Today I received my HTC Trophy with Windows Phone 7 from my employer Avanade Netherlands. In this small post i will cover my first impression about this phone and the new mobile OS.
First of all: I’am not a very experienced smartphone user, have only used smartphones with Windows Mobile OS. So I will compare this phone against the experience I have with the previous versions.
After unboxing the phone, and installing the SIM card into it, I turned on the phone and it started a very clean and simple wizard which updated some settings like the region etc. Within five minutes I was able to read my email, surf the web and download apps from the marketplace. Easy as what!
Capacitive screen
When working through the wizard I already noted that the capacitive screen is working very smooth. It responds directly to finger gestures and moves in a nice speed. This works really nice compared to the ‘old’ HTC Touch pro I was used to.
Tiles
The tiles on the home screen look very nice and clear to me. Customization is very easy, so it your phone will become soon your personal device. HTC has decided to no change very much to the home screen. They’ve added an HTC hub which is mostly doing something with the wheater and looks like the ‘old’ WM 6.5 screen. Not really interesting in my oponion. At least I expected more of it.
Clean fonts
When reading websites on the internet and working with some apps, I noticed that there are very clean fonts used in WP7. Reading from the screen is like an angel is touching your eyes 
. I’am getting a little bit to enthousiastic.
Onscreen keyboard
The onscreen keyboard is working very quick through it’s autocomplete functionality that even includes some dutch words. (Not all) I have choosen my previous phone with a hardware keyboard because I was not expecting that the onscreen keyboard will be handy enough. With this phone I was also worried a bit about this issue, but for now this onscreen keyboard works like a charm.
Bad things
Most people will ask: Haven’t you noticed anything bad in your first impression? Well, I don’t want to call it bad things but I think there are things missing. For example there is not very much information about your device status. (At least i haven’t found it) battery and memory status. Also the settings which you can change are minimal. It means you are not able to screw up the phone, but I like to change settings.
Overall I have a good feeling about the first impression and think that Ms has done a great job when building this OS. This definitly can be an Iphone killer if they have added the copy/paste functionality and tethering support.
Later on I will come up with pictures and probably a movie.
