Here’s my review of the HTC Amaze 4G. Like the Samsung Galaxy S II X, it supports all North American HSPA frequencies. If you unlock the Amaze it will work on any North American carrier that supports HSPA. In Canada, that’s pretty much all carriers not named Public mobile.Besides the impressive HSPA support, it has a 4.3” 960x540 qHD display, dual core 1.5Ghz processor, NFC, 16GB of storage of which 9.75GB is available, a micro SDHC card slot, an 8MP rear facing camera that can record 1080p video, a 2MP front facing camera that can record 720p video, Bluetooth 3.0 and WiFi direct.
While I don’t always love HTC phones, one thing I really respect about them is that out of all the major Android manufacturers they try their hardest to make their phones look unique. Unique design is one of the hallmarks of a leader.
At a glance the front is a bit bland but there’s actually a lot to set it apart from the competition. Notice the aluminum edging and raised display. The earpiece is similar to the one you find on the MyTouch 4G/Panache.
The back is similar to the Sensation, in that the entire back along with part of the edges are a single piece. The back cover also has numerous electrical connectors because the antennas are built into it. From a design perspective I can see how the back has been evolved from the Nexus One and the Status.
Parts of the Amaze’s back and edges are made from aluminium. It’s very tactile - sort of like the back of an iPad or the original iPhone. The parts that aren’t aluminum are covered with rubberized paint.
Apple iPhone 4s, Nokia N9, Motorola RAZR, HTC Raider, HTC Amaze 4G, LG Optimus LTE, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Samsung Galaxy S II LTE
Another thing I love about the Amaze is that it’s actually kind of thick (130mm x 65.6mm x 11.8mm) and heavier than average (171g). This is desirable because it makes it much easier to hold. It definitely makes the phone feel like a power user’s phone, rather than a dainty little toy.
So far, a lot of what I like about the Amaze is stuff that won’t show up on a spec sheet. That’s one thing that really separates HTC from the competition. The intangibles.I’m pretty sure the Amaze’s display is an STN LCD. Compared to the HTC Raider’s display, straight on the Amaze’s display is brighter but it has noticeably worse viewing angles. The blacks tend to not be as dark. I also noticed that on a dark screen some light from the menu buttons leaks onto the bottom of the screen. The display also appears to have a pretty slow refresh rate. When I ran the Antutu benchmark, there was a graphics test with a bunch of Android mascots bouncing around. The mascots on the Amaze had very noticeable trails on them. Check the video out to see what I mean.
The Galaxy Nexus has a super AMOLED HD display which has virtually no ghosting. The LG Optimus LTE has an IPS display which has minimal ghosting. I think the Raider’s display is also IPS, though it has a little bit of ghosting. The Amaze has a ton of ghosting. If you play a lot of racing games this may bother you. The display works okay in direct sunlight.
It’s kind of interesting since other than size, I figured the Raider’s and Amaze’s displays would be pretty similar looking. In fact, the Amaze’s display reminds me of a prepaid phone’s display on steroids.
I was very happy that the camera is the same one you get with the HTC Raider. Like the Raider you get a f/2.2 lens. That refers to how much light the lens lets in; f/2.2 is pretty fast for a phone camera. The Raider also has a field of view equivalent to 28mm on a 35mm camera. Also not a bad spec for a phone camera. This has a few benefits: first off since it’s wider you don’t have to stand as far back from your subject. It also means that all else being equal, your photos won’t be as susceptible to camera shake. Since the Amaze lacks an optical zoom 28mm is a good compromise between ‘too zoomed in’ and ‘not zoomed in enough’. When you get wider than 28mm you start to capture too much background, even if you walk closer. If you get wider, then you lose the flexibility of a wider lens.
Focus speeds are excellent while still managing to be pretty accurate most of the time. The flash does a good job of throttling down when you’re close up. Image quality is also good. Pictures are sharp and colour is accurate. All-in-all the speed coupled with the performance makes it a very good camera in real world situations.
