HTC HD7 – India’s First Superb Hardware Windows 7 Phone
HTC has launched India’s first Windows Phone 7 namely HTC HD7 with partnership with Bharti Airtel in India. HTC HD7 is powered by 1GHz processor. The screen that just keeps on going meets the OS that refuses to fit on a single display. Yes, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, like Windows Mobile 6.5 and Android. The HTC HD7 (T-Mobile) has the specs of a high-end phone: The HD7 is a great device for watching movies or browsing the Web, which are becoming the norm for high-end phones.
Display
The HD7 isn’t shy about proclaiming itself an entertainment machine and its design reflects these aspirations. A slight tilt off-axis and colors get shimmery and washed out—it’s particularly noticeable with Windows Phone’s in-your-face primary colors. The hardware buttons on the side are smoother, too, giving it an overall sleeker appearance. Like the HTC EVO 4G (on Sprint also with a 4.3-inch display), measuring 4.8 by 2.7 by 0.4 inches thick and weighing 5.7 ounces the HD7 has a kickstand for tabletop video-watching. The kickstand pulls out from the camera’s lens. Also houses a volume rocker, a two-stage camera button, and your standard-issue power/lock combo button. If you’ve got large jeans pockets, you should be fine. Ladies, forget about carrying this thing in your pocket.
Camera
The HTC HD7 sports a 5-megapixel shooter with a dual-LED flash. All WP 7 phones also must have a dedicated camera key, the camera app from a locked screen (by holding down the shutter button). You get a few basic camera Click to zoom.controls like Scene settings (auto, portrait, landscape, sports, beach, and so on), Effects (Grayscale, Negative, Solarize), as well as metering and resolution controls.The HD7 defaults, weirdly enough, to shooting 480p video, which you have to switch up yourself… each and every time you use the video app. Maybe we’re unenlightened on how to make our settings stick, but sure enough, each time we turned on the camera and wanted to shoot at 720p, we had to manually turn it on. Unfortunately, Windows Phone 7 doesn’t have direct upload to YouTube in the gallery, which is another painfully obvious feature that the OS overlooks.
Software/ Windows Phone 7
The first thing to note is that HTC adorns the bootup sequence for its Hub animation that pummels you with oncoming cloud and sun symbols to remind you that yes, there’s a weather app coming up in there. Once you get inside, you’re faced with a stock updater, that climate-monitoring utility is a quirky, stylized take on your usual note-recording app. It gives you a board that you can “pin” little post-its to, which in turn age relative to their, age. We could frankly take it or leave it, there’s a character limit on each note so if you’re a wordy sort of missive writer, it’ll immediately discourage use, while its stylized elements feel somewhat forced and unnecessary.
Now the Photo Enhancer, image post-processing app doesn’t really have any pretensions for the high office of actually enhancing your photos. Oh, sure enough, it has one preset for auto-correcting and enhancing your pics, but it’s real title might be something closer to Photo Fiddler. It comes with a bunch of different after-effects you can apply to generate particular artistic conceits atop your images — from making them look like monochromatic classic, to intentionally over-exposing them, to giving them warm or cold color casts with 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS, Dolby Mobile, SRS surround and 1230mAh battery. Honestly, it was a lot more fun than we expected it to be and its basic but varied functionality seems a perfect fit for the device it’s riding on.
Price
HTC HD7 will be available for Rs. 29990. Airtel customers get a special data pack of 2GB per month for 6 months at Rs 300 extra.
Conclusion
The HD7 is a high-quality phone, but without a front-facing camera or 4G data speeds, it can’t compete with the T-Mobile myTouch 4G, Apple iPhone 4, HTC EVO 4G, or Samsung Epic 4G. If you’re a T-Mobile customer longing for a Windows Phone 7, however, the HTC HD7 is a nice introduction to the platform and a great entertainment phone. Make sure you give Windows Phone 7 a test run, however, before purchasing. It has a few quirks as well as a few missing features, like copy/paste and Flash support.
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