Windows Phone – a month with my HTC HD7

So I’ve now had my HTC HD7 for around a month, and its a great phone.

I was a bit vary of the Windows Phone OS. But Microsoft has done a great job upgrading their mobile operating system from windows mobile to windows phone. The basic home-screen is a bunch of square tiles. Simple yet effective. There are no multiple homescreens like you get with the Android devices, but swipe across and you are welcomed by a list of all installed applications. Simple. It’s okay when you have say twenty or thirty apps, but as you download more it gets a bit confusing scrolling through a long list of apps trying to find the one you are looking for. Unless of course you know the name of the app, then you can just quickly use the little search feature and voila, you’re done.

What I really love about the new Windows Phone OS is the ‘People’ application. This links all your accounts, including windows live, facebook, twitter, etc. and gathers all the contacts from them into once place. You can then link up contacts who are available across the different platforms and quickly write on their facebook, or mention them in a tweet, text them, call them, whatever. All the possible options of contacting that person, is listed in that one contact. Sweet.

Windows Phone links with the Zune software which can be found on Microsoft’s media devices, and also available for desktops. This is the only way to get your content to and from your phone. I would have preferred to have bluetooth transfer and managing my media manually like a memory card, but never mind, it works. I can’t complain.

What I really didn’t like was the fact that I was unable to tether my phone. Yes Windows Phone does not give you the option to tether your data connection to your computer/laptop. After searching online for hours and hours, and reading the amazing forums over at XDA developers and many other forums and came across the Deepshining v3.1 ROM. Now this is awesome. The easiest way to tether your phone and some more added functionality.

It’s a good, solid phone. Particularly interesting is the little stand on the back. Personally I’ve never used it and don’t ever plan to. But its something different and cool. The camera is not bad. Okay I lied, the camera sucks. It’s worse than my BlackBerry Torch’s camera, but who cares? The phone is quite large itself, but I like having the large touchscreen, in fact I really like the Samsung Galaxy Note, only because it has a massive screen. One thing I do hate, is the really bad battery life, o and also the fact that it takes ages to sync my emails. BlackBerry on the other hand is amazing on push emails.

But Windows Phone is still a foetus when it comes to mobile operating systems. Microsoft has made a massive jump and given its mobile operating system a massive overhaul and designed it from scratch. The Windows Phone operating system is very much similar to the ‘tablet’ look of the Windows 8 Desktop version (public beta to be released sometime early 2012) . This post wasn’t meant to be a full review of the phone, you can easily find great reviews on many sites; it was just meant to be a rant about the phone and my month that I’ve spent with it.

It’s impressive. And still developing. The UI is amazing, but it still doesn’t have much of a unique and amazing factor to it; if I hadn’t received it for free, I would never have bought it. But all in all, a decent, large touch screen, smooth UI phone, with adequate camera, crap battery life, decent app availability, but great looks!

If you do want to read a full detailed review, TechRadar have a done a nice review of this device. Click here =)