HTC HD7 powered with Windows Phone 7

HTC's HD7 is one of the first Windows Phone 7 devices to launch here but will it make iPhone 4 users want to throw away their phones?

TILED: The HTC HD7, with the Windows Phone 7 interface gives you a clean, uncluttered home screen.

LET ME just put it right out there from the outset - the Windows Phone 7 operating system does not suck.

In fact, I daresay the experience of using a smartphone based on Microsoft's new mobile operating system is actually a pleasant experience.

While your taste in aesthetics may differ from mine, IMHO WP7 easily trumps the Android OS in how modern and yet functional the operating system looks. Anyway it still can't beat the iOS 4.2. iPhone still the best gadget... sorry for that Mr. Bill Gates.

The big guns

The HTC HD 7 is a nice device - the screen is humongous - at 4.3in it's right up there with HTC's own HD2 (which in fact it shares many hardware features with) and about as large as you can go with a mobile phone's screen without going into Tablet territory.

However, the resolution is the same 800 x 480-pixels as every other WP7 device and most Android phones, so you don't really get any advantage except a bigger virtual keyboard and a larger screen for viewing videos.

Turn it on and you'll see a nice LCD screen - the screen quality is good though not quite as good as the iPhone 4 but it is capacitive and very responsive to the lightest of touches.

The WP7 interface presents you with a homescreen that's made up of a number of customisable tiles - these tiles are essentially shortcuts which you can delete, move around or add to as you like.

These shortcuts aren't just for particular applications. You can even save a favourite webpage link on the homescreen as well.

Despite the large screen, the HD7 is still pretty slim and has a removable battery.

The HD7's built-in camera has a 5-megapixel image sensor with a dual LED flash. The image quality of photos taken on the camera are only so-so.

STAND: The HTC HD7 features a nifty integrated kickstand for handsfree landscape viewing.

Talking about the camera, the area on the back hides a pretty cool feature.

The metal part that surrounds the camera and the flash is actually a kickstand that you can flip outwards and turn into a small stand to prop up the HD7 when you're watching a movie. Pretty nifty, although it only works for propping the HD7 in landscape mode and not in portrait.

WP7

So, just how usable is the WP7 interface? Well, let's start off with the positives.

For one thing, the operating system is very responsive - coupled with the speedy 1GHz Snapdragon processor, I'd say that everything happens as fast as you'd expect it to, and there's never any obvious slowdown.

Microsoft has really tweaked the operating system so that everything runs smoothly and responds to your touch almost instantaneously, which is always an important consideration when you're using the phone functions.

There's a downside to this though - as it stands right now, WP7 does not have multitasking, a feature which iPhones have recently gained and which Android phones have had from the start.

This means that apart from the native applications (which do in fact support running in the background) you can't run any third party app, (say, an Internet radio app) and expect it to continue working when you've navigated away from it.

DUAL FLASH: The dual LEDs on the back of the HTC HD7 provide a bit of illumination when shooting in dimly lit situations with the built-in 5-megapixel camera.

In practice, this isn't too much of a problem though, as each application has a "save state" feature.

For example, if you're reading an e-mail message and switch to another app, switching back to the e-mail app later will open the mail exactly where you left off.

While the tiles are relatively simple - essentially square boxes with white text - the animation when you tap on them make them look quite 3D.

While the homescreen itself is the flashy front end of WP7, all your other applications are stored in the next screen, which is a long, vertically scrolling list of apps and settings.

The problem with this applications screen is that you can't arrange anything in folders.

Whatever you've installed just gets arranged in alphabetical order in this list (including various e-mail accounts if you have more than one), and can really get pretty long if you have lots of stuff installed.

Hubs

An interesting design choice is in the so-called "hubs" - a hub is essentially a folder of related tasks grouped together and in the case of WP7, these hubs are designed like a huge landscape sized poster.

When you're in a hub, your WP7 screen acts like a window looking at just part of this huge poster, and to see more you need to scroll vertically and horizontally.

HUBS: Large fonts and oversized titles dominate the entire Windows Phone 7 interface. This is the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, the hub where you can download free and paid apps.

The funny thing is that each title for any category sort of spills over to the next screen. For example, the "People" title in the hub will only show you "Peopl" with the "e" spilling into the next screen.

It's a bit weird, but it's the design team's way of telling you that there's more if you scroll to the right.

Talking about the People hub, although it's essentially your contact list, it does a lot more than that.

