Thursday, June 7, 2007
HTC Touch Video Unboxing
Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 03:34 PM
Courtesy of HTC, I received an HTC Touch yesterday afternoon - being in Canada I was a bit behind schedule from most other sites - but I'm happy to bring to you a video of the HTC Touch being unboxed, along with a running commentary from yours truly, shot on a Canon HV20 (man, what a camera!). My commentary was so...comment-heavy, I blasted right through the 10 minute limit on standard YouTube accounts, and even though I thought I had a Director account without that limit, after uploading the 99 MB file (which took a while), and waiting for YouTube to process it (which also took a while), they rejected the video for being too long. So I went back and edited it into two pieces, re-uploaded, waited for processing (two hours for both parts), and finally, here we are with part one:
[somehow it's missing the intro text, I'm not sure what happened there]
Here's part two:
YouTube quality is just horrific, isn't it? Remember how I shot it on the Canon HV20? It worked quite well with Vista, minus some driver issues - look for a review on Digital Media Thoughts. The YouTube videos have the black bars on top and bottom because I shot it in 16:9 format. I was initially hoping to upload a nice wide-screen high-definition video, but even after converting it to 1280 x 720 at 6 mbps WMV, it was still huge (567 MB).
I experimented with a few formats, and ended up picking a wide-format 720 x 480 video at 3 mbps as the compromise format. The file in question is still 297 MB in size, but the quality is quite good [go full screen when watching it]. If you have the patience to wait for the download (our server should be up to the task), go ahead and download it.
As a side note, I'm curious to hear what you think of me using video to review a device rather than writing about it. On the plus side, these one-take videos can be cranked out faster than a 3000 word review. On the negative side, they can be a bit tedious of the reviewer in question (me) starts to ramble or says "Uh" too many times. I'll definitely be doing another video to show how the HTC Touch actually functions (it's quite impressive), but moving forward I want to know what you think about video as a method of presentation. Yes? No? Suggestions for improvement?
[somehow it's missing the intro text, I'm not sure what happened there]
Here's part two:
YouTube quality is just horrific, isn't it? Remember how I shot it on the Canon HV20? It worked quite well with Vista, minus some driver issues - look for a review on Digital Media Thoughts. The YouTube videos have the black bars on top and bottom because I shot it in 16:9 format. I was initially hoping to upload a nice wide-screen high-definition video, but even after converting it to 1280 x 720 at 6 mbps WMV, it was still huge (567 MB).
I experimented with a few formats, and ended up picking a wide-format 720 x 480 video at 3 mbps as the compromise format. The file in question is still 297 MB in size, but the quality is quite good [go full screen when watching it]. If you have the patience to wait for the download (our server should be up to the task), go ahead and download it.
As a side note, I'm curious to hear what you think of me using video to review a device rather than writing about it. On the plus side, these one-take videos can be cranked out faster than a 3000 word review. On the negative side, they can be a bit tedious of the reviewer in question (me) starts to ramble or says "Uh" too many times. I'll definitely be doing another video to show how the HTC Touch actually functions (it's quite impressive), but moving forward I want to know what you think about video as a method of presentation. Yes? No? Suggestions for improvement?
