T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide Review - Photographers Wanted

Okay, I’ve been mostly ignoring the software side of things here, for not really any good reason, but here it goes. The MT4GS ships with Gingerbread 2.3.4, with a UI skin that basically amounts to a decontented version of Sense 3.0, which Brian covered in depth with his Sensation review. T-Mobile made a whole bunch of changes to the skin, mostly taking features out or just tweaking interface elements. 

I’m not a huge fan of UI skins. At all. They can make perfectly good phones feel downright slow, and slow phones feel unbearable. For example, the completely unskinned G2 feels subjectively quicker then the Sense-ified MT4GS, even though it’s down a core and has 50% lower clocks. This has nothing to do with how powerful the phone is and everything to do with how responsive it feels in basic OS interactions. Very rarely do they ever add anything of value, especially ones done by LG and Samsung. Surprisingly, I never had as much animosity towards Sense as the others, and certainly not as much as Brian. Sense 3.0 on the Sensation is simply the only UI-skin I’ve dealt with that adds functionality and amounts to a logical reskin of Android. 

The skin T-Mobile chose to ship with the Slide is basically Sense 3.0 with all that functionality taken out. The biggest losses here are the lockscreen app shortcuts and the rich info you get from the weather lockscreen. The other disappointing thing is that HTCSense.com features aren’t supported in full as they are on devices with the official version of Sense. This is a pretty big loss, since HTCSense.com comes with some pretty nice features, like remote backups, a locating feature with remote dialing (even when set to silent), remote lock and wipe, editing and multimedia features for photos and video taken on your phone. In my opinion, it’s one of the best things about Sense, but you get none of that with T-Mobile’s custom variant (hereby dubbed nonSense, for lack of a better name). 

Let’s look at what you do get. The sliding ring is still there, you pull it up to unlock the phone. When you’re answering the phone, you can drag the green and red icons into the ring to accept or decline the call. Alternately, you can swipe the ring upwards to answer the call. 

The homescreens rotate in on a circular track, almost like a revolving door of lockscreens. HTC has really emphasized the smoothness of the animations here, but it feels like a waste of computing resources if you ask me. (Sorry for the terrible images, DDMS has some issues with taking screenshots of the rotating motion.) The general interface actions here are identical to those in Sense 3.0. Quickly swiping through homescreens gets the entire deal to spin fluidly, with a virtual version of inertia deciding which screen you land on. 

Unlike Sense 3.0, there’s only 5 homescreens and no real easy way to rearrange them. Double-clicking the home button from one of the homescreens gets you an exploded view of all five, but there’s no way to drag them around or anything. Long-pressing on empty space brings up the Personalize menu, which you can also get to by hitting the menu button from the homescreen. You can mess with a bunch of stuff, including the system theme, wallpaper, widgets, folders, app shortcuts, shortcuts to specific parts of certain apps (such as the battery use part of the settings menu, a Gmail label, or a specific playlist in the music app), the ringtone, and notification sound.

The system theme sounds interesting, but literally all it does is change the wallpaper, ringtone, and appearance of the bottom row of icons. I like having my own wallpapers and ringtones, so it’s only a very small appearance difference to me. The bottom row of icons has its own issues though, in that it has five icons, two of which (phone and app launcher) aren’t modifiable. I like keeping it simple and just having three options - phone, browser, and app launcher. Sense 3.0 messes with it by dumping the browser button for the Personalize menu, but I can live with it. Something about having 4 or 5 icon docks just bugs me, especially when some of the icons are fixed. You get used to it fairly quickly though, so it’s not a huge deal. 

The app launcher is another place where minor annoyances lie. You scroll through pages, grids of 20 at a time, instead of scrolling through by row. This is a feature imported from Sense 3.0, and it’s another one that I personally don’t like. As with the dock, you get used to it. The big difference in the app launcher between Sense 3.0 and the MyTouch-version is that the MyTouch devices lose the tabs, which is actually a bigger loss than I first thought. The frequently-used apps tab is pretty sweet, I’d have liked to see it in this UI. 

The notifications shade is another carryover piece from Sense 3.0, with a recently used apps list and a quick settings tab. It’s a nice touch, one of the additions I really enjoyed, though a brightness slider would have made it even better. The task manager, too, is a good feature to have built-in, it’s a pretty clean way to manage running applications. 

The only other major change is one that I mentioned earlier, with the Search button being replaced by something called the Genius button. Just right off the bat, let me make it known that it’s not as brilliant as T-Mobile seems to think it is. It’s a glorified voice command interface done by Nuance, the company behind Dragon Speech and Ford’s SYNC. It’s a well done bit, but it’s not ingenious. Think of it like Windows Phone 7’s voice command shortcut, and you’ve got the right idea.