HTC 7 Trophy review, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
It truly is a catchy name, but the Trophy is – so to speak – the consolation prize in the HTC Windows Phone 7 lineup. It’s not the big guy in the family nor is it the smartest. The Trophy is a middle-of-the-roader, the mass market choice. It’s the first HTC-made Windows Phone 7 device we’re reviewing and we guess it’s up to them to prove there’s no such thing as an ex PocketPC maker.
HTC 7 Trophy price سعر اتش تي سي 7
HTC 7 Trophy price سعر اتش تي سي 7
Windows Phone 7 is about sky-high hardware standards and Microsoft is not really encouraging out-of-the-box thinking. What does this mean for the HTC 7 Trophy? Well, believe it or not, this here Trophy has come onto the scene to bring the one thing that Windows Phone 7 is obviously short of – device personality.
Don’t get us wrong, WP7 is a great looking OS – and one that will only be getting better in terms of usability – but Microsoft-imposed uniformity is making it hard for manufacturers to set their products apart. They are trying to make up for that with better screens or free apps, but they still haven’t hit on a winning formula yet.
The HTC 7 Trophy will do its best to be the WP7 phone that stands out from the crowd. Since Microsoft forbids any customization, HTC took a different approach to giving the OS some individuality. Instead of offering free apps from the Marketplace, HTC have built their own – available to download for free off the HTC Hub. And the hub itself is a pinch of Sense UI sprinkled on Windows Phone 7, with some awesome exclusive apps.
Key features:
- 3.8″ 16M-color capacitive LCD touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480 x 800 pixels)
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
- Dual-band 3G with HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) and HSUPA (2Mbps)
- Windows Phone 7 operating system
- 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, 576MB RAM, 512MB ROM
- 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, geotagging
- 720p video recording @ 25fps
- 8GB of built-in storage
- Standard 3.5mm audio jack
- Standard microUSB port (charging)
- Dolby Mobile and SRS sound enhancement
- Wi-Fi b/g/n
- Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
- Accelerometer for screen auto rotation
- Office document editor
- Facebook integration and cloud services
- Built-in A-GPS receiver
- Stereo FM Radio with RDS
- Comes with HTC Hub and exclusive HTC apps
- Voice-to-text functionality
Main disadvantages:
- Non-expandable storage
- Average display
- No lens protection
- Disappointing audio quality
WP7-specific limitations
- No system-wide file manager
- No Bluetooth file transfers
- No USB mass storage mode
- Limited third-party apps availability
- No Flash (nor Silverlight) support in the browser
- Too dependent on Zune software for file management and syncing
- No video calls
- New ringtones available only through the Marketplace
- Music player lacks equalizer presets
- No multitasking
- No copy/paste
- No DivX/XviD video support (automatic transcoding provided by Zune software)
- No sign of free Bing maps Navigation so far
- No internet tethering support
- No handwriting recognition support
Windows Phone 7 doesn’t have the luxury to break itself in gently to the smartphone arena like the iOS did. Microsoft’s new platform has been released into fierce OS competition with Google and Apple leading the way. Microsoft knows that best and will spare no effort to promote their Windows Phone 7. From funny TV ads and massive billboards, exclusive operator deals and even Xbox Live Arcade, they’re trying to make the biggest marketing impact in as short a time as possible. Not to mention product placement: WP7 phones are displacing iPhones in some of the highly-rated TV shows and recent blockbusters.
Alright, that’s a new platform that users need to hear about. As for individual devices, it will be up to the manufacturers to tout their strengths. In the case of the Trophy, you just can’t go around promoting a brand new Windows device from the makers of some the best Android phones. Nor can you refer to HTC’s record with Microsoft powered devices. Comparing Windows Phone 7 to PocketPC won’t make sense really.
WP7 interface has a lick of Sense
The software part of Windows Phone 7 reviews feels like a book you’ve read – that’s because all WP7 phones run the exact same software, with just a couple of preinstalled apps that make some difference. So don’t get surprised that we’ve reused some texts from our previous Windows Phone 7 reviews (including our dedicated WP7 review). We want you to be sure that even when we reuse portions of the texts, we always take care to check our facts with the review unit thoroughly.
Even though they weren’t allowed to do a complete UI makeover like they have on other platforms, HTC still managed to give the Trophy that trademark HTC feel. HTC Hub has the well familiar clock and a few other apps that wouldn’t look out of place in a Sense UI environment.
Before we go into details, here’s a video of the HTC 7 Trophy and the Windows Phone 7 interface.
The old Today screen is gone and it has been replaced with a set of Live tiles. It’s one of the most flexible homescreens we’ve seen. You’ll notice just how many useful things you can put on it as this review goes on. The iconic Start menu is gone too and there’s no trace of the honeycomb pattern either.
