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

Microsoft hypes smartphone, browser

ENTHUSIASTIC: Ballmer addressing a sold-out crowd of developers at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC10) in Redmond, Washington. - Microsoft

REDMOND (Washington): Microsoft Corp CEO Steve Ballmer pumped up unique features in the company's new web browser and smartphone software at a software developer conference.

The event was the company's annual pep rally for people who will build programs for the Web, Windows computers and phones.

Ballmer is known for his onstage enthusiasm. This year, he joked with the crowd that he wouldn't repeat the memorable "developer prance" of years past, when he loped around hollering, "Developers! Developers!"

Dean Hachamovitch, a top executive in Microsoft's Internet Explorer division, showed off how developers can program websites to take advantage of new features.

Internet Explorer 9, which is in beta test form, uses more of a PC's hardware to make pages load and run faster. A new version of the underlying code has been released for developers.

IE9, which is only available for computers running Windows Vista and Windows 7, lets computer users "pin" websites to the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, creating a permanent shortcut that makes the site feel more like a desktop program.

Microsoft also unveiled some new apps - add-on programs that can be downloaded - for Windows Phone 7, its new smartphone software.

One was a version of Amazon.com Inc's Kindle e-book reader software. Microsoft's app marketplace now has 1,000 approved programs and games; the first Windows Phone 7 devices go on sale in the United States in early November.

Most of the keynote presentations centered on what software programmers can build with Microsoft's tools.

Microsoft is far behind Apple Inc with its iPhone and Google Inc with its Android smartphone software; tens of thousands of apps are already available for those phones and have been critical to their success.

But one of Microsoft's greatest strengths is its relationship with developers. The company's tools, which it is updating, will be familiar for developers who already make programs for Windows PCs, and Microsoft is hoping that will encourage them to build apps even though the popularity of the phone is unproven.

"We need your best work," Ballmer said to developers. "Make no mistake about it, when it comes to Windows Phone, we're all in."

Ballmer said Microsoft will give all developers who attend the conference at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters a Windows Phone 7 smartphone - more than a week before it goes on sale.

Microsoft also updated developers on its Azure system, which it describes as an operating system for "the cloud" - in other words, technology that allows programs to run not on a single computer or server, but across thousands of machines in datacentres scattered around the world.

Walt Disney Co's Pixar Animation Studios demonstrated a real-world example of how Azure works. The maker of the Toy Story movies is also responsible for the visual-effects rendering software used by many other movie studios.

Rendering effects is computing-power intensive, and in the past it required studios to invest in massive datacentres to crunch files.

Pixar built a version of the rendering software so it runs on Azure. It lets movie studios upload their raw files to the cloud.

The studio can decide how fast it wants the computing done, and the service ramps up the right number of machines to complete the work. The studio pays based on how much computing resources it uses, but doesn't have to buy a huge server farm. - AP

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.

Microsoft will launch more games on Windows Phone 7 platform for Xbox

NEW: Users with Windows Phone 7 handsets will be able to access their friends lists, game library and Xbox Live messages.

Microsoft will launch more and more games for mobile phones running its Windows Phone 7 operating system as the year goes on, unveiling 73 launch titles that integrate with the existing console service in one way or another.

Included in the roster are mobile versions of popular casual games Uno, Puzzle Quest 2,Bejeweled, and Flight Control, as well as more traditional console fare such as Assassin's Creed,Castlevania, Guitar Hero 5, and the blockbuster Halo series.

Integration with Xbox Live means that those with Windows Phone 7 handsets will be able to access their friends lists, game library, and Xbox Live messages.

Also included are leaderboard rankings and a cumulative, personal Gamerscore that can be increased via PC, Xbox 360, and mobile phone games that work with the Xbox Live service.

Latest estimates for Windows Phone 7's release indicate an October launch is most likely for European users, with United States joining in by November, though Microsoft has refrained from naming specific dates or, indeed, confirming anything beyond the 2010 holiday period.

Having elected to stand back from the handheld console market while Nintendo and Sony battled it out with their DS and PSP platforms, Microsoft looks well poised to leapfrog its console competitors, but face a tough challenge cutting through the established enthusiasm for Apple and Android handsets.

Given the buzz enjoyed by the iPhone 4 since its June release in the United States, and Google's march into the game space with its browser-based Web Store also targeting October, Microsoft need to come up with something special to cement its presence in the mobile entertainment sector - this could be just the foot in the door that it needs