HTC Inspire 4G Cell Phone Review

Hardware and Navigation

As shown in Figure 8 the main navigation for the phone consists of four lighted icons on the black strip at the bottom of the touch screen. They are (from left to right), Home, Menu, Back and Search.

Figure 8: The screen and navigation

Pressing the Menu icon brings up six choices that change depending on which screen you are on. The Menu choices for the Internet option are shown in Figure 9. They include Back, Forward, Add bookmark, Bookmarks, and Windows. The last icon is marked “More” and will obviously give you more options.

Figure 9: The browser menu options

The Inspire’s 4.3” screen is a WVGA LCD screen which HTC calls a Super LCD. Although this screen wa
s developed to compete with Apple’s Retina display and Samsung’s Super, we found that it did not live up to those standards. However, the screen itself was crisp, clear, bright, and gave a good color representation. It was viewable in bright sunlight and we found it extremely usable. As a capacitive touch screen, it was nicely responsive. Although some smart phones with dual processors are starting to appear, the Inspire’s 1 GHz Snapdragon processor with 768 MB RAM provided speedy responses no matter what chore it was presented with.

As shown in Figure 10, the top of the Inspire has only one silver button – the Power button. On the right side is a single toggle control for the volume, shown in Figure 11.

Figure 10: The top of the Inspire

Figure 11: The side of the Inspire

The bottom of the Inspire, shown in Figure 12, has a USB connector in the middle, flanked by a 3.5 mm standard headset jack and a small microphone hole.

Figure 12: The bottom of the Inspire