This is called the unit Hertz Titan and it’s, a very large blackberry, inspired Android phone with a square display and a full keyboard and, if you’re, into full keyboards. This might be something worth looking at. The last phone we looked at from them was called the atom, which was this little tiny, full featured Android smartphone. This one is moving in a very different direction, but feels equally high quality, so we’re going to be taking a closer look at this phone in just a second. But I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds. All the opinions you’re about to hear are my own. Nobody is paying for this review, nor is anyone reviewing or approving it before it was uploaded, so let’s get into it now and see what this device is all about. So let’s take a closer look now at the hardware. The first thing that surprised me about this phone is its size and weight from the pictures that look like something that was more along the size of a blackberry, but it is much much larger than that. It’S got a 4.6 inch display here, it’s running at 1430. By 1438, so decent pixel density on it, but it is much bigger than I initially expected it to be: it’s, also pretty heavy to about 305 grams or ten point: seven, six ounces and it’s that heavy, because it is super rugged.

It’S got some really high quality materials here, putting it together a lot of high end thick plastic and metal. It feels like it can definitely survive some abuse and I think that’s kind of what it’s designed for it’s kind of a rugged device for people that are out in the field. A lot and don’t want to have a case on their phone. It includes a screen protector, one of those tempered glass protectors which comes installed, and they also included a second one in the box price point on this. When it hits retail is going to be three hundred and fifty nine dollars. I paid two fifty nine, which was their Kickstarter price. It has a heel, VOP, 60 mt 77, one processor, six, gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage, so pretty decent specs actually for the price point, if you can get over its big size and weight. Of course, and that’s, one of the nice things about these niche phone makers is that you can often find exactly what you’re looking for, if you hunt around a little bit – and I think they’ve really nicely equipped this one out for the price point. It also has a very big battery in it 6000 milliamp hours, which should be good for easily a full 20 or 24 hours worth of usage and I’m sure you could probably get a few more hours or perhaps even days out of it. If you just have it on standby, so when you charge this thing up, it should be able to easily get through the workday we’ve been very impressed with the battery life that we’ve been seeing with it so far, and the phone also supports wireless charging.

It’Ll support up to 10 watts with a wireless charger. The only thing we noticed when we were putting it on the charger is that you do have to position it a little bit off center. I think the wireless charging region is located right around here and not in the center, like most phones are, but once you get it on that wireless charger, it should start charging itself without any real issues. Now, as far as carrier compatibility is concerned, it should be fairly Universal worldwide, it’s, a 4G LTE phone no 5g on this. One it’ll also work with Verizon here in the United States, but you do need to have that SIM card activated before you pop it in the phone. This is this is not an official Verizon phone. So as such, you have to plug it into a regular, officially sanctioned Verizon device first to activate, and then you can move the SIM card over. If you haven’t activated sim, then you can just pop it in here and you’re good to go. You can have two SIM cards installed at the same time and then you can switch between them in the settings that might be useful if you’re traveling globally. Frequently the other option. Is you put a single sim card in and then you can also add a micro SD card onto the tray here, so your choices are a micro SD card and a single sim or no micro, SD card and two sims.

The choice is yours there and that will get you activated and on most of the major cellular networks you don’t have much in the way of ports on this one. You do have a you spc port here at the bottom, for charging. It will support the faster USBC charging voltages and amperages. Just know, though, that you do have a bigger battery here, so this will take longer to charge than a phone with a smaller battery running at those faster speeds. So just be aware of that, you also on the top here, have a headphone jack that’s, something lacking on a lot of phones these days, so you can plug in your earbuds or whatever else you want to use and of course it supports bluetooth. So you can have wireless headphones attached to it as well. The speakers are on the back here and they are quite loud, so it does very well as a speakerphone. The handset speaker here also works quite nicely when you’re just talking on the phone with the phone up to your ear, you do have a bunch of buttons on here. You’Ve got a programmable button here on the side. You can do pretty much whatever you want with this right now, it’s tied to the flashlight on the back, but you can use it with push to talk apps and that sort of thing. On the other side, you’ve got your volume rocker and you have your power. Switch here for turning the phone on and off, it has two means of authentication biometric authentication.