The Windows Phone 7 Metro UI has two main parts that live side by side – the homescreen (referred to as “Start”) and the main menu. You can switch between the two by sideways swipes or using the arrow button.
The homescreen is a grid of Live tiles. Live tiles fit the broad concept of “widget” but, unlike most widgets out there, are very uniform with clear labels of what each of them does. They display info (e.g. number of messages, the date) and are also the Windows Phone 7 equivalent of homescreen shortcuts.
The color theme of the interface is customizable – the background can be either dark or light and there’s a long list of accent colors (the fill color of the tiles).
The main menu is a traditional list – this is where all the hubs and installed apps are listed in alphabetical order. A press and hold reveals a context menu, which lets you “pin” items to the homescreen (that is put their Live tile there), uninstall them or rate and review an app that you’ve downloaded.
There are no folders in the main menu – so the more apps you install, the longer the list will get. So, finding apps that you chose not to pin to the homescreen may involve plenty of scrolling. The list is alphabetical, so at least you’ll know where to look. .
The interface is quite simple – sideways swipes navigate a sort of tabbed interface and there are on-screen soft keys. This will cover the most commonly used features, but for advanced features you can tap the “…” symbol.
It opens an extended context menu (and also reveals a label under each soft key, if the icon wasn’t revealing enough). Pressing and holding on an item in a list (e.g. a single message) will reveal a context menu relevant to that item only.
What Windows Phone 7 has lost since the 6th iteration is multitasking. It handles a lot like a pre-version-4 iOS. The Start key (the one with the Windows logo) will get you out of the app and on the homescreen. Alternatively, you can exit an app using the Back key. That gets you back to the app last used.
That last app will continue from exactly the same point from where you left it. Getting back into an app is done by tapping its live tile or shortcut in the menu or by using the back button, which returns to the previous screen (even if it was from a completely different app).
However, lack of multitasking means you can’t, say, run third party music players (e.g. last.fm) in the background. Apps also get suspended when you lock the screen – however, there’s the option to allow them to run with a locked screen.
Microsoft will lift that restriction, but only for the apps that prove battery-efficient – the phone must be able to work at least 6 hours with the app running if it’s a music player and 120 hours otherwise.
Still, all the other apps get suspended when you lock the phone – unlocking the phone will cause the app or game to reload, which can be slow and you usually lose your progress. This can be very annoying to even casual gamers.
There’s no “recently used” type of list to make going back to the app you need easier – so you might have to search for it in the main menu or keep hitting the Back button until you see it. So, multitasking is not a complete loss, but not quite as comfortable as true multitasking OSes either.
Phonebook has its head in the cloud
The People hub assumes the responsibilities of the phonebook, though calling it a “phonebook” is not very accurate. Instead of contacts, you have people with profiles – a term borrowed straight out of the social networking domain.
The first screen of the People hub shows you a list of all your contacts (phone contacts, social network friends, email pen friends – everything), with a search shortcut and an add contact button.
Contacts are ordered alphabetically, indexed with colored squares with a letter. You can tap on any one of those letter boxes and the screen shows you the whole alphabet highlighting the letters actually in use. You can tap a letter to skip dircetly to that part of the list.
Contacts can be sorted by either first name or last and they can be displayed as “First Last” or “Last, First” (the two settings are separate), you can also include or exclude Facebook friends, import only Facebook contacts that have a phone number and add several accounts to sync with.
Swiping to the side shows only new events from all contacts from social networks. Another swipe shows the recently called contacts. Instead of favorites, you can pin a contact to the homescreen.
Telephony is good, no smart dial is bad
The HTC 7 Trophy held on to signal quite well though it did drop a call in an area of poor reception. During a call, the sound is loud (pretty loud at the loudest setting) and clear.
The phone application shows you the call history, with shortcuts to voice mail, dialer and phonebook. The phone live tile will show the number of missed calls as will the lock screen.
The dialer itself is as simple as it gets – a phone keypad with a Call and a Save button. The lack of smart dialing is an annoyance, but the People hub is good at finding contacts.
You could use voice dialing instead – the Trophy did fairly well recognizing our commands, though it did have issues separating the two Dexter’s in our contact list – “Dexter” and “Dexter Morgan”. Still, it did recognize the unusual name of Mandark.
An interesting option is the International assist – it comes in handy for dialing while abroad or calling someone outside the country. What’s missing is the ability to set any song from your collection as a ringtone – a feature some of you might miss. You can download new ringtones from the Marketplace though (possibly for a fee).
When there’s an incoming call, the contact’s photo will appear full screen and you can slide up to reveal the answer and reject call buttons. This will prevent any accidentally answered or rejected calls.
A quick note – status indicators are hidden by default (except the clock) but you can bring them up with a quick tap on the very top of the screen.
Capable messaging
The messaging department of Windows Phone 7 uses threaded view to organize your messages. When you start the app, you’ll see a list of conversations – each one consists of multiple messages displayed as speech bubbles, which are ordered by the time they were sent/received.
