HTC were the first manufacturer to release a phone built using the Google ‘Android’ Operating system, and looking at their brand new phones, The Cha Cha and Salsa it seems HTC’s heart lies with the Android set up.
However, the HTC Trophy Phone I have been testing for the last few weeks is based on the Windows Phone 7 Operating system and I have grown quite attached to it.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to have a close personal relationship with my phone. For a phone to work it has to be many different things.
A friend to cheer me up and relieve my boredom, something I can trust with secrets and rely on in times of need. It has to inspire me to to be pro-active and to allow me to be creative.
The trophy does all of these things really well, it looks great and the interface is nice to use and dare I say it.. fun!
Yes, Microsoft have got funky and this will come as great news to those people still working in an office on Windows 98 or similar.I was still discovering cool things about the Trophy a week after first picking it up. Here is some of the good stuff.
Music
The music player is good, there is no radio but it’s a cinch to hook it up to your PC or Mac, and move your tracks over. I plugged some Shure earphones