If you have a Facebook account for example, entering your Facebook details will pull in all your contacts from Facebook as well as postings on your contacts' walls and their photos as well.

If you want to keep your contact list separate from Facebook, then I suggest not entering your Facebook details into WP7.

Xbox Live and Marketplace

At the launch of Windows Phone 7, execs from Microsoft said that certain hubs, namely the Xbox Live hub and the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, would not be available at launch.

However, I actually could connect to the Marketplace and download free applications, like the Twitter app, and even pay for a game.

I'm not sure what's up with this, but it may have something to do with the address my Xbox Live account is registered with - hint: It's not a Malaysian address.

Before you rush out and buy a WP7 device expecting the Marketplace and Xbox Live to be working, though, a little bird told me that while the launch models of WP7 devices can connect to both hubs, there's no guarantee that later models with different ROM images can connect to those hubs.

Issues

In some two weeks of nearly daily use, I do have a few complaints about the HD7 hardware.

For one thing, the relatively tiny battery barely has enough juice to keep the HD7, with its huge screen, running an entire day.

On a typical day, I started out with a fully charged battery at 9am, and only with moderate use (a couple of phone calls, messaging, moderate surfing, a few minutes of video) by 3pm the battery was only about 30% or so.

By 5pm, I started getting warnings from the device that the battery was critically low.

The other issue I had was that the speaker on the back of the device isn't loud enough or high-quality enough for speakerphone use or video watching.

For example, in speakerphone mode, I can barely hear what the other side is saying even in relatively quiet environments.

To be able to have an effective speakerphone conversation, I had to turn the phone around so that the back of the HD7 was facing me before it was loud enough.

On the operating system side of things, my biggest complaint is that Bing Maps on WP7 is totally useless in this country.

The maps currently do not provide routing in Malaysia and are certainly not even detailed enough for just looking up roads. Or restaurants. Or hotels. Need I say more?

I hope Google produces a Google Maps app for WP7 in the near future - at least that would make the GPS hardware on the HD7 useful.

As for Office Mobile, while the Office hub on WP7 is really nice, Word Mobile, for example, seems to be quite barebones.

For example while I could easily add automatic bullet points in OneNote Mobile, I couldn't find where to do so in Word Mobile.

The only option for bullet points seems to be to add it manually from the keyboard for each and every line.

And then there's the lack of cut, copy and paste, which makes it really difficult when you're tapping out a Word document.

Conclusion

Having used the HD7 for about two weeks or so to check my e-mail messages, listen to music and to surf the Web, I found that I liked the way the operating system works.

The all-important phone functions work much better than on Windows Phone 7's predecessors - the calling and SMS screens are easy to get to and even deleting applications and shortcuts are only a tap-and-hold away.

As for the missing cut/copy/paste functions, multitasking and perhaps custom folder organisation for your applications, Microsoft promises a plethora of new features and fixes in an upcoming 2011 update, so at least most of these issues will be fixed.

In terms of the HD7 hardware itself, the real deal breaker is the battery. If you are a heavy user, I suggest looking around for a different WP7 device or at least buy an extra battery to go with this one.

Pros: Interface looks good and performs well; 4.3in screen is big and bright; touchscreen is very responsive.

Cons: Sound quality not great from built-in speaker; battery life too short; No multitasking; no cut, copy and paste.

HD7
(HTC Corp)
Smartphone
NETWORK: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, HSDPA 900/2100
OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows Phone 7
DISPLAY: 4.3in capacitive touchscreen (480 x 800-pixels)
CAMERA: 5-megapixels with autofocus; dual LED flash; 720p HD video recording
CONNECTIVITY: Bluetooth, WiFi, USB 2.0
MEMORY: 576MB RAM; 512MB ROM, 16GB internal flash memory
EXPANSION SLOT: none
STANDBY/TALK TIME: 320 hours/320 minutes
OTHER FEATURES: GPS, digital compass, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, G-sensor
DIMENSIONS (W x D x H): 68 x 11.2 x 122mm
WEIGHT: 162g

New features of Windows Phone 7 : reviewed

HTC 7 Mozart

On February 15, 2010, Microsoft Corp unveiled its Windows Phone 7 during the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona. While the new operating system could be the most significant for Microsoft since losing the lead in the smartphone market to RIM's BlackBerry, Apple's iOS devices and Google's Android operating system, the local launch was marred by the unavailability of certain key features that would have made Windows Phone 7 devices in this country more competitive.

This is unfortunate, because Microsoft's new smartphone operating system has a real chance of taking hold in the market, thanks to a well thought-out interface that has all the animation and flash of its rivals and yet looks completely unlike any of them.

