HTC Thunderbolt Review: The First Verizon 4G LTE Smartphone
by Brian Klug on April 27, 2011 12:12 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HTC
- Verizon
- LTE
- 4G
- Android
- HTC Thunderbolt
- Mobile
- MDM9600
- MSM8655
Camera
HTC’s camera designs seem to have notably improved this refresh. The newer phones I’ve seen have both better codecs for video and substantially improved image quality for stills. I have to give credit where it’s due, the new cameras are definitely better. The Thunderbolt continues the 4.3-inch HTC form factor tradition and carries an 8 megapixel rear facing camera with dual LED flash illumination. Images shot on the rear camera are 3264 x 2488 in size, and are compressed to just under 2 MB in size. There’s still no way to change how much compression is actually applied to images, and the majority of HTC’s camera interface is familiar territory. By default, shots are widescreen aspect ratio, but a quick toggle to 4:3 gives you the full 8 MP sensor size.
Switching cameras is done through menu. The Thunderbolt’s front facing camera is 1.3 MP and shoots 1280 x 960 or VGA size images. By default, the Thunderbolt horizontally flips images, thankfully you can toggle image flipping through the menu very easily. The front facing camera isn’t super impressive, and has a slightly yellowish cast in our lightbox.
Per usual, we took shots with the phone under test inside our lightbox target with the lights on and lights off, and in our usual outside test locations and added the images to our smartphone bench gallery for comparison.
I've also included a gallery with miscellaneous shots taken with the Thunderbolt that also illustrate camera performance outside of our normal testing locations.
Probably the easiest way to see the generational improvement in image quality that HTC has made is by comparing the HTC EVO’s lights on image with the HTC Thunderbolt’s. Likewise, the Inspire 4G/Desire HD shows notable improvement over the previous generation of HTC smartphones packing 8 megapixel cameras.
Left: HTC EVO 4G, Right: HTC Thunderbolt (click to expand)
When it comes to stills, the Thunderbolt finally does away with HTC’s previous tendency to oversaturate. More notably, the Thunderbolt has much much more fine spatial detail (higher spatial frequencies) visible than the EVO. Comparing things like the edge of the books, lines in the camera focus barrel, and detail in the pen shows a huge improvement. Subjectively, the new cameras also seem to have much less distortion at extreme field angles. The generational improvement in cameras is a notable difference, and HTC deserves credit for fixing things here. It still isn’t entirely perfect, for example, outdoors there still seems to be notable amounts of glare at the wrong angles. In the dark, there’s also ghosting from some extra reflections that clearly happens as well.
In the dark, the Thunderbolt shows the same increase in fine spatial detail as with the lights on. White balance with the flash is a bit cooler than it should be, however. The Thunderbolt properly illuminates the scene while doing autofocus and exposure, before taking the photo.
Outside at our test location, again sharpness is dramatically improved without being artificial. I truly feel like the 8 MP camera system that HTC has is much better than the previous generation of 8 MP HTC camera systems.
Video
When it comes to video, again codec selection and optical system has changed for the better and resulted in an all around improvement. Video quality is much improved. I keep using the EVO as a comparison, but here again the improvement is notable.
The Thunderbolt shoots 720P 30 FPS video in H.264 baseline with 1 reference frame at 8 megabits/sec, instead of 8 megabits/s MPEG-4 simple. Audio is now single channel AAC at 64 Kbps, which is a dramatic improvement over AMR-NB. Oddly enough there seems to be some noise cancellation oddness going on and audio still doesn’t sound good on the Thunderbolt, though I’m told this is something that’s also going to be soon remedied with a software patch. Both the front facing and rear facing camera samples are zipped up and available for download in their original form here.
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Omid.M - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
A friend "in the know" (yeah, yeah) said HTC accidentally shipped it with S-ON for that portion of the internal storage, and that HTC had (has?) issued an OTA that will allow the full 8GB to be useable. Not sure if it's been pushed, as I don't have the Thunderbolt.Brian,
1) How quickly did GPS lock?
I feel like some of these issues that users experience with other phones---e.g. GPS lock on SGS phones---should be considered for reviews of future phones. I know it can be a hassle, but it should highlight that some issues are manufacturer specific. Hopefully, it lights a fire under mfrs. to correct these problems, if they see that other phones don't suffer from the same.
2) Also, maybe I missed it, but has AnandTech established a Light-Moderate-Heavy usage pattern for phones to test battery life?
i.e., Moderate = 45 min of Bluetooth, 20 min GPS navigation, 10 phone calls, 50 sms, 20 still pictures, etc ?
I saw you set display brightness to 50% and loaded web pages, but I'm talking about how a user would normally use the phone: calls, sms, pictures, BT, GPS...etc.
I am positive you guys have done it before.
Really amazing review. Have been spreading the word, hoping more people flock to AnandTech. You guys deserve the recognition!
@moids
Brian Klug - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Moids,I haven't gotten any OTA updates, but that's entirely possible. Sometimes these review units get updates on a different schedule, so I have no idea. I should check whether it's S-ON or S-OFF.
I constantly forget to post about our GPS testing, possibly because I take it for granted these days that devices do it right. It's something I do test however with a bunch of phones at the same time and compare SNR for all the visible satellites using GPS-Test.
