Much
has been said about the Windows Phones since its launch and the
pre-launch conjectures had filled up more Google pages than you can
imagine! The new HTC Trophy smartphone is launched as part of the WP7
family in October 2010.
The
HTC Trophy is a user-friendly smartphone that fares well against basic
smartphone offerings. It is like your girl next door! Not too slim or
light, but nicely small with a 3.8-inch, 800-by-480 16M-color TFT LCD capacitive
touch screen. This average black slab looks better outdoors and has a
better screen sharpness than larger smartphones since the physical area
of the screen over which the pixels are distributed is smaller. The
soft-touch black plastic back of the phone is cumbersome due to the
presence of the 5- megapixel camera (with flash), so you have to live
with that metal bulge. Plus the media capturing is not to be boasted
about. Blurry picture (due to autofocus not locking properly) and too
much sensitiveness to light cause this feature to be half-baked. As for
video recording, Trophy is good for shooting 640 x 480 video at 30
frames per second outdoors, everything else comes out at a much less
than desirable level.
The
voice and sound system of this smartphone are better than most of its
sisters and the earphones and speakers are of commendable quality. While
HTC Trophy does offer you voice dialing on your Bluetooth Headset, any
other voice commands are unavailable. Although music can be played on
Bluetooth headphones, video watching would require wired headsets since
video sound streaming is not done over Bluetooth. Battery life also
leaves some standards to be desired since average battery life clocks at
5 hours of talk time with less than 24 hours in standby time – that
statistic in itself is not a good reckoner in today’s era.
Being
a 3G phone and Wi-fi accessible, internet connection commences at close
to a speed of 1 Mbps. While it does not support Skype Mobile and does
not act as a modem for your laptop, priced at a comfortable INR 7000, it
does make an attractive choice for entry-level users.
And
the OS comes in as simple a form as they can get! It isafter all a
Windows Phone! So at the risk of sounding repetitive, let me again
enumerate. WP7 comes with a home screen that can be scrolled to choose
your desired tile and you can enter a hub of activities through each of
these modifiable live tiles. Currently with 18000 installed apps and
another 500 more features in the next upgrade, the choices are plenty to
say the least.
Now
let me tell you why this phone exists! It’s a Gamer’s phone. With an
array of intelligently developed games elsewhere unavailable and simple
but fun to play, these games are as good they can get. And yes, office
integration is terrific with Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Exchange
server. Facebook and Twitter (third party) are also well integrated.
While Bing takes care of the mapping experience with easy GPS tracking
but maps comparatively inaccurate than Google, Web browser is good to
use but without Flash. Multimedia support is through Zune Media Player
and matches ones expectation. Trophy comes pre- uploaded with Netflix, Slacker and one can download Pandora, YouTube, and SlingPlayer apps as well.