New interface

For those who haven't seen the phone in action, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 interface is made up of customisable "Tiles" which are active shortcuts to various applications - for example, the Outlook tile not only takes you to the application when tapped, but the tile itself will show users how many e-mail messages are unread.

Similarly, the People tile, which takes the user to the contacts list, also has constantly active thumbnails of people taken from the user's contacts list.

Tiles on the Home screen can be customised and the user can easily add (and remove) shortcuts to a variety of applications and even favourite websites.

Within this interface is a concept called "Hubs" which are essentially areas which hold collections of related tasks - for example, the People Hub not only allows users to access their contacts lists, but also to access each contact's Facebook photos and Windows Live feeds.

Then there's the Office Hub, which of course includes mobile versions of Word, Excel andPowerPoint as well as OneNote, a new application in the mobile Office suite for note-taking on the go.

Microsoft's hardware partners like HTC, LG and Samsung are set to launch products based on Windows Phone 7 in the coming months.

HTC announced that it will be releasing its HD7 and Mozart models early next month. The HD7 has a retail price of RM2,399 and will be available exclusively from Maxis at a subsidised price with a plan. Meanwhile the Mozart will have a recommended retail price of RM2,099.

Hardware front

In an effort to avoid the fragmentation in hardware (CPU speeds, screen resolutions, etc) which resulted in vastly differing user experiences in the company's previous Windows Mobile operating system, Microsoft has this time set more stringent base hardware specifications for devices running on Windows Phone 7.

With Windows Phone 7, every device must run on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, have a screen resolution of 480 x 800-pixels, have at least 8GB of storage and at least a 5-megapixel digital camera.

Missing Marketplace, Xbox Live

For Malaysians, however, the disappointing news could be that both Xbox Live and the Windows Phone Marketplace will not be available at launch.

For gamers, Xbox Live on Windows Phone 7 is one of its biggest draws, as the feature allows Xbox 360 console users with Xbox Live accounts to log in on Windows Phone 7 to customise their Xbox Avatars and even add to their achievement points for mobile games played on the smartphone.

While the unavailability of Xbox Live on Windows Phone 7 isn't that big a surprise considering that the Xbox 360 console itself isn't officially available in the country, the missing Windows Phone Marketplace, Microsoft's application store for the smartphone, may turn off some users.

According to Ananth Lazarus, managing director of Microsoft Malaysia, the missing features are "to be rolled out in the future," although no specific time-frame was given as to when this would be.

As it is, the missing Marketplace puts Windows Phone 7 at somewhat of a disadvantage, because the smartphone operating system itself has no Twitter application nor an instant messaging client like Windows Live Messenger built in.

HTC quietly challenging the iPhone

APPLE'S RIVAL: A July 27 filepic of HTC chief executive officer Peter Chou introducing the brand's smartphones during a press conference in Beijing. HTC is moving out of the shadows and trying to establish its own brand name as it competes with Apple's iPhone. - AP

BEIJING: East Asia is the world's electronics factory, yet unless they are Japanese, producers are largely anonymous. Now HTC Corp, a Taiwanese maker of smartphones, is moving out of the shadows and trying to establish its own brand name as it competes with Apple's iPhone.

HTC supplies US carriers Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile but says a year ago only one in 10 Americans knew its name. With the help of marketing by cellular carriers and HTC's own TV ads during the baseball World Series, HTC says that number is up to 40%.

"We want to be one of the leaders," said John Wang, the 13-year-old company's chief marketing officer.

In trying to establish a global brand, HTC is following in the footsteps of another Taiwanese company, Acer Inc, which is battling Dell Inc for the title of second-largest personal computer maker.

Other rising Taiwanese technology names include software producer Trend Micro Inc and Asustek Computer Inc, a maker of PCs and cellphones.

HTC's path to its own brand has been complicated by US carriers' preference for many years to market its phones under their own brands.

That started to change in 2007, and the "HTC" brand started showing up on phones, as carriers figured that the company had some cachet among early adopters that they could capitalise on.

HTC phones on the US market include the Droid Incredible, sold by Verizon Wireless, the HD2, sold by T-Mobile USA, and the Hero, sold by Sprint Nextel Corp.

Even now, HTC is careful to avoid straining ties with carriers by promoting its own identity too aggressively. Such ties are crucial in the United States, Japan and other markets where carriers usually pick which phones to offer. In Europe and elsewhere, customers pick their own phones and buy service separately.