An empty speech bubble will hang at the bottom waiting for you to type a response. A message can have multiple recipients too by using the + button next to the recipient field. Just the first few letters of the contact’s name are needed – the search feature will find it for you.
Gallery with connections to the cloud
The Pictures hub is the photo gallery of Windows Phone 7. When you start it, it shows the most recent photos (including those from the camera), What’s new (which shows photos from online services) and a menu, which lets you view all photos, photos sorted by date and your favorite photos.
Viewing an individual photo supports pinch zooming and you can easily upload the photo to Facebook or share it on some other service. There’s an option to automatically strip geo-tagging information before uploading it to online services – that way your offline album will still be geo-tagged, but you won’t have to worry about privacy.
We’ve had no issues with speed – Microsoft’s minim spec requirement guarantees that even 5MP photos are handled without a snag.
Even so, Microsoft has decided to downscale photos when they are transferred from a computer to the phone using the Zune software (much like emailing a photo).
One of the HTC provided apps – Photo Enhancer – can be used to add a bit of flare to photos. It’s a really basic app, you just open a photo and select an effect: Auto enhance, Cinnamon, High contrast, Sepia, Overexposed, Glimmer, Twilight, Vintage, Antique and a few more.
Music and videos play to the Dolby and SRS tune
The media players reside together in the Music & Videos hub, which bears the Zune logo. When you start it, it shows the History, which gives you quick access to the last two things played, or you can go to the full menu and start the music or video player, listen/watch podcasts (both audio and video podcasts are supported), start the FM radio or go to the Marketplace.
FM radio has RDS
The HTC 7 Trophy also has a built in FM radio with a dead simple interface. You have the current frequency in very large digits – swiping left and right changes the frequency and a swipe and release automatically searches for the next available station in that direction.
Disappointing audio quality
Unfortunately the HTC 7 Trophy audio quality is quite a bit short of impressive. There are notable flaws even when you use the handset with an active external amplifier – imperfect frequency response and high intermodulation distortion. The rest of the scores are pretty good, but are still not enough to bring the 7 Trophy up there with its competitiors.
And, as you could expect things get even worse when you plug in a pair of headphones. The stereo crosstalk increases (though it still remains pretty decent) and intermodulation distortion climbs even further. The 7 Trophy is also not among the loudest devices we have tested.
Check out the table and see for yourself.
Sub-par 5MP camera
The HTC 7 Trophy has a 5MP autofocus camera and LED flash that snaps photos with maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels.
The camera UI is pretty simple – you have your viewfinder and some controls on the right. From top to bottom they are the still/video camera toggle, virtual zoom buttons and an extended settings menu.
Photo quality comparison
We’ve also added the HTC 7 Trophy to the database of our Photo Compare Tool. The Tool’s page has a quick how to guide and also what to look for.
Video camera does 720p
The video camera interface is identical to the still camera one and has plenty of features too. You can calibrate contrast, saturation and sharpness, change the white balance or exposure compensation and also add image effects. You can use the LED as a video light too.
You can record in three resolutions – QVGA, VGA or 720p. The camera defaults to VGA, which is frustrating – if you forget to set it to 720p, the videos you thought were shot in HD will be at the much less impressive VGA resolution.
Connectivity sans Mass storage
The HTC 7 Trophy has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and dual-band 3G with HSPA (7.2Mbps downlink and 2Mbps uplink).
The local connectivity is covered by Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP. Bluetooth is currently limited as to what it can do – there’s no file transfer support.
Syncing with a computer is done with the Zune computer application. It’s the only way to transfer files directly between your computer and your Trophy – Windows Phone 7 doesn’t support Mass storage mode. Zune supports syncing over USB and Wi-Fi. There’s a Mac version of Zune in the works too. You can check our detailed review of the Zune software here.
http://www.gsmarena.com/zune_software-review-539.php
Another syncing option is the cloud. SkyDrive is a free Microsoft service that gives you 25GB cloud storage. You can even have your photos automatically uploaded as soon as you snap them.
Great browser, but where’s Silverlight?
Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 is the best mobile IE yet. But that doesn’t do it justice – it’s actually a huge leap forward compared to version 6.
Good organizer package
The calendar prefers two view modes – agenda and day view. You have month view too, but you can’t access it by side-swiping – you need to use the soft key for that.
You can sync with multiple calendars, including our Google Calendar but we had to add it as an Outlook (ActiveSync) account.
You can set multiple alarms – each with its own name, ringing sound and repeat pattern. We set up ten and yet the add alarm button didn’t grey out – the HTC 7 Trophy can handle more alarms than we know what to do with. There’s a basic calculator too, which has big, easy to hit buttons – turn the phone on its side and the calculator adds hexadecimal digits and a few more operations (e.g. mod).
