Review: HTC Vivid for AT&T
Music
The Vivid has a handful of ways to listen to music. There's the HTC music player, MOG Music is preloaded, as is an FM radio.
The on-board music application is very good. It isn't 100% stock; HTC has given it a new skin to match the Sense 3.0 theme in the way the software looks, but the overall features remain about the same. If you use Google Music, you'll need to download the newest Android music player to access it, as Google Music doesn't work with the HTC music player.
The FM radio works well with headphones attached. I was even able to dial in some of the furthest stations from my house, and the local rock station the next town over sounded great. MOG Radio is a streaming radio music service similar to Slacker or Pandora. It offers access to 11 million songs complete with offline caching and high-quality streams.
If these features aren't enough for you, well, there's always the Android Market.
Video
On the video side of the equation, your options are almost as varied. It has the stock YouTube application, AT&T's Mobile TV application, and HTC's Watch.
Watch is HTC's movie rental/download service. The selection is far from fantastic, but it had a number of (near) recent releases, such as Captain America and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. It also had TV episodes from a small number of shows. TV episodes could be purchased for $1.99. Movies could be rented for $4.99, and purchased for $9.99 - $19.99, depending on the title. Using this service requires a credit card. The few trailers that I viewed looked really good on the Vivid's display.
Watch also comes with a homescreen widget that lets you sift through your library of purchases, where they can be played directly from the home screen.
Video content that you record, side-load, or download is played back in the gallery application. I didn't have any trouble with the DRM-free movies I loaded on the Vivid. They played back just fine.
Hands-On: HTC Vivid for AT&T
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HTC Vivid
