HTC Inspire 4G Review

Related: Specifications

This is one of the largest phones out there and one of the largest Androids as well. Running currently on Froyo on a 4.84 x 2.68 x 0.46 inch display, this phone has speeds like no other. With all of the 4G wars going on, you can only assume everything is pushing out the best phones just awaiting 4G speeds. After a slow start, you can see that AT&T has put there foot in the door at CES 2011 with the HTC Inspire 4G. The Android device forms with hot-spot capabilities and a very generous 4.3 inch touch screen. You will also see the latest version of HTC Sense on the Inspire. At a very affordable $99.99 with contract of course. This beautifully constructed phone is one hell of a phone and it makes our favorite little green guy happy. It honestly is just a rebranded friend of ours from overseas, as you can tell, it is an HTC Desire HD that is now on AT&T’s HSPA+ network. Cool right? The high end smartphone is big enough to win over the hearts of AT&T customers everywhere.

Okay lets start at hardware. The device weighs in at 5.78 oz and follows in the footsteps of its HTC family members in being big like the EVO and the HD7. Even though the device is rather big, it’s actually pretty slim. Carrying it around will take some getting used to actually. When playing around with the touchscreen, it was actually 100% responsive and typing went smoothly. When switching to landscape mode we had no problems what so ever. At the of the stunning 4.3 inch WVGA touch screen you will see the typical Android buttons. The display gives you the brightness and clarity that shines above the rest. I love the way it hardly washed out in the sun, it did just a bit but not too much when tested. The Home, Menu, Back, and Search buttons were all responsive 100 percent. The thing I really didn’t like the most was that for such a big phone, there should have been a kickstand. On the back you will find the 8 megapixel camera with dual LED flash. As for the battery door, you will find that HTC did something quite unusual; there are now two pieces to take off the back – one at the bottom and one on the right hand side. Odd right? We didn’t have a problem taking off the two compartments, but as for the battery door? Well lets just say we had a manly competition as to who could get it off. After 20 minutes of bantering back and forth, we had to go find a tool and take it off. Inside the HTC Inspire 4G packing, you will find a USB cable, a preinstalled 8GB microSD card, and reference material, and an AC adapter. Inside the phone you’ll find all of the typical pre-installed Android apps and AT&T apps such as AT&T Navigator, AT&T FamilyMap, and AT&T U-Verse Live TV. When getting into apps, we had hardly any trouble, everything went nice and fast. The thing that really got on our nerves was that we still couldn’t taste the 4G speeds. We’re still holding out for that AT&T! When testing out the mobile hot-spot, we tried it out on a few devices and saw slightly better downloads.It took about a minute to load a photo onto Facebook and about 50 seconds to upload onto Myspace. For the extra 20 bucks, I’d say it’s worth it. That 20 bucks in on top of the required Data Pro data plan for smartphones, so you’ll play $45 per month in total for 4GB of data. The 4GB applies to data consumed on all connected devices and overage fees will cost $10 per gigabyte. The Inspire carries 4GB of storage and a preinstalled 8GB microSC card. The HTC Inspire 4G is fast and with the hot-spot features, it only helps other items to be just as fast.

What has a 8-megapixel camera with auto focus, dual LED flash, and HD video recording? Can you say Inspire? Oh yes. This phone is ahead of other phones in the camera area. The built in photo enhancer allows you to add great effect to all your photos. The effect include; adjustable scale for exposure, contrast and saturation, white balance controls, ISO settings, and face detection. Good news for all of you geotaggers out there, this there a setting on the Inspire camera for that too! HTC has finally impressed us with a camera worth having on a phone. From low to high light places, photo quality over all was awesome. In our HD videos, it was bright, clear and we could hear all of the sounds nice and loud. As for performance, we had good call quality. On our end, we had clear audio, but there was some buzzing in the background. On the other end, people could hear us clear too but they also heard the same buzzing. Overall we found that the call was not the best we’ve had but it definitely wasn’t the best. The buzzing was kind of annoying, it was that bad that we had to end the call, but it was a bit irritating. We only experienced one call dropped during our testing, after that we had full bars the entire time. Here in Florida we usually had an average of four or five bars when roaming around with our Inspire. When put on speaker phone, we didn’t hear that buzzing anymore we just heard the semi quiet voice. It wasn’t good enough to hear in Starbucks thats for sure. We know that our Inspire here doesn’t sport the top notch dual core processor like other new smartphones, but we liked our 1GHz Snapdragon processor perfectly fine. It was a smooth ride, not a bump in the road. There was no lag time between searching the web and playing with apps. The Inspire sports a 1,230mAh lithium ion battery that runs a 6 hour talk time. We were really happy with out battery, it didn’t die on us after some serious testing – call after call, text after text, emailing, photographing, and playing games. The battery survived a almost a day. But when using the hot-spot feature you will see about one forth of the battery life suddenly drained fast. To wrap things up, this huge smartphone is fast, it’s strong, it’s ready for that 4G speed. This phone is big, it’s practically a mini tablet. It’s definitely worth that $99.99. The HTC Inspire 4G is a great phone, it’s a great Android beginner phone, and it’s definitely a bargain.