Mobile office is better than ever, still not perfect
The Office hub is an important part of the Windows Phone 7 package. The interface is identical to the other hubs and it’s the best mobile Office suite we’ve seen yet.
The Office hub breaks down into three sections – OneNote, Documents and SharePoint.
Collaboration for both Word and Excel files is enabled with SharePoint. It allows syncing, sharing and web publishing but you’d need to use the right SharePoint server. You can attach those files to emails, though you need to do that from the Office hub. You can’t do it from the email editor, which caused a little confusion at first.
Anyway, let’s look at the two most important apps – Word and Excel. They share the Documents panel, which lists all available documents of the relevant types (in order of last used). Both viewing and editing of files is supported. PowerPoint files live in the Documents section too – but they are for viewing only, you can’t edit them or create new ones.
The Word file support is very good. When reading a file, you can tap the Outline key to view a list of all titles from the document. The other way for navigating long files is the Find key.
Editing is pretty straightforward and easy to use even on a mobile device. You type in the text and you can use the Format key to change the formatting of the selected text. You can also insert comments.
Formatting options include the standard bold, italic and underline, as well as text size, highlighting and font color. For highlighting and font colors you have only three colors to choose from, which is a little limiting but should be enough for most cases.
There’s undo and redo options but strangely, there’s no way to create lists, like in OneNote.
And of course, the biggest missing feature is copy and paste. That’s a huge miss for a document editor – you can’t copy and paste parts of other documents, emails, messages, sites, nothing. We’re guessing many people will sooner or later find this omission quite frustrating. Microsoft will be fixing that in early 2011.
The Excel viewer/editor is pretty good too, but like the Word editor it misses some features. You can add formulas to cells (though it’s not as easy as on the desktop Excel and there are fewer cells available), you can sort and filter the cells too, even merge some of them.
But cell formatting is limited to date, money or percentages. You can’t even change the currency sign. Another must-have missing is row and column insertion. Several sheets are supported but you get three by default and you can’t rename or delete them, nor add new ones.
Bing search, voice commands and SkyDrive
Like the Bing website, there are new photos every day to serve as a background, but WP7 has one extra – three squares on the photo, which give you three interesting facts about what’s in the picture. The copyright sign in the bottom right also reveals the location of the photo (e.g. “Waterfall on the Arroyo del Salto River”).
It’s not useful per se, but it’s a nice “Did you know…?” type of feature for the curious-minded.
Much like any other Windows Phone 7, HTC 7 Trophy has extensive voice recognition capabilities – you just press and hold the Windows key and say your command. You can do things like “Call Sarah at work”, “Open calendar” and even “What can I say?” if you’re not sure what commands you can give.
HTC Hub and other HTC apps
There are several HTC apps preloaded on the Trophy and we’ve already covered some of them. Now it’s time to look at the ones we haven’t covered yet.
HTC Hub for a brief moment looks like Sense UI – once that moment passes you see that the only thing borrowed from Sense is the clock with a weather forecast. A tap on the clock brings up a five day forecast. You can have multiple locations and the weather conditions are visualized in traditional Sense UI fashion.
Here’s a video of the apps so you can see them in action:
Plotting routes with Bing Maps
The HTC 7 Trophy comes with a capable GPS receiver built-in – it gets an accurate GPS lock in just a minute. Cell tower and Wi-Fi positioning is available too – it gets a lock almost instantly but it’s accurate to only 100-150 meters (good enough for location based services).
The native mapping app is Bing Maps – it has two modes (regular map mode and satellite photo mode) and you can get directions and information on nearby businesses too.
Interestingly, when you zoom in down to street level, Bing maps automatically switches to satellite imagery. However, the cool Bird’s eye view from the desktop Bing Maps isn’t available nor is Streetside view (Microsoft’s Street View alternative).
Try before you buy at the Marketplace
The Marketplace has gotten a few tweaks since we last saw it. It’s organized into four main sections – applications, games, music and the HTC Apps. A fifth section called Updates shows up when one of your installed apps has received an update – there’s an Update all button, which will save you the hassle of updating each app individually.
WP7 as a gaming platform
Xbox Live is at the heart of the Games hub. It carries over many features from the Xbox – from your avatar to your scores and achievements. The Spotlight feature is available too (it shows info on new stuff) and also Requests – which shows you game invites from your friends.
The WindowsPhone.Live.com cloud has a silver lining
Microsoft has added extensive support for “in the cloud” features in Windows Phone 7. The WindowsPhone.Live.com site is where you can access those features from your browser – everything from remote wipe to browsing photos.
My partner and I really enjoyed reading this blog post, I was just itching to know do you trade featured posts? I am always trying to find someone to make trades with and merely thought I would ask.
تعليق بواسطة small business grants — 2010/12/01 في 1:27 PM