OK so I’ve had the HTC Trophy 7 for a couple of weeks to try out and here are my final impressions:
Pros:
Lovely touchscreen with good resolution (480 X 800), but not as good as the Iphone 4 (960 x 640). This would probably affect gaming but during web browsing it’s hard to notice much of a difference.
Smooth interface of Windows Phone 7 – I was really impressed when I first started to use it as to how easy it was to set up and sync contacts and emails with the phone. Vodafone have their 360 portal link on the start page but you can easily get rid of it if you want to – the phone doesn’t seem to have much more VF stuff on it (a good thing!)
The phone is quite well-made, despite being mostly comprised of plastic. The thin plastic back panel does feel a bit tacky but the rear of the phone has the nice rubber-feel soft plastic which feels nice in the hand.
The 5 megapixel camera offers decent quality photos and slightly shaky 720p HD video capture. It’s sister the HTC 7 Mozart has an 8 megapixel offering.
As I mentioned earlier the addition of the sound enhancer giving you virtual surround sound is fantastic. I also liked the touch sensitive buttons beneath the screen which vibrate when touched.
It’s real good value for money – the handset is generally free with contracts around £20 p/m which gives you a whole lot of phone for your money.
Cons:
No multi-tasking. Annoying and will hopefully be addressed by Microsoft.
Bing maps is rubbish compared to Google maps. Getting a GPS location was generally easy to achieve, however as there are no decent sat-nav apps for Windows Phone 7 it was difficult to test this.
App store – no comparison to Android and Apple.
I found the battery life below par for this type of handset during the last week. As it doesn’t have true multi-tasking this was surprising. Watching a few YouTube clips really ran down the battery in no time at all.
The camera shutter button is too easy to press accidentally which takes the phone straight to the camera even in sleep mode.
I was unable to connect to my work Wi-Fi, probably as the username and password we have takes a long time to type in (full of different characters, upper & lower case) so the phone seemed to “time out” at every attempt to sign in.
Although not a problem for myself, I’m sure others will find the 8GB internal storage inadequate as the phone has no memory card slot. Doing a lot of recording @ 720p and this will be eaten up rather fast.
To get “deep” into the phone settings I had to go on the web and google how to do this as not everything appeared accessible at first – with the iphone it felt so easy to change settings.
So there we have it – a vast improvement over Windows Mobile 6.5 but there are areas where it is lacking. But as this phone and OS have been around for less than a year I’m sure we’ll see the issues being addressed soon. A lot of my friends and colleagues were genuinely interested in it when I was using it but they found it a bit “boring” due to the lack of applications available. In the mean time I’m going back to my Iphone 4.