GPS locks fast, but not extremely fast. I took multiple road trips to Phoenix with the Thunderbolt doing navigation guidance. I'd say that 15 seconds with complete sky LOS is enough to get a lock. In location services it does have checkboxes for Verizon's location services and google's. I neglected to take screenshots but SNR is very good on the TB, no GPS problems here.
So the battery life test situation is continuing to evolve. We're working on and will have a system trace setup (exactly what you mention, GPS, using the phone, SMS, browsing) eventually. It's still in progress, of course it'd only work for Android comparisons at present.
Thanks for the good word as always ;)
-Brian
Omid.M - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Feature requests:1) permalinking
2) Signature (with char. limit, like 40 chars, for Twitter ID,etc.)
3) Comment reply notification -- this one is HUGE. It's impossible for me to find replies to my comments, given then I can reply to an old comment (so my reply is "newer") but still buried in a sea of comments from older dates. Make sense?
4) Add Tapatalk compatibility to the AT forums. The mods said they're just waiting on Anand to approve, and I've given examples of other forums built on the same system (phpBB, etc) with equal or more users, to show that those forums are working fine and won't buckle under high traffic. Just have to register the forums (free) with Tapatalk so we can post using the Android/iOS app.
Oh, and a Wordpress style mobile version of these articles would be sweet, especially for commenting.
Come on, AT! The best tech site on the net should have these features! :D
Great work as always. Hope you nail those papers, Brian.
Omid.M - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Awesome. Thanks for the reply!The OTA is coming if it hasn't already. I'll check with my source, but he said HTC definitely wanted to make the full 8 GB usable, so it was definitely a minor oversight on their part which they intend to correct.
I don't know why more manufacturers haven't built antennas into the cover. It definitely seems the way to go.
FYI,
Regarding the sig, if you could make it so the badge (to the left) has another bar below the handle where you can put, say, a Twitter ID...well, that'd be slick...hint hint.
That way, since it can only take something like a Twitter ID, you won't have to worry about junk URLs clogging up the comments section. Plus, people can retweet or tweet at individual comments.
Expect more RTs of this article shortly :)
whthawk - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
Fascinating and easy read. Thanks!FITCamaro - Sunday, May 1, 2011 - link
I love all the people who are like "its thick and heavy....waaaa..." Man up people. Some of us like to have a phone that has some meat to it so we don't feel like we're going to break it. Nor is 5 ounces instead of 4 going to make any difference. For me even the Thunderbolt barely is noticeable when I'm holding it.floyd1 - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - link
he folks who can tell me how can i order this htc thunderbolt???? and what is the price??? hope some one can help me my regards floyd from hollandname99 - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link
"The Thunderbolt has noticeably less attenuation when held in a 4G LTE scenario, no doubt thanks in part to the fact that it's fully leveraging MIMO "This statement makes no sense.
(a) To know what is going on requires knowing what is being reported by that signal strength number. THE big issue with mobile radio is the VARIANCE in signal strength. This variance occurs on a timescale of 10s of ms, and a spatial scale of cm/
So when that dB number is reported, what EXACTLY is being reported? The maximum value over the past n seconds? The minimum value? A time average of the power, converted into dB? A time average of the dB rating. (Since the mapping from power to dB is non-linear, these two types of averages are VERY different),
(b) MIMO is NOT a technology to deal with a weak radio signal, in fact the exact opposite.
Given two antennas, you can use them in two DIFFERENT ways.
(i) You can use the two antennas via receive diversity, which means they each pick up an independent version of what is essentially the same signal. This is useful when the amount of signal variance means that one of the signals is frequently too weak to be useful, but usually not both, so at least one of the signals is strong enough to be useful.
ST codes like Alamouti are a fancy version of this idea.
Note --- this is useful for situation where the combination of the mean signal strength AND the variance means that the signal is sometimes too weak. It does not help if the mean strength is too low to be useful; it is a coping mechanism for a high variance.
(ii) MIMO is different. MIMO says we will use the two antennas to decode what are essentially two independent streams of data, and double our throughput. For this to work, we require that the lowest signal strength received (even in the presence of variance) not be too low. Thus this is a technology to take advantage of either a high mean signal strength, or an unusually low variance in the signal strength.
You can use your antennas to give you either diversity (more consistent reception) or MIMO (higher throughput, under good conditions), but not both.
NEITHER diversity nor MIMO can deal with a signal that is too weak. There IS multi-antenna technology that can do this (beam shaping) but I don't know if any carrier or cell-phones use this.
In other words, if this phone shows lower attenuation when being held
(a) who knows WTF that actually means, since we have no idea what is actually being measured
(b) it likely has more to do with the details of the placement and geometry of the antenna than with antenna diversity
(c) it certainly has nothing to do with the specific technology of MIMO
name99 - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link
Having made the complaint above, congrats to Brian for taking my earlier complaints about these reviews to heart and trying to get a more comprehensive picture of the capabilities of these phones beyond mere headline numbers!Certainly, for example, the histograms are very helpful.
EvoGuy - Monday, May 16, 2011 - link
Droid Charge does not have an MDM9600 or any other Qualcomm IC.Of the four LTE smartphones coming to Verizon, only HTC has a Qualcomm LTE IC. CDMA is handled by VIA in the Charge, Q has the other three.
Also, EV-DO stands for EVolution-Data Only. "Data Optimized" is a backronym to try and cover up the fact that EV-DO cannot support voice. There was a standard called EV-DV (EVolution - Data & Voice), but it was killed by the giant IC company.