HTC 7 Trophy Review

Introduction:

The word trophy conjures images of acclaimed success and triumph, of being the best of the best, the winner if you will. As it happens, HTC have given this accolade to their lowest specced Windows Phone 7 handset, the HTC 7 Trophy. With a 1GHz processor, a 5MP camera and 8GB of on board memory, the spec sheet is standard, but nevertheless, far from shabby. So can the HTC 7 Trophy, win the race or will it be shown up by the flashier competition?

Design:

Design-wise, the HTC 7 Trophy is the least HTC looking out of all the Windows Phone 7 handsets. With no gun metal, silver or matted hard plastic in sight, it has a distinctly black rubberised feel. Tactile and grippy to the touch, it is comfortable to hold, well weighted and while arguably lacking in design risks, delivers an aesthetically neutral, well put together solution that feels considerably more rugged than either the HTC 7 Mozart or the HD7.

The HTC 7 Trophy has a Super LCD display measuring in at 3.8 inches with a resolution of 480x800 pixels. Without the size of the HTC HD7, but with all its pixels at the same time, pixel density is greater giving you a sharper image. Naturally, given the technology, colours aren't as saturated as on AMOLED screens and blacks aren't as deep, but they nevertheless look vibrant for the most part and are bright enough, delivering a great overall experience. Coupled with good angles of view, we're left with no major complaints.





You can compare the HTC 7 Trophy with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

Below the screen are three capacitive buttons, above the screen is the in call speaker, at the top of the HTC 7 Trophy is the power button and a 3.5mm headphone jack, with the camera button to the bottom right and the volume rocker to the top left. Flip the phone over and you’ll find the 5MP autofocus camera with LED flash as well as the loud speaker. Remove the battery cover to reveal a bright yellow interior and a 1300mAh battery.


Overall, the HTC 7 Trophy feels solidly constructed, with a practical, understated design and a comfortable feel when swishing your way around Windows Phone 7. The screen is big enough to make tasks a breeze, and while the keyboard is not quite as comfortable as on the 4.3-inch HTC HD7 display, the 3.8-inch screen on the HTC 7 Trophy is still a great size for everything including text entry.

Interface:

Windows Phone 7 is an aesthetically unified OS, visually bringing all its functionality into a Zune inspired system of panels and panning. This looks great on the HTC 7 Trophy and the 3.8-inch screen is responsive to the touch when tapping on live panels or swiping through menus. The start menu (home screen) aggregates these panels into tiles aligned in a very simple vertical grid of two columns and multiple rows. Each tile takes up a fair chunk of the screen, and on first glance, it seems simplistic for a home screen, blurring the lines between home-screen and menu, however, it is also cleverer than it looks, displaying key live information within tiles, encouraging the user "glance and go", as Microsoft puts it, dipping in when appropriate.

Slide the homescreen out of the way and Microsoft bestows a simple list of applications on your screen. All these can be pinned to the start menu with a long press, or just opened from the list. We’d imagine that once we have 20-30 additional apps on the phone, this list will get too long, however, visually, it’s clean and in line with the rest of the OS. It’s worth noting that if you’re left-handed, Windows Phone 7 is not as usable as if you’re right handed as your thumb will cover the tiles and swiping right to left to get the menu up is un-intuitive - not a deal breaker, but try it out first.


Now we've covered the two start-up pages (the start menu and application list), we can move on to one standout feature of Windows Phone 7, the visual flourishes. Tapping a tile results in a cascade of current tiles revolving out of the frame, and a stream of new elements either panning, revolving, or emerging into the frame to deliver oncoming information. These would look like overkill on any other OS, however, thanks to the styling of Windows Phone 7 being so very simple, it works to have this one extravagance.

At the heart of this simple styling are the themes. Go into settings, press the themes option and you can "change your phone's background and accent colour to suit your mood today, this week or all month" as Microsoft puts it. As far as background colour goes, your options are whittled down to black or white, which is a good, minimalistic way to ensure the user doesn't make Microsoft's shiny new phone OS ugly. Accent colours are applied to app tiles and standout text. To compensate for the minimal choice of background, these can be one of 11 colours, green, red, blue, orange, pink, brown, lime, teal, purple and magenta. Network provider colours may also be selectable. This simplicity lends itself to an identity Microsoft is clearly trying to attribute to Windows Phone 7.

The interface is intuitive with very few layers of menu and is very clearly marked out. We found ourselves looking for a capacitive Android menu button at times with many applications lacking the extensive functionality their Android counterparts may have (i.e. selecting which Google Calendar to display if you have multiple under one account), however, Microsoft have clearly placed limits on the things doable on a Windows Phone 7 handset in order to keep the experience simple and clean, and they succeed for the most part. In turn, the HTC 7 Trophy offers reduced functionality when compared to Android so won't be for everyone, but thanks to the ease of use, visual flare and the fact that there really is no lag, there is definitely a place in the market for this usable, relatively inexpensive (when compared with other Windows Phone 7 devices) phone like the HTC 7 Trophy, with a clean, OS that won’t confuse and solid build.

Phonebook, Messaging and Organizer:

As a phone, the HTC 7 Trophy works well, with a good dialler sporting big responsive keys, it’s more finger friendly than the HD7 as thumbs have less distance to travel. Type a number in and there is a save button underneath the dialler. It's all very easy and intuitive. The phone book falls under the people tile. This offers very tight integration with Facebook, with a right swipe from your contact list taking you to friend's recent updates. The search capacitive button adapts its function depending on which menu you're in, so contacts can either be scrolled through or searched for directly as expected. Long press the Windows capacitive button to activate the voice dialler. We found this worked exceptionally well out of the box.


Messaging is also a pleasure for the most part. The keyboard is a good size on the HTC 7 Trophy both in portrait and landscape and the predictive text is very good indeed. The keyboard looks clean and simple with no gradients in sight which is great, though no copy and paste means functionality is hampered slightly, though Microsoft promises this in the near future.


Organizer features pre-installed include alarms, calculator, calendar and Notes. The calendar is the most finger friendly we've used in a while, looking very clean and feeling really intuitive. Adding appointments is simple, and the whole experience was a pleasure in every aspect other than the aforementioned section regarding multiple Google calendars (you can't choose which calendar under your Google account to use). The other standout feature is Notes, which, while adding little functionality to the OS beyond short note taking, does provide some nice eye candy nevertheless.

Camera and Multimedia:

With a 5MP autofocus camera with LED flash, the HTC 7 Trophy won't blow any minds, but nevertheless does a good job of making snaps look half decent. With little delay between shots and a speedy interface, everything ticks along nicely. Camera options include scenes (portrait, landscape, sports, beach, backlight, candlelight and macro), Effects (greyscale, negative, sepia, solarize), resolution (VGA, 1MP, 2MP, 3MP, 5MP), metering mode (center, average, spot) as well as flash (auto, on, off).




Colour reproduction is okay, with most shots looking a tad dull and a bit washed out. Detail is okay too and the flash is strong enough for most light requirements, however, won’t light up a room in the way the HD7’s twin LED flash will. It does suffer from a couple exposure issues, though this can be corrected for with the metering function. Dynamic range isn't fantastic, with high contrast scenes lacking detail in the extremities and noise being a big issue as with most camera phones. For low light dusky landscape shots for example, the Trophy isn’t ideal. An area the HTC 7 Trophy struggles is in macro shots, with in focus images looking a touch too soft. Indoor shots come out fine, largely thanks to the on-board flash. On the whole, you're certainly getting an upper middle level camera phone experiences with the HTC 7 Trophy, but certainly not something that could give your compact a run for its money like the Nokia N8.




HTC 7 Trophy Video Sample:



With Zune on board, the music experience is a giant step in the right direction for Windows. In fact, the music feels more integrated on Windows Phone 7 than on any platform other than the iPhone OS, and if you own a Zune, even more so than that.  It's slick, simple to get to grips with and well integrated, with access to basic music functionality on the lock screen for example. Audio quality is good and the Dolby Mobile and SRS Surround offers a great range of output options.



When it comes to videos the Zune software integration lends to compensate for the lack of codec support on the HTC 7 Trophy. The phone will play MP4 and WMV files, and the onboard software will convert other video formats to your phone's optimal resolution which is handy, but will leave you waiting a while for your movies, depending on the performance of your computer. Watching movies and videos on the HTC 7 Trophy is great. While not as visually immersive as on the HTC HD 7 thanks to the screen size, it nevertheless delivers the goods. With the Dolby Mobile and SRS on board, great sound really helped boost the experience, and while colours could have done with a bit more punch, brightness is adequate, playback is smooth and detail is good.

Internet and Connectivity:

The HTC 7 Trophy is a quad-band GSM, dual-band 3G phone loaded with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS on board. Connections include a 3.5mm headphone jack, a microUSB port and there’s 8GB of memory on board. The only things we might have liked to see are DLNA functionality and a mini HDMI port.

Completely in line with the latest and greatest achievements in the area, the new Internet Explorer delivers fast loading times and silky smooth scrolling. The same goes for zooming, which you can do by either double-tapping or using pinch-to-zoom. Both options work flawlessly. In addition, the HTC 7 Trophy’s 3.8 inch screen offers a great trade off between pocketability and web browsability.

Internet Explorer lacks Flash and Silverlight support, which is on one hand unpleasant, but on the other, it guarantees flawless operation, so we can live without it. Android has the advantage here, but we shouldn't forget the fact that scrolling when a Flash element is present is far from smooth in Google's OS.

The email client works great. As soon as you've entered your account details, your emails start to populate. Everything works super smooth. Unfortunately, you do not get a universal inbox like in bada or iOS, so your different inboxes are displayed as separate tiles. However, this isn't much of an inconvenience as flitting between mailboxes is so quick on the HTC 7 Trophy. Another point is that emails are displayed in full HTML glory and look fantastic.


 
Software:

Bing Maps gets you from A to B on a Windows Phone 7 device. Panning the map around is very smooth, as is pinch zooming. The available options are pretty standard – you can search for a specific location, go to your position, and get directions. Unfortunately, there is no support for voice-guided navigation yet.

Searching for POIs on the HTC 7 Trophy is very intuitive, and once you open a POI in order to see more details, you are presented with the exact address, an option to get directions and a phone number. You can also pin a certain POI to the home screen, as well as share it via text or email.

The GPS managed to get our location fixed very quickly after a cold start and kept locked on through an entire 20 minute journey with no issues.

We were a bit underwhelmed by the Office Hub of the HTC 7 Trophy. While the panoramic user interface is great, we found Word Mobile's options to be quite limited. You can also create, view and edit Excel files (with a range of available functions to choose from), as well as view and edit PowerPoint presentations. However, editing here comes down to just editing text. You can also take notes using the included OneNote software, or collaborate through SharePoint.


For functionality that happens to be beyond Windows Phone 7's out-of-the-box capabilities, you'll have to rely on the new Marketplace Hub, which is limited at the moment, but growing steadily.

Performance:

Call quality on the HTC 7 Trophy is on the whole good. When listening on the phone, there are no issues with regards to either volume or clarity. Listeners on the other end of the line found that the phone was a bit quiet at times, however, repositioning the handset slightly corrected for this. The loudspeaker delivers an overall good noise, though is slightly tinny with a few muffles, but nothing major. With there being no issues with regards to reception or mobile browsing, the HTC 7 Trophy gets an overall thumbs-up in this department.

Get the HTC 7 Trophy up and running and you will find the overwhelming smoothness and visual flare of the OS works a treat. Given the hardware and software, 99% of the time, it all runs like a dream.

One final point on performance is a lack of true multi tasking. This didn't ruin the experience by any means, but meant, for example a half written text was lost on a couple of occasions when hitting the search button by mistake.

Battery life on the HTC 7 Trophy is pretty standard. With a quoted 6.75 hours talk time and 17 days standby time, in reality, it lasts a full day and maybe a bit more. Better than the HTC Desire, Desire HD and HD7, however, not a patch on similarly specced Symbian phones.

Conclusion:

The HTC 7 Trophy is a winner after all. With solid specs, a nice rugged feel as well as solid performance across the board, the HTC 7 trophy delivers a great screen, great connectivity and great performance. Admittedly, the camera could be better and the screen bigger, however, we’d say the HTC 7 Trophy finds a good balance between price and performance. Alternatives to the HTC 7 Trophy include the HTC 7 Mozart for an 8MP camera with a Xenon flash on a very similarly specced device, the Motorola Defy for an Android phone that can take a bit of a bash here and there, or the Nokia C7 for a well-balanced Symbian alternative.

Thanks to Vodafone UK for providing us with the review unit!

HTC 7 Trophy Video Review: