Design
This is a bit finicky, but I'm not a huge fan of the way HTC has designed the SIM card and battery slots. Rather making the battery cover one removable piece, you have to remove two different panels to get to these slots. The battery slot was especially hard to remove and put back together. I felt like I had to use some force to get the piece to snap in--which is never a good feeling.
The is otherwise minimal yet attractive and it feels nice and solid in hand. It is slightly thinner than the EVO and a touch lighter as well. The 4.3-inch WVGA display looks gorgeous and nicely showcases HTC Sense. Beneath the display, you'll find the typical Android buttons: Home, Menu, Back and Search. On the bottom spine, you'll find the micro-USB port. The left spine houses the volume rocker while the right is bare. The power switch sits at the top of the phone.
HTC Sense with Android 2.2
Out of the box, the Inspire runs Android 2.2 (otherwise known as "Froyo") with HTC's custom-built overlay, called Sense, running over it. Hopefully, the Inspire will be updated to Android 2.3 sooner rather than later--an upgrade that should improve performance overall. I've written a lot about Android 2.2 and HTC Sense in other articles, so I will just quickly summarize the important parts of the operating system.
Of all the Android overlays, HTC Sense is the best-looking, in my opinion. The dynamic Weather app, in particular, is one of my favorites. The latest iteration of Sense features Leap, which is essentially an elegant way of handling multitasking; it's a bit reminiscent of (remember WebOS?). Pinch anywhere on the homescreen, and you'll jump to seven thumbnail versions of your homescreens. From there, you can go to any of those open applications or close out of one.
Friend Stream, HTC's social network aggregator, lets you view your friends' status updates, shared links, and pictures in one seamless view. Supported social networks include Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, among others. I find this type of social network feed a bit annoying--do I need to see everybody's tweets and Facebook status updates jumbled together? If you're an avid social networker, though, seeing all of the updates in one place may be useful.
The Inspire's version of Sense features htcsense.com, a Web-based service that adds an extra level of security to your phone. If your phone gets lost, you can use the site to track your phone on a map, send a command to make the phone sound an alert (even if your phone is set to "silent" mode). And if you can't track it down, you can remotely wipe all of the phone's data with a single command.
Multimedia
With a 4.3-inch display, the Inspire is just begging to be your secondary television. But like I mentioned previously, there's no kickstand on the Inspire so no table-top movie watching for you. There's also no HDMI port so you can't watch content from your phone on your HDTV.
Despite these omissions, the Inspire is a great media player, especially with the inclusion of Dolby Mobile surround sound. I sideloaded a clip of Iron Man on the Inspire and was impressed by how rich and clean the surround sound was.
The Inspire 4G also supports Flash, so you'll be able to watch Flash videos, view Flash-enabled pages, and play Flash-based games. Flash sites loaded up pretty quickly over AT&T's network and videos ran smoothly. YouTube videos looked as good as they could ever look, but the ability to easily switch between regular and HQ (High Quality) YouTube videos with a simple tap is very nice. But one strange thing happened: I paused a YouTube video and when I tried to continue playing it, the video did not load. It gave me an error message and started the video back up from the beginning.
I'm not a huge fan of HTC's Sense music player. The album art doesn't take full advantage of the Shift 4G's display while the app is in Now Playing mode; instead, the art remains thumbnail-size. The Sense player is slightly prettier than the dull-as-dirt Android player, but I prefer both iTunes and Samsung's TouchWiz player.
Camera
Like the EVO, the Inspire sports an 8-megapixel camera with autofocus and a flash. Image quality was pretty good. My photos taken outdoors had bright, natural colors and crisp details. Photos shot indoors looked pretty good, though the colors were a bit oversaturated.
Overall, I was pleased with both the easy-to-use camera user interface as well as the Sense Gallery. You can sync your photos from Flickr, Facebook or load images or video via DLNA. Sadly for Picasa users, the Gallery app does not sync to Google's photo service.
The camcorder can capture up to 720p HD video. Video looked pretty good, but it is unfortunate that there's no HDMI connector so you can watch your videos on an HDTV.
Performance
The Inspire is not one of the dual core processor mega phones we saw at CES; it is powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor. With mobile processors getting faster and stronger, 1GHz seems a bit, well, weak. But honestly, I felt like the Inspire handled everything I threw at it speedily enough-minor YouTube hiccups aside.
I had a hard time picking up a strong HSPA+ signal (or what AT&T is calling "4G" - see our dissection of ). This wasn't too odd, though, because I have a hard time picking up a strong 3G AT&T signal in San Francisco regularly. I ran the Ookla Speedtest application in San Francisco and achieved average download speeds of 0.31 Mbps and upload speeds of 0.08. These speeds are typical of a 3G network-certainly not a 4G network. Perhaps I got these results due to a weak signal here, but so far, I'm not impressed. I will continue testing in San Francisco in places where I get more HSPA+ bars and update this review if I get faster results.
Call quality was good in San Francisco. Callers sounded loud, clear and natural over the line. My friends said that they could hear very little background noise while I was standing on a busy city street corner. I experienced no dropped calls nor any static or distortion during my tests.
Conclusion
The Inspire is an excellent addition to AT&T's line-up and is a solid Android alternative to the iPhone 4. The display, good camera and variety of apps available in the make it an excellent phone for entertainment. I'm not totally convinced that it deserves the "4G" in its name, but that might be due to where I was trying to test the network. Still, "4G" implies speed and while the Inspire certainly wasn't slow, it wasn't blazingly fast over the network either.