HTC Thunderbolt

Design
The HTC Thunderbolt follows the simple HTC design line and it doesn’t bring anything new to the table in this department. The large 4.3-inch screen is placed directly on the center of the phone and the top margin contains the Verizon logo, the speaker, and a front facing camera, while the bottom margin contains four touch sensitive buttons. The only other buttons you will find are on the sides of the phone and they can be used for turning it on and off and changing the volume. The rear side of the phone doesn’t contain anything special, just two logos, the 8MP camera, and the dual-LED flash. A microUSB port can be noticed on the left side and you will also notice a 3.5 mm headphone jack on the edge of the device. This phone is considerably larger than the iPhone and you will notice this as soon as you pick it up. Fitting it in your pocket may be difficult at times, but the thinness of this device makes up for it. Because most people will take advantage of the large screen size for watching movies, a kickstand was added on the rear side of the phone. You can pop it out easily and the device will rest on it without being wobbly.

This phone measures 4.75 inches in height, 2.44 inches in width and 0.56 inches in thickness. This makes it larger than most Smartphones you will normally see and the phone is even heavier than the Evo, at 6.23 ounces.

Features
The HTC Thunderbolt runs on HTC Sense and you won’t notice any problems with it. Every touch of the screen is registered properly and the phone will respond in an instant even if you are running a very demanding application. The 1GHz MSM8655 processor performs very well and even if some other phones are better, you won’t feel the need for better processing speeds while using this device. With 768 MB of RAM, you can be sure that each application will run smoothly and that they won’t take long to load. The data transfer speeds are better that what you normally see on the market and this phone won’t disappoint you with up to 12Mbps of download speed and up to 5Mbps of upload speed.

The WVGA screen offers a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and thanks to the 4.3-inch size, you won’t have any problems watching movies or surfing the web. Plus, the phone comes with a 32GB microSD card which will offer you more than enough free space for your movie clips and music files.

The 8MP camera performs great and the flash will help you obtain great pictures in even the darkest environments. You can also play around with the settings if you want to obtain different effects. The front facing camera offers a resolution of 1.3 mega pixels, which is more than enough for video conferencing.

This phone excels when it comes to video recording. You can shoot 720p videos without any problems and in almost any condition. If you can do it in outdoors with plenty of light, even better. The sound quality of your video files will also be above average, so there is nothing to worry about in this department. However, you should know that the quality will drop in lower light conditions and you might even experience some drops in frame rate. After you record your videos or after you import some from your computer, you can go to the media center and play any MPEG4 or H.264 files. The phone also offers support for DivX and Xvid, but the quality is not exceptional.

If you play around with the menu, you will eventually run into some pre-installed apps. Adobe reader is available for any .pdf documents you might want to open, you can stream videos through Bitbop, and you will also find a few other apps like FM Radio, kindle, QuickOffice, and VZ navigator, just to name a few. In essence, there are plenty of interesting things you can do with the HTC Thunderbolt out of the factory and once you get bored, you can download and install some new ones.

If you don’t want to wait close to a minute every time you power on your phone, you should use the Fast Boot feature which can reduce the power on time to an impressive 9 seconds. This is basically a standby mode, but it will save you a lot of time if you need to turn off your phone on a daily basis.

Browsing the web is definitely easy thanks to the fast processing speed, the fast downloading speed, and the large touch screen. No matter what you’re looking for, you will be able to find it in just a few seconds. Because this is a HTC device, flash support is available and flash content can be viewed directly.

The HTC Thunderbolt comes with plenty of interesting features that you would normally see on a high end Smartphone: GPS, stereo Bluetooth, video conferencing and a few other handy tools.

Pros and Cons
The HTC Thunderbolt is one of the best HTC phones around because it offers a little bit of everything and a lot of some things. Browsing the internet, snapping pictures and watching movies are definitely this phone’s strong points.

There aren’t many bad things you can say about this device, so as long as you are happy with the large 4.3 inch screen and the overall size of this phone, you should give it a try.

Conclusion
If you are looking for one of the most versatile Smartphones on the market, the HTC Thunderbolt might be the one for you.