"I don't think it should ever become a 'destination phone,' because that is very arrogant," Wang said.

The company's slogan, "Quietly Brilliant," expresses both modesty and pride.

Apple, of course, is anything but quiet, and HTC sets itself apart from the US-based giant in other ways, too.

In contrast to lookalike iPhones, HTC tries to make handsets for every taste, some with slide-out keyboards, others with touchscreens.

And while Apple has its own online store, HTC focuses on phones while carriers pick which music and applications to offer.

"This is positioning the vendor almost diametrically against the increasing perception of Apple as an egotistical and domineering company," Seth Wallis-Jones, an analyst for IHS Global Insight, said in an e-mail.

"This is a contrast to a company that wants to do one phone only and say, 'This is the one and you are going to love it and if you don't, there is something wrong with you,' " Wang said.

In the United Stataes, HTC made a splash this summer by producing the first phone, the EVO 4G, that's able to use a 4G (fourth-generation) wireless data network. It's sold by Sprint. HTC also manufactured Google Inc's first phone, the Nexus One.

"These really put the brand into the spotlight in the United States," said Wallis-Jones.

Still, Apple has a daunting sales lead and HTC also faces competition from South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co, Nokia Corp and other rivals.

HTC was just behind Apple in the final quarter of 2008, selling 3.7 million phones to its US rival's 4.4 million, according to Wallis-Jones.

A year and a half later, Apple has pulled ahead, selling 8.4 million in the second quarter of this year, while HTC sold 5.4 million.

But HTC is seeing its sales jump. It expects to ship 6.5 million phones in the current quarter, more than twice the number it shipped in the same period last year.

Court battles

HTC cut its teeth on smartphones that used Microsoft Corp's Windows Mobile software.

But when Google released its Android smartphone software in 2008, HTC was the first manufacturer on board, and that's paid off.

Every US carrier except AT&T, the home of the iPhone, is pushing Android phones as the alternative to the iPhone.

HTC is pitted against Apple in the legal arena as well. Apple sued HTC in March in the United States, accusing it of violating 20 iPhone patents.

In May, HTC filed a countersuit accusing Apple of violating five patents.

Among consumers, HTC needs to create a distinctive identity as more than a manufacturer, said Joseph Pai, chairman of advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Taiwan.

"They get the technology right, but Apple is considered fun and creative and very bright," said Pai. "HTC is quite serious.

Their technology is good. They keep coming out with new products. But they need to find their own personality."

HTC is working on that, trying to build a reputation for anticipating users' needs and inventing appealing solutions, Wang said.

The company calls that "HTC Sense" and says it wants to create "moments of delight."

Its innovations include allowing users to group together friends' e-mail, social networking and other contacts under their names, while the iPhone requires separate contact lists for each function.

HTC phones can sense when they are in a pocket or purse and ring louder. The EVO has a tiny kickstand to stand upright for videoconferencing.

HTC promotes itself as a cross-border brand, with no mention of its Taiwanese roots. The company holds major product launches in London or New York, rather than Asia.

"People don't really think of Sony as Japanese any more. That's what I envision HTC to be," Wang said. "Eventually people will see HTC as a global brand, not necessarily from Taiwan or Europe or the United States." - AP

Review of HTC EVO 4G Android

As a mobile platform, the EVO 4G’s Android foundation is still an infant — well, okay, perhaps it’s a tweener — but in its two-odd years in the public spotlight, the list of truly revolutionary devices to use it has been a significant one: the G1 for being the first to market; the Nexus One for ushering in a new (and subsequently killed) retail model; perhaps the CLIQ for introducing Motorola to the platform or the Droid for bringing the company some desperately needed, long overdue success. For the moment, anyway, a whopping fraction of the world’s most important phones are running Google’s little experiment.

Needless to say, Sprint, HTC, and quite frankly, many of us have come to expect the EVO 4G to join that short list for some obvious reasons. Put simply, its magnificent list of specs reads as though it was scribbled on a napkin after a merry band of gadget nerds got tipsy at the watering hole and started riffing about their idea of the ultimate mobile device: a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 4.3-inch WVGA display, 8 megapixel camera with 720p video recording, HDMI-out, and WiMAX compatibility. Of course, the list of potential deal-breakers for a phone is as long as the EVO 4G’s display is wide; to put it another way, there are countless ways HTC, Sprint, or even Google could’ve screwed this thing up. So does this moderately intimidating black slab of pure engineering and marketing

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