Phone smart

HTC Trophy

The mighty red received its first Windows Phone 7 device today, called the HTC Trophy. Verizons first 3G spawn of Bill Gates completes the major carrier circuit, so now theres no excuse for Microsoft to lose out on sales with all four of their bases covered. For $150 with a $50 mail-in rebate and 2-year Verizon voice and data contract, this phone could be yours. If youre familiar with the Windows Phone 7 interface, the Trophy is no different from the Samsung Focus, LG Quantum, HTC Surround, or any of the other Windows Phone 7 phones weve reviewed this year. However, it struck us as more of a plain Jane device with its standard screen size and subdued outward appearance. Call quality was fair and battery life was lacking. The phone is nice to look at, and its interface is beautiful, but were not sure the HTC Trophy has what it takes to snag first place over the rest of Verizons formidable fleet.

Design

The Trophy is closest to the HTC Droid Incredible 2 in the looks department. Its a compact device, flaunting dimensions that are almost identical to the iPhone 4, though the Trophy is notably thicker. We love the fact that HTC retained the sexy red interior underneath the back panel, and the red speaker accents were hot. For the sound junkies out there, it has SRS WOW HD speakers, so our audio experience was top notch. The Trophy has a basic 3.8-inch WVGA screen that had difficulty displaying text at small fonts. Everything appeared jumbled until we zoomed in, and the text for the icons on the second Home screen bled together as we scrolled up and down. Needless to say, the Trophys screen was a long shot from the top.

The smartphone is fairly well equipped with outward controls, giving us a Camera button that seems to be disappearing on higher-end phones these days. In back resides the 5-megapixel main camera with embedded flash and youll notice that theres no MicroSD card slot. Thats because all memory lies within—16GB of internal storage, that is. The Trophy is stocked with a 1300mAh battery pack, which youll read about later on, but the results in our battery tests were not promising. Aside from the main entrees, the HTC Trophy is built with the standard 3.5mm audio jack, open USB terminal, large volume rocker, and panel of 3 haptic feedback touch controls: Back, Windows (Home), and Search (Bing). The Trophy was not the most advanced phone weve seen, but it was sleek and attractive.

Software and Interface

If youve seen it once, youve seen it a thousand times. The Windows Phone 7 OS is uniform across all phones and carriers, so if youve played with one at your local phone store, then you know just how the Trophy operates. First, well get the hardware out of the way. It has a quick 1GHz Snapdragon processor, Wi-Fi Wireless-N connectivity, GPS, and an accelerometer for 3D action. It can also be used as a world phone, thanks to its Global Ready connectivity.

As highlighted numerous times before, the Trophy relies on Hubs as the main steering wheel for its interface. This is part of the "Phone to save us from our phones" hubbub, though we think its entirely up to the user when it comes to prying themselves from their device. What Microsoft has done is lay out a grid of animated icons for hubs like People, Messaging, Internet Explorer, Calendar, Pictures, Music and Videos, Me, and more. So, rather than go on the hunt within an Android OS for particular icons, Windows Phones place them right in plain sight. However, Android is more customizable and can create its own icon grid.

In that sense, the Windows Phone 7 interface is closer to iOS, though phones like the Trophy offer a secondary Home page with settings. One of the cool things about the Trophy and other Windows Phone 7 phones is that the Camera can be fired on from the Lock screen by pressing and holding the Camera button. Overall, the Windows Phone 7 OS is beautiful, but we think its nicer to look at than actually functional.

Internet

For example, the Internet browser is lacking compared to the competition. Aside from the fact that we dont get Flash, the browser is just bare bones—it sort of seems like an afterthought. The Refresh control is all we get in the Address bar, as everything else is tacked to the Menu control. Adding and selecting windows is easy and checking Favorites and History is intuitive, but viewing is all you can really expect from the Trophy.

Multimedia and Productivity



HTC Hub »
This is an arena where Windows phones shine. Lets start with Pictures. When the Pictures icon is selected, it gives us the option of viewing our Camera Roll, latest uploads from social networking friends, or our personal galleries from synched websites like Facebook. Music and Videos lets us synch whatever we want from iTunes to the phone and displays album artwork, shows history, offers Slacker Radio, and a Marketplace for taking albums for test drives before buying. For gaming, the Trophy offered the Xbox Live store and we had the chance to create our own personal gaming avatar. We also got the HTC Hub for snagging additional applications not offered by the Windows Marketplace. Lastly, Microsoft Office came to the rescue for working on Office documents like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and supported OneNote and SharePoint.

Call Quality/Battery Life

While Verizon phones usually give us the best call quality, our HTC Trophy review unit fell below the mark. Calls were quite decipherable and crisp, but they had a slight hiss to them. This was not a huge problem, and certainly not as pressing as the battery dilemma. Yes, the Trophys battery life was less than desirable. We predicted it when we took a gander at the phones 1300mAh battery pack, and the phone proceeded to last less than a day on a single charge. Think iPhone 4 when it comes to juice. After the slew of powerhouses with exceptional battery life weve been seeing (Samsung Infuse 4G, Motorola Atrix 4G, etc.), the Trophys battery life is falling quite behind the times.

Camera

The Trophys camera was a bit of a tossup. Its a 5-megapixel shooter with 720p HD video recording. Bright light macro shots were top notch—some of the best weve taken with a phone. However, landscapes exhibited a lot of in-camera sharpening and pixel smearing. Indoor and low light shooting was noisy as all get out, but low light sensitivity was better than we expected. We hated the fact that every time we changed a camera setting like resolution or metering, it would be set back to default the next time we fired the camera on. This needs to change because it is the most annoying thing weve found on a phone camera to date.

There were a fair amount of Scene modes, and the camera had a video light. However, the video light could not be toggled while recording and the camera was devoid of touch focus. If you like macro shooting, the Trophy will rule. Other than that, pictures and videos will be piped straight from Mediocre Land (check out photo and video samples). We did like the Photo Enhancer, which allowed us to alter our images with several different cool filters and save them as separate files.

HTC Trophy – Features & Specifications

3.8-inches WVGA capacitive touchscreen, 480 X 800 pixels resolution
Weight: 140 g with battery
Windows Phone 7 OS
1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor
Adreno 200 GPU
Internal memory: 8 GB
512 MB of ROM & 576 MB of RAM
5 MP camera with Dual-LED Flash
HD Video Recording @ 720p
3G network support
Up to7.2 Mbps download speed
Up to 2.2 Mbps upload speed
GPRS, EDGE support
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP & EDR
GPS & A-GPS navigation support
HTC Hub for weather, stocks, converter etc
1300 mAh Battery capacity
Standby time upto 435 hours (WCDMA)
Standby time upto 360 hours (GSM)
Talk time upto 330 mins (WCDMA)
Talk time upto 405 mins (GSM)
Social Networking
Facebook & Windows Live App
Share Photos on Facebook & Sky Drive