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:

• engadget: HTC HD7 review
• engadget: Windows Phone 7 review

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.

• Download the Zune Software.

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

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

The update was downloaded to the phone and then:

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.

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