That is, you have a fingerprint sensor down here and then it will also do facial recognition. So if I just turn the phone on here and look at it, you can see it unlocks very quickly. However, the face recognition does not differentiate between your eyes being opened or closed. So if you’re sleeping somebody could walk up to you and unlock the phone just by pointing it at your face, likewise, of course, they could pick your hand up and put it on the fingerprint sensor too. So just be aware of that, but it does work very quickly and it’s nice to see that on a relatively budget priced phone now, given this phones biggest selling feature is the physical keyboard, you might be wondering how it is well I’ve been typing on it. For the last couple of days and it’s, okay, it reminds me a lot of my blackberry keyboard from a few years back. I have to say, though, personally I’ve really gotten used to on screen. Keyboards and I’ve been getting very proficient at them, so it’s been taking me a while to get used to having physical keys again. But if you are someone who really prefers this, I think you’ll like these. They remind me a lot of the BlackBerry springiness. They feel very similar to that. I think the keys might be a little bit larger than what you might have remembered on your blackberry, given the fact that the phone is larger overall and they integrated smartly, I think some touchscreen keys with the physical keys, so, for example, if I want to add A period I can just push the period on screen here and add it.

If I want that period from the physical keyboard, I have to hit Alt V to get it, which of course, might take a little bit more time, so they’ve kind of smartly mixed the new and the old here. I think in a way that I think might work a little more efficiently for a lot of folks. I don’t like the position of the Shift key though it’s all the way up here. If I remember correctly, my blackberry had that Shift key integrated into the mainline keyboard here. Also, if you want numbers, you’ve got to hold down the Alt key and type in these keys here which have numbers attached to them. You can get at numbers on screen, though, so, if you are in a text input field, you can hit this right here and that will give you additional punctuation marks, along with numbers that you can type in an ad, and I think this kind of works, because The screen is larger than what you had on a blackberry, so you do have some room down here for some touch controls. But again a bulk of your keyboard typing can be done on the physical keyboard itself. The keyboard is backlit, so you can see it in the dark that’s a good thing. I also found that, depending on the context, you’ll see a different bit of touch commands here. So, for example, if I enter into a password field, I’ll get numbers. In addition to some punctuation marks down here at the bottom for faster entry, I would have liked to have maybe seen this two row entry in all text fields, but it looks like it’s only doing that when it’s in a password field there, but perhaps they can Do some firmware updates or do something to allow you to customize that a little bit more but overall, not a bad typing experience on here.

But I think if you haven’t used one of these physical keyboards in a while it’s going to take a little bit to get used to it again now, like most smartphones, you’ve got two cameras, one on the front, one on the back. Nothing spectacular, though, out of this camera system, it is really basic transportation and very similar to what I see on a lot of other low cost smartphones that we’ve looked at the front sensor here is 8 megapixels, so it’s adequate. I guess for documentation and selfies, and maybe some video conferencing it’ll shoot 720p video oddly there’s a 1440p mode on the front facing camera, but the video doesn’t look much better in that mode. I think it might be doing some kind of internal up conversion to hit that resolution. The rear camera is 16 megapixels, and although that is a decent resolution, the overall photo quality here is still pretty lackluster. So you’re not going to take a photo that you’ll put on display anywhere, but it’s, probably good enough for documenting something at your workplace. It will do 1080p, video at 30 frames per second out of the back here again, nothing spectacular but adequate. It also has that odd, 1440p mode for video, but again it doesn’t do much to improve the overall quality of what you’re seeing out of it. So let’s take a look now at some basic performance on the phone we’ll begin with web browsing. We’Ve got the Chrome browser up here and I’ll load up the nasa.

