GamesmasterLive Forums

Hi all this is a re-post from the old forum, original written by me Thu Mar 03, 2011 4:26pm, so I can reply to it.

Posting on something I've been using for a few months now for anyone else who is in the smartphone market. In December 2010 i got a HTC Desire Z smartphone on Orange 24 month contract for £30 per month and nothing up front. In that package you get the phone with accessories, and each month get 700mins of anyphone/anytime free, 500mb of internet bandwidth, and unlimited texts.



http://www.htc.com/www/product/desirez/ ... ation.html

I did look at getting an iPhone originally simply because that seemed the most obvious choice, but I couldn't get a deal with no up front fees (£100 down was the best offer), so looked round at other phones and took the opportunity to get a phone with a flip out qwerty keyboard as I much prefer that to a touchscreen which can get a bit crowded with the on screen keyboard. Having compared it with friends' iPhones, I actually much prefer mine and am glad I didn't get an iPhone. I've got to say this phone has changed my life quite a bit. I used to have an old PAYG phone which I virtually never used other than in emergencies, but this new one I use all the time, not just for calls, but email and the internet too, along with a whole list of additional apps, utilities & games.

I was a little concerned about the flippy out keyboard being something that might break easily & quickly. I few years back I took the gimmicky route and got the Matrix phone, Nokia 7110, with the spring loaded flip down mouthpiece, which became loose and started falling off quite a lot. I've had no issues with this phone. After 6 months the flip action is still as firm as it was the first day, and I've had no issues with it at all.

The phone came with a 8GB Micro SDHC Card, but I swapped that for a 32GB card from Play.com for £49.99, which was the cheapest 32GB card I could find. That allowed me to fill it with around 70 movies and a number of TV shows including series 1-3 of Gamesmaster. I used Handbreak to encode the MP4 files at 480x368 (4:3), 480x272 (16:9) or 480x205 (2.35:1) resolutions using the h.264 (x264) codec at a 2-Pass 330 kbps average bitrate, with AAC (faac) stereo 48kHz 96k audio (along with a number of other tweak settings), all of which play smoothly without any stuttering even in the high motion sequences, and still look virtually perfect on the 4" 16:9 screen. A 90 minute movie comes out about 300mb, while a 24 minute Gamesmaster episode is about 75mb.

A while ago two people posted on having sync issues when re-encoding my Gamesmaster DVD transfers for their phone, but I never had this problem at all. Just used Handbreak to encode direct from the DVD files and they were fine. I have all seven series of Gamesmaster ready encoded if anyone is interested. I couldn't guarantee that they would play on any given phone, as each one has different specs and may only have compatibility with certain A/V tweaks. If anyone is interested, I have them anyway.

The phone also comes with a 5 megapixel color camera, the quality of which is perfectly fine, but is nothing compared to my proper 6.4 megapixel SLR camera with a decent tripod, but phone cameras never tend to be that amazing anyway. It also has Google Maps, so with the GPS function & internal compass you can navigate in real time (the phone even knows which direction it's facing), and it has an in-car sat-nav mode too.

Since getting it I have also installed a fair list of free and paid for games;

Need For Speed: Shift (3D racing game)
Reckless Racing (overhead off-road racing game)
Doom (1:1 port of the old PC version)
Marvin - ZX Spectrum Emulator
GBCoid (GBC Emulator)
Gensoid (Megadrive Emulator)
SNesoid (Snes Emulator)

Although the phone 'only' has an 800mHz chip with 512mb of ram, this doesn't seem to equate to a PC standard of speed, as you'd have great trouble getting a 3D game like Need For Speed running on an old 800mHz Athlon PC as smoothly as this phone (Even the newest phones are still around the 1GHz chip / 1GB memory mark, although the Samsung Galaxy S2 top of the line has a 2Ghz chip). Most of the android specific games are so-so, but with the various emulators you can get access to just about any game made for any of the older systems, you can even get a PS1 emulator too (although you'd need the SD card space to copy the whole of the CD over, for each game)

I also have a long list of paid & free apps, of which these are the ones of worthy note;

Dolphin Browser HD (Best replacement for the stock internet browser)
Photaf 3D Panorama (takes & stitches together panoramic photos with the camera)
VitalPlayer (The best/smoothest/fastest media player I have come across, and I've tried them all!)
Out Of Milk (Great to-do list app)
Ebay Official Android App (Easier than using the Ebay site on the phone)
tTorrent Lite (Download torrent files)
Temp+CPU V2 (Homescreen system info display icon)
Advanced Task Killer (Akin to the windows task manager)
Gmote 2.0 (Turns your phone into a remote control for your PC)
ES File Explorer (The best file explorer I have tried)
SMS Backup & Restore (Backup and restore all your text messages)

All in all I'd highly recommend this phone, and any Android over any Apple phone.

Had the above phone for 11 months now, all in all a solid phone! Having said that (and just in case anyone else has the same problem) it's recently developed a fault, something is wrong with the ribbon cable which connects the two halves of the flippy phone together, so closed the phone works normally, buy when flipped open the LCD screen looses power/signal and slowly fades and goes off after about 4 secs. To be fair, called HTC today, UPS are collecting it tomorrow, and they'll have it back within 7 days repaired or replaced, all free of charge. Can't complain too much, but going back to my old Motorolla V500 is like going from a PS3 to a BBC Micro!

I'll be eligible for an upgrade this time next year and this still seems to be the best HTC android phone with a QWERTY keyboard, so might need to leave the HTC camp and see what other android QWERTY phones are out there?