HTC Inspire 4G Cell Phone Review

Setting up the Inspire

Normally, getting a cell phone’s hardware setup is a no-brainer, but this is not so with the Inspire. This phone has two doors, one on the side of the back for the battery and one at the bottom of the back for the Micro SD chip and the SIM card. Figure 5 shows the back of the Inspire with both doors removed.

Figure 5: The battery and card openings

Inserting an SD card and the SIM card is easy. The bottom easily slides on and off easily. Unfortunately, the same is not true for the battery door. We needed a small screwdriver to pry it open. After inserting the battery, the door was almost impossible to get closed properly. It took a good 10 minutes of fumbling to get it situated properly. The door itself is rather thin and we were in constant fear of breaking it. The only good thing that we can say about this situation is that luckily, inserting the battery is something that you will only have to do once or twice during the life of the phone. If you purchase this phone, we suggest avoiding this frustration by having the battery inserted for you at the store.

Once you have the hardware setup, getting the rest of the phone ready for use is a cakewalk. It runs Android 2.2, so it is easy to set up email, to sync your contacts, and to personalize the phone to suit your needs.

Figure 6 shows the bottom of the home screen, which includes three icons. The arrow on the left brings up the full App screen. The larger one in the middle is used to access the Phone functions, and the one on the right is used to personalize the phone. Although some have indicated that they thought this icon looks like a football helmet and a stick, we believe that it is supposed to be an artist’s pallet and a paint brush.

Figure 6: The Home screen buttons

Tap on this icon and you are presented with options for personalizing your Inspire. This was actually one of the fun parts of setting up this phone. Where the vanilla Android operating system has four or five personalization options, the HTC’s Sense user interface has many more options. You can change the skins, wallpaper, sounds and other options, but you can also choose from a wide range of specially designed HTC widgets and Apps. There are also HTC Scenes which creates customized home pages. The phone includes six scenes which are nicely shown on the phone in an iTunes-like display, as shown in Figure 7. If you sign up for a free HTC account, you can easily download additional scenes.

Figure 7: Choice of scenes

You can also use the HTC Sense and HTC’s Friend Stream app for your social networking. It will allow you to check your status, email, or tweets. Other Apps from the Android Marketplace are now plentiful.