gov home page have to say this is one area where I don’t like having this physical keyboard, because I really wish there was a little bit more vertical screen real estate as I’m scrolling through some Of the articles and other things that are on the site here, but it does seem to perform pretty well at rendering these pages I’m on Wi Fi right now, but on the LTE a little bit earlier, it was doing just fine as well. Text is a little bit on the smaller side again given the on screen size here, but it seems to work fine as a web browsing device. You can use the physical back button here to go back and forth. Unfortunately, though, I was really hoping this capacitive area would work like a little trackpad with a mouse pointer, but it doesn’t do that it’s, basically just your standard home button and you can do some basic gestures, but nothing that’s, all that useful or innovative. Unfortunately, they do, of course, support YouTube and other video apps on this phone as well, and things do seem to load up pretty quickly on here, including all the ads again. The speakers are pretty loud on this, so you shouldn’t have a problem. Hearing the videos that you’re watching even in noisy environments but again because we’ve got this weird square phone here, it’s going to give you a pretty large letterbox area, especially when you’re looking at 1080p content like this, so it’ll just take some getting used to.

Given the odd screen orientation on the phone now, it’s also able to play some games, but the screen might introduce some challenges. There, let’s take a look at goats in later, first they’ll, this scroll over to it. Here I had it running in the background and you can see, because we’ve got that six gigs of RAM it’s very easy and fast to switch between apps that are running in the background like this, I know this is one of these open world games. That seems to perform pretty nicely here. It does force me, though, into the landscape screen orientation. It just flips you right over here and that’s how you have to play it, and it will also, of course, shrink the visible area it doesn’t look like it’s squishing everything it’s, just giving us less to look at. So if we were on a wider screen phone, we would see more of the world right now than what we’re seeing here, but it does appear to be running and running pretty adequately. I will try to another game here. This one is another one of my favorites pac man, 256 again. It was just sitting there in the background. Without any real problems, this one will run vertically, but it is running with a very tiny view of the world here. So different games will vary up. The screen real estate, depending on how the developers wanted to deal with oddly shaped screens like this, but the good news is, is that most of the games that I have tried have worked.

So again you might encounter some wackiness with some of these games, but generally they appear to be running and running quite well on the platform here and on the 3dmark sling shot gaming benchmark test. We got a score of one thousand four hundred and seventy so graphically this kind of puts it in budget territory. If you want a better general consumer phone for around this price, I think the Google pixel 3a is the one to look at. But if you are a customer looking for a very specific set of features, namely a physical keyboard, a square display a rugged physical design, along with really good battery life. I think this phone will largely meet your requirements. It is a great work phone. It is very well constructed it doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a tiny niche manufacturer. It really just feels solid all the way around. The only compromise that I can really see on here is the camera system, which isn’t great but everything else about this phone. I am quite pleased with, and of course, it’s running Android and you’ll have access to that huge application ecosystem, the version of Android that was shipped on the phone time. Recording this video is android 9. The security updates are current through October of 2019. At the time I’m recording this video I’m recording this in January of 2020, so it might be a little behind on its security updates, but by and large it looks like they are supporting the phone beyond its initial release here, which is often a good sign, and This is one company that I’ve really been impressed watching over the last two years, because they are selling this stuff initially on Kickstarter, which is never a place where you often see a lot of companies delivering on what they promised.

This phone is everything they promised and it was delivered largely on time as well, and what I’m getting here is not something that feels cheap, it’s, something that feels really well designed and put together. So, if you’re in the market for a large work phone like this, that has that familiar Blackberry, look and feel. I think you’ll be quite pleased with this. This is a phone that’s not really for me, but I appreciate what they’re putting together here, and I really appreciate the fact that I think the people that are looking for a phone like this will be quite pleased with how it performs, especially given the price point That they’re selling it at so, if you like this design and you want something running – Android it’s – definitely worth taking a look at. But for me I think I’ll stick to my traditional smartphone with the on screen. Keyboard that’ll! Do it for now, but until next time this is line Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters, including gold level supporters, the four guys with quarters podcasts Tom Albrecht, rajesh logic, gr and Kalyan Kumar. If you want to help the channel you can, by contributing as little as a dollar a month Music it over tool and TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe visit.

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