WP7 on HTC HD7

It already seems like a week, but it has been only a day that I've been in possession of my new phone. I really like this device, as much as I hoped I would and I am even a bit surprised at how much I enjoy it.

I'm sure you've read the various online reviews if you had any interest in WP7 and I won't go into too much detail but I will offer my experience with the phone as compared to other review[er]s.

I chose this particular model because of the size of the screen. It is large at 4.3 inches diagonal. It's a[n] SLED screen, older technology and I feared it would appear dim and lack color but I have been pleased with how bright it is and the colors on screen. Not nearly as bad as some reviewers led me to believe. The blues are blue, the reds are red and streamed video looks great. The viewing angle is good as well, despite what you might have read elsewhere.

As you can imagine, the phone itself is large and while I have no problem handling it, someone with a smaller hand might.

I'm not a big photographer but a 5 mega-pixel camera was nice to have as well. The camera does have some issues which might be resolved in a future firmware update (it's not an operating system issue, but hardware). As many reviews mention, it washes out photos with its dual flash, can be difficult to focus, etc.

My phone came with the basics. A USB wall charger, a separate USB chord and ear buds. I also bought a screen protector pack, but have not yet used any of them. The ear buds were broken (sound only came from one side).

So much for the basic hardware.

Windows Phone 7, the new MS phone operating system, is quite nice to work with. MS rushed it out the door to have phones ready by Christmas and some aspects of the OS are missing, but MS promised them in a future (January?, February?) update.

All screens work on the basic premise that you are looking through a horizontally scrolling portal at a larger page. Once you reach a portion of an application you want, you can then scroll vertically as well. Not ALL apps available to the phone work this way, but the better ones do follow this basic design principle (as laid out by Microsoft). At first you might think that is a lot of scrolling and hunting but as you scroll the pages jump a page at a time (smoothly) and the swiping motion is natural and not uncomfortable. The OS responds very well to the touch and the amount of pressure or swiping to get reactions feels "just right."

The front page is sort of like an application unto itself. It contains your "favorite" applications and one quick swipe to the left (or tap the arrow icon) brings the FULL list of applications to bear. Any application that supports it will have useful information display on the favorites screen. These are called "live tiles." Again, the application you place there has to support live tile updates to provide information, but many of the ones you would want to do that, do (mail, zune, people, photographs, messaging, etc.)

One complaint I've heard and have already dismissed is the status bar at the top. It hides. In fact you only see it if you swipe down from the top or if the phone needs to get your attention (for example of the battery is very low). I like this, I don't need to see that information all of the time... but some people might.

So far I've already spent far too much money on applications. They range in price from FREE, to $0.99 to $14.99 with most apps costing $1.99 or $2.99. The "Marketplace" (Microsoft's "App Store") has a lot of useful applications in it, but is still very sparse compared to what's available for the iPhone. For example, I really wanted "Star Walk" but it just is not available. I am hoping the developer will port it to WP7.

So what are the apps I have and how are they?

The apps that come WITH WP7 are quite useful. MS Office, Mail, IE, etc. The usual suspects, plus the People and Photo hubs, stuff like that. Hubs, btw, group similar data in one place. For example, my people hub has my Windows Live and Facebook data all in one place, including access to photos, threads of discussion, etc. The Pictures hub is similar but just focuses on photographs. Beyond that I also downloaded 3 Bibles, a news app, 2 weather apps (with live tile updating on the home screen), a couple of games (frogger, need for speed), some other weird apps like "Congress" which tracks the goins on of your own senators and reps and provides you multiple ways to communicate with them, silly apps like "days to christmas", the official Facebook app, Twitter app, last.fm, maps, a level, unit translators, picasa, a piano, a periodic table, remember the milk, youtube, etc. Oh, and it came with Netflix as well, and some other video and radio apps (it has a built-in FM reciever, did I mention that?)

Are the apps any good? Mail works very well, I have my Windows Live and GMail accounts in it, and so far it has been flawless. IE is surprisingly fast and renders fairly well, I've noticed some bad handling of the latest CSS 2.0 specs, but not bad over all, and the zooming is super-smooth. Netflix works well, but you are best off using WiFi with it, not 3G (same goes for the other video streaming apps). Zune is fantastic. I absolutely love it. It could not import all of my iTunes songs, only the non-DRM ones, but I purchased a zune pass to see how that goes. That gets you free music access for a month at a time and allows you to keep 11 songs per month as tho' you had purchased them outright. You can also simply purchase songs (and video, like TV shows) outright as well if you want, and the Zune store is actually pretty darn cheap.

The Bible apps I got, one was free, two cost money. One that cost money added abilities to tag scripture with your own notes and stuff like that, but otherwise they all had pretty intuitive interfaces, one required a web connection to download scripture.

I have the Weather Channel and Weather Bug apps. I use Weather Bug as it is less buggy and provides TONS of data including maps and local webcam images.

Maps simply locates you and slaps a map under you... nothing too spectacular there, but I believe it uses Bing maps which is pretty good.

The calendar app is simple, not much to talk about. Google calendar integrates with it.

The "Need for Speed" game is fun and uses the phone's motion sensors to turn your phone into a steering wheel with specific, but simple touch motions for brakes, turbo speeds, etc. Frogger is a pain as it always was, in my opinion. It's nearly impossible to get a frog into the left-most slot. Drives me nuts.

MS Office is nice, allowing you to read and write all sorts of MS documents (doc, excel, one-note, etc.) but I prefer using remember the milk or calendar for tasks. I also downloaded Adobe PDF, already came in handy when someone sent me a PDF doc in mail.

I also like AP Mobile (news feed)... it is nicely laid out (I think) and easy to navigate and contains a ton of data.

I grabbed EBook Reader... but haven't used it yet. I did do a search and found "Ethan Frome" on it. But I probably won't read that story.

The most expensive app I purchased was Geocaching... the official app for geocaching.com. I love how slick it is!

The Pocket Piano is pretty cool too. Anabelle likes it. Slacker radio is nice, but Zune has similar features so it seems redundant.

Twitter is twitter and the Facebook app is a complete Facebook app on the phone. Perhaps a little TOO much, and redundant as Facebook support is built into the People hub. Twitter will be built into it in the first update as well, so I hear.

YouTube is... YouTube. It's the mobile version (the interface) and nothing to write home about, but it works. By the way, I already added Facebook and other links to my Windows Live account so some of the information I am getting is duplicated and I need to decide how to handle that, perhaps remove it from Windows Live, not sure. I'll see how much it bothers me over time.

And that is it for now. All in all my first day with WP7 running on my HTC HD7 has been a lot of fun. I would heartily recommend this phone and operating system to anyone looking for a new smart phone. It's really good, and it will only be getting better.