Video recording looks good. I love how the Amaze records video using the entire sensor instead of just the center portion. What this means, is that video isn’t ‘zoomed in’ like it is on the iPhone 4s. You don’t have to stand further back when you switch from photo to video mode. It also means that video will look steadier since camera shake is directly related to how ‘zoomed in’ you are. What I hate about Amaze’s video recording is that it has the worst sounding microphone since well, the HTC Raider which is equally horrendous. Audio sounds robotic and virtually all noise causes the microphone to peak. It’s such a shame that the video camera is ruined by the mic.
On paper the front facing camera has an impressive resolution of 2mp, but in practice I find the iPhone 4s’ VGA camera to be more usable. Video and still photos don’t look that great indoors.
The menus and software are exactly like the HTC Raider’s so I’m going to take most of this portion from my Raider review.
Like all HTC Android phones, the Amaze has HTC Sense which is an overlay that sits on top of the operating system. I found Sense crashed about once a day when I used the Amaze heavily. When it crashes it recovers very quickly. It doesn’t cause the phone to reboot or anything, so the crashes didn’t bother me too much.
First off they’ve customized the lock screen so that it can quickly launch 4 different programs. It’s a great idea. While I miss the ability to mute the phone from the lock screen, the utility of these shortcuts more than makes up for it.
HTC has their own keyboard. Unlike the Raider, typing on the keyboard with 2 thumbs works well because the edges of the Amaze are much beefier. The HTC keyboard also has a trace feature which is similar to SWYPE.HTC has also augmented or replaced many of the stock Android programs. Generally speaking it’s for the better.
HTC’s mail client offers up some features not found on the Stock Android one. It actually replaces the Android mail client but not the Gmail one. You can view your inboxes separately or all together. It can thread your email together, plus it supports copy while you’re viewing an email (you don’t have to hit reply to copy and paste).
I noticed that the browser has 2 extra tricks. It has an option to not view animated gifs - which is nice if you don’t have a really beefy data plan. It also has a built in print feature. I tested it with my HP 6500 A Plus E710n printer which was connected to my network. The printer wasn’t listed on the list of supported printers (it supports the HP 6500 E709n) but I was able to print to it anyways. A small problem was that I told it to just print the 5th page of an article but it printed all pages. It lists a bunch of HP and Canon printers as being compatible. There’s also a postscript feature.
One superfluous program is HTC Likes. Basically it’s an app that links to popular Android apps suggested by other HTC users.
HTC Hub let’s you look for new content to customize the Amaze.
Connected Media allows you to send media from the Raider to DLNA devices on the same WiFi network. Unlike similar programs on other phones this one doesn’t allow you to stream videos from a DLNA device to the Amaze. It’s not a big loss in my opinion since most phones can’t playback a lot of video formats because they don’t have comprehensive codec support.
I’m not a fan of HTC’s gallery program. On the plus side it allows you to view Flickr and Facebook pictures. On the minus side it’s clunky and slow and doesn’t support Picasa.
Other program extras are: Clock, Flashlight, FM Radio, Friend Stream, Mirror, People, Phone, Reader, Stocks, Task Manager, Teeter (a video game), Voice Recorder, Watch and Weather.
There’s built in NFC - Near Field Communication. You can use it to transfer a message or url to another NFC enabled phone by placing them back-to-back.
Here are some numbers comparing the Amaze’s performance with other Android phones. Since I’ve never done this before, I grabbed some phones and ran some benchmarks on them to compare with.
First off is SunSpider. It’s a test that measures browser performance. It actually runs within a browser which makes it cross platform compatible. I threw in a couple of extra devices for comparison. I ran the test a couple of times and am publishing the highest number I got with each test.
You’re probably wondering why the Amaze 4G scores as low as it does. The reason is because HTC has customized the browser so that it immediately hides the notification area after a page has loaded. Since SunSpider repeatedly loads new pages, the notification area is constantly scrolling up and down.
I included some non-Android devices including my desktop computer running Chrome, some iOS devices, a Nokia N9, N8 and a Surround 7. Please note that SunSpider is a webkit test. The HTC Surround 7 is a Windows Phone device that doesn’t come with a webkit.
Check this out. I ran SunSpider on my Samsung Galaxy (the first one). It's an Eclair/Android 1.6 device with a 528Mhz processor. I got a score of 75138.4ms. Android has come a long way.
Linpack is a test that’s used to measure super computer performance. It’s not a very useful test to be honest, but it’s still used because it measures performance in mflops. You can say ‘this phone is as powerful as a supercomputer was x number of years ago’. I’m only comparing the Amaze’s Linpack scores with other Android phones. In this case I’m running the ‘multi-threaded’ option.
One problem I’ve noticed with Linpack is that it gives inconsistent results with certain phones. On the Amaze I only managed to get the score I posted once. Every other time it scored much lower. It’s strange because the LG Optimus LTE scores very consistently.Vellamo is another browser test. It actually includes the SunSpider test along with 10 other tests. It’s an Android app so I’m only including scores from Android devices.
Despite having the same processor the LG Optimus LTE scores slightly higher than the Amaze. It’s also worth pointing out that the Galaxy Nexus could only complete 9 of the 11 tests. The other devices got approximately an extra 70 points on these test. So even if the Galaxy Nexus did complete those tests it would still probably fall shy of the Optimus.
GLBenchmark is a benchmark that is available on both Android and iPhone which makes it useful for comparing across those 2 platforms. I’ve decided to run 2 tests: Egypt Standard and Egypt Offscreen. The Standard tests runs at the same resolution of the display so all else being equal devices with higher resolutions will be at a disadvantage here. The reason why this test is still valid is that you can’t change the resolution of the display. So if game a lot and have 2 phones which are exactly the same except that one has a higher resolution you may opt fo the lower resolution one because it will get higher frame rates. The Offscreen test runs the test at 720p which makes it useful for isolation graphics performance. As it turns out Qualcomm powered phones don’t like the Offscreen test. The Amaze, Raider and Optimus LTE all reboot when I try to run it so I’m only including results from the Standard test.
Not surprisingly, the Optimus LTE and Galaxy Nexus score poorly. The blame goes to their high resolution 720p displays.
Battery performance is an extremely difficult thing to test because there are so many uncontrollable factors which effect battery performance. If you’re in an area with low signal your modem will consume a lot more power. You have to take into account the screen brightness, if you’ve downloaded 100 poorly written widgets that are constantly running. Maybe you received 5000 emails and tweets a day. Eventually I decided to set each phone to flight mode to disable the modem. I’ve also disabled WiFi/BT (some phones allow you to use these in flight mode) along with the GPS. While this does make the battery benchmark some what more abstract since I’m removing some very important factors from my test it does allow to me to get more consistent results. To keep the phone running I downloaded the ‘Battery Drainer’ app from the Android marketplace. When I ran it I left all options except ‘Vibrate’ checked. To track battery usage I used ‘Battery Indicator Pro’ and enabled it’s logging feature. I left the phones running over night and then recorded the start and end times in the morning. When possible I tried to run the test as many times as I could. The results are in minutes so more is better.
So the Amaze 4G has very good browser performance, graphics performance and middle-of-the-road battery life.
RF performance is very similar to the HTC Raider - it’s average. Sound quality is also very similar to the Raider. It’s very clean sounding with a little bit of fuzziness when the signal gets extremely weak.
Nokia N9, Motorola RAZR, HTC Raider, HTC Amaze 4G, LG Optimus LTE, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Samsung Galaxy S II LTE, Apple iPhone 4s
I loved using the Amaze. While the screen is awful in some ways, the only thing that really bothered me were the lousy viewing angles. When I leave it on my desk it is really noticeable. Still, to me it’s not that big a deal - I can live with that. The software is good and the camera is even better. It’s fast, and most importantly I like the design and how substantial it feels. Next to the Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy S II, the Amaze is my favourite Android phone for 2011.
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Originally Posted by howard
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