t help much when most searches on Amazon hit the black version.

HTC Amaze 4G Android Phone, White (T-Mobile)

Let me preface this review with my past phones. I’ve been thru 7 BlackBerrys in the last 6 years with Verizon. I recently switched from Verizon to T-Mobile as both my wife and I were constantly dropping calls in our home. I won’t ever look back.

This phone is smoking fast. The UI is snappy and I’ve experienced 0 lag switching between programs even while streaming a movie over the 4G connection. I’ve downloaded and installed 10+ apps in the past few days including Netflix, a yahoo fantasy football app, a few games, a few social networking and chat apps as well as 3 different game emulators. I had 0 issues with installing any of the apps on this phone. When the 4G connection is active, webpages actually load faster than on my laptop over a local WiFi-n connection.

I’ve read reviews of HTC phones having issues with the quality of the speaker. I was able to use this phone in the middle of a very noisy state fair, surrounded by screaming kids, rides and other distractions without having to plug my other ear to hear the caller’s voice. My friend later told me that he had no issues hearing me either. I find that the speakerphone works well, but the sound quality is better when I flip the phone over. My wife says I sound like I’m on a land line when I use the speakerphone, and the sound coming thru the speaker was not tin-cannish.

The screen is amazing. There’s a handy app built into the phone that tells you what is draining the battery the most. After quickly draining the phone (4 hours) a few times, I discovered this app and saw that the screen was eating up 95% of the battery life. Changing the brightness of the screen to the lowest setting greatly increased the battery life, but it still looks great when dimmed.

The camera is snappy. I can take pictures as quickly as I can hit the button and they look amazing. The auto-focus can sometimes be finicky in low-light situations, but overall I have to say this could easily replace my $250 Sony point-and-shoot camera, and I haven’t even begun to touch all of the camera modes on the Amaze. The video is fantastic as well. When viewing the 1080p playback on my tv, my family was blown away with the quality of the picture. The sound capture on the video could be a little better, but that is a minor deterrent.

If there is one major drawback to the Amaze, it would have to be POP3 email issues. I found the POP3 email delivery system / syncing adequate at best when using Hotmail and a school email account. Gmail syncs well, so if that is your only email address, you should be fine with this phone. POP3 emails seem to disappear and reappear whenever they want, deleted emails sometimes don’t stay deleted and I occasionally receive notifications for emails I’ve already read. I’m a systems analyst and even when working with T-Mobile support and trying to tweak every syncing setting there is, we could not get this to perform as well as a BlackBerry with regards to email delivery. That being said, the official Hotmail app from Microsoft works without a hitch on this phone. I installed that and it has been smooth sailing ever since.

Battery life is not awesome on this phone if you use it for anything besides email / calls / texting. However, I didn’t expect it to be with the qHD Super LCD display and when running everything else that I do (Facebook, games, streaming video, messaging apps, taking pictures/video). I’m getting between 5-6 hours of battery life before I hit the 15% mark. Installing JuiceDefender from the Android Market helped the life, as well as disabling Bluetooth and the GPS connection.

Few other quick points:
- The FM radio and MP3s sound wonderful over headphones / earbuds. No distortion.

- The GPS navigation works better than my 2 year old Garmin, and syncing Google map directions with calendar entries is easy and helpful.

- This phone is slightly weightier than the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S2, but for me this is a bonus. I prefer using a phone that doesn’t feel like it could snap in half if I sit on it by accident.

If you are up in the air between the HTC Amaze and the Samsung Galaxy S2, you really can’t go wrong either way. Go into a T-Mobile store and play with each as I did to see what your personal preference is. Enjoy!

Note: As another reviewer has stated, the sound quality of recorded video is not the great. Since I’ve had more time to play with mine I’ve noticed that in some instances it is very hard to hear people speaking unless they are looking directly at the phone.

I’ve also seen a remarkable jump in battery life since updating…

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Extremely stylish and well built, probably one of the best looking phone I’ve ever had. Let me first stary by saying that it DOES have 16GB of memory. The user who complained about 16GB with 1 star himself has admitted it and I hope people do not get misguided by that inaccurate review. The phone has 9.75GB for pictures, movies, music and 2.2GB for apps and app data. 9.75 + 2.2 = ~12GB. The remaining goes for OS (1 GB), installed apps and space to execute apps (2 GB) and general cache (remaining), –>[...]

PROs:
* Amazing build quality and most beautiful phone ever, great finish and feels really good in hands.
* Most advanced camera ever with features that would put a point-and-shoot digital camera to shame. The video quality is amazing and pretty smooth.
* Extremely fast, there’s virtually no lag at all in running heavist of applications/games.
* Very vibrant, bright and highly responsive.
* Net speed is awesome with new HSPA+42 4G on T-Mobile.
* Pretty generous battery with 1760 mA

CONs:
* The phone is ever so slightly heavier than other phones but to me, the premium material used maks up for it.
* The phone heats up slighly (no where near as bad as Motorola Atrix) with heavy use.
* Battery drainage is significant (although that’s same with pretty much every single android smartphone out there).
* Camera is great but seems to take a little bit washed out pics in low light conditions which is not bad for a phone but with all the HYPE around it, I felt I’ll throw my point-and-shoot away.

Overall, with $199 with 2 yr contract and no tax or s/h (from amazon or from wirefly); this is not a bad deal at all. I would say this phone definitely beats out Samsung Galaxy SII with it’s style and features (and I found this much more pocket-friendly than Samsung Galaxy SII).

Bottom Line: Amaze is amazing. I’d say go for it, you will not regret!!

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