HTC Thunderbolt Cell Phone Review

HTC Sense

The Android 2.21 operating system on this phone is augmented with an overlay provided by HTC. Although most of the time we prefer the vanilla Android experience, this overlay, called HTC Sense, offers some useful software enhancements.

This includes a very good copy and paste function, a good task manager, and email search capabilities. The Sense overlay also has an excellent keyboard layout and many useful HTC widgets. The Sense interface also has plenty of social networking apps and customizations that work with Facebook, Twitter, and others.

The thing that we like most about the HTC Sense overlay is the HTC Music player, which is a cut above the stock Android player and gives you a much more iTunes-like music experience. The Thunderbolt also has an FM Radio with one of the best interfaces that we’ve seen for the radio. You can create presets with station names and pretty much use this as you would a regular radio. Like most cell phone FM Radios, you have to play the radio though a pair of wired headphones since the cable acts as the antenna. With the usefulness of the kickstand to listen to music, we found ourselves wishing that we could play the radio through the phone’s speakers.