HTC Inspire 4G review

Given the budget-minded price of the HTC Inspire 4G, you might think the handset would get shorted in the multimedia department, but in many ways, this handset has some of its siblings beat.

The Sense-enhanced Gallery app features four ways to view photos and videos: Albums, which displays everything you've shot with the handset or copied over to it; Facebook and Flickr, for viewing content from your accounts (or those posted by friends) without accessing the dedicated apps; and Connected Media, which displays media servers on your local network.

The Inspire found two EyeConnect-enabled UPnP computers, a Pogoplug device and even our main D-Link DNS-323; our only bummer was discovering that .MOV files shot on our iPhone 4S and stored on the Pogoplug couldn't be accessed at all, but other video types played just fine.

(We also installed the Pogoplug app which recognized those .MOV files, but refused to play them, complaining about needing a player capable of supporting "video/quicktime" format.)

On the audio side, HTC includes support for MP3, AAC+, WAV and WMA9, both from the included Music app as well from the Gallery and the free Google Music app; MP3 and WAV files can also be used as ringtones. Video formats can include DivX, Xvid, MP4, H.263, H.264 and WMV9.

Although the Hulu Plus app is only available on a select few Android devices, we were pleasantly surprised to discover the HTC Inspire 4G was one of them.

Initially we installed an older version that didn't allow sorting our queue by Show, but during our review period a version 1.41.100096 (?!) showed up in the Android Market to right this wrong. Media player apps such as Netflix, Plex and iHeartRadio all installed and worked flawlessly as well.