HTC Inspire 4G review

The HTC Inspire 4G's Sense UI extends into your address book (i.e., People app) and phone dialer, but we didn't find either all that inspiring.

The phone app fills the lower half of the screen with a finger-friendly dial pad, leaving the upper part of the screen free to display the last four numbers in your call history.

The dial pad can be hidden with a button to the left of the big green Call button, displaying all of your contacts. Contacts in the phone app are displayed alphabetically sorted by the first name only, even though the option exists in the People app to sort by last name – why HTC and Google can't get in sync on this quirk is beyond us.

Thankfully, the People app can be called up quickly, either by tapping Menu > People or using the Call History button to the right of the Call button, then toggling to All Contacts.

The People app offers a quick way to add new contacts at the top of the screen, and after receiving an incoming call from a new number, you're given the opportunity to add it as a new contact, a convenient touch.

Equally handy is the Blocked Callers feature, perfect for smartphone owners stuck with digits that always seem to attract wrong numbers or crank calls.

From the People app, tap Menu > More > Blocked callers, then tap Add caller and add the offending number, either by typing it in or selecting a contact from your address book who you'd rather blacklist. It worked like a charm, even when using Google Voice for incoming calls.

Otherwise, the HTC Inspire 4G is pretty average for actual calls. Overall volume for both the earpiece and speaker were just about right at maximum level, but didn't give us any additional headroom for increasing the volume while in louder environments.