Monday 7 March 2011

HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 First Impressions

My old HTC Touch Pro died this last weekend. So, despite wanting to wait until the summer before picking up a new Windows Phone 7 based device my hand was forced.

After evaluating the three main cellular provider’s Windows Phone 7 (WP7) devices I settled on the HTC HD7 offered by Bell Mobility.

This essentially killed two birds with one stone:

  1. Discontinued our longstanding TELUS Mobility (TELUS) service (previous blog post on some of the pain points with them).
  2. Replaced the now dead HTC Touch Pro.

First off, engadget has a couple of really good posts on the HD7 and WP7:

Now, since I have had a Zune HD since last year that gets used a lot the Metro GUI on the HD7 has been pretty straight forward to get used to.

Initial Impressions
  • The screen is huge, clear, and rich in colour compared to my old HTC Touch Pro.
    • Almost anything would look better! ;)
  • Exchange configuration was very straight forward.
  • The integration between Outlook, Hotmail, Facebook, and other social media sites is amazing.
  • In Phone mode the screen blanks when the phone is at the ear but immediately goes active when the phone is taken away from the ear.

I like it. :)

The phone did require an update right from the start. In order to do that though the Zune software was required.

Once done, the Zune software picked up the phone right away though it required an update for itself:

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Once the Zune software was up to date we were able to move forward with updating the phone.

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The update was downloaded to the phone and then:

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Once the phone rebooted it came up into an update mode with an icon of a laptop tethered to a Windows phone. There was a progress bar that ran up the left hand side of the phone’s screen.

I was not able to watch the update complete, but the first third took about 10 minutes. The progress bar then sat there for quite a while.

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Once completed, the phone was sitting at the lock screen. The approximate time for the update was about 30-45 minutes.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

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