Review: HTC 7 Trophy

Brenton Currie
Wednesday, 11 May 2011 04:57

Mobile devices

While in this review we're not going to go into the pros and cons of the operating system, Windows Phone 7, the HTC 7 Trophy certainly shows off the power and glamour found in the radically re-designed Microsoft offering. Gone are the days of Windows Mobile '” Windows Phone is truly an amazing new way to use your phone, revitalising the 'screens of apps' found on the iPhone and most Android phones.

The phone itself is fairly stock-standard thanks in large to Microsoft's stringent rules for manufacturers using their operating system. It's got a 1GHz processor, 8GB internal storage, 5MP camera and 720p HD video support, and a 3.8'³ resistive touch screen display - just sneaking into the specification range. With the 1GHz processor games and other apps run smoothly, although the more detailed games at times suffered some barely noticeable lag when a number of interactions were required.

HTC's WP7 apps ship on the device, and provides a hub for news, finance and weather information. Building upon their Sense overlay which ships on other devices such as the ones running Android, the 'HTC Hub' offers an immersive and truly impressive way to view weather information, while the sound and photo enhancing apps will satisfy most people's basic editing wants. Unfortunately there's no cool augmented reality app like the one which ships on LG's Windows Phone 7 devices, but HTC's app are far from a complete letdown.

The camera is impressive, although not as good as Apple's iPhone 4 when images taken are compared. There is one benefit the camera on the Trophy has over the iPhone '” thanks to Microsoft's rules, there has to be a hardware button to launch the camera, so snapping a picture takes less than 10 seconds as opposed to the drawn out process on the iPhone due to the lack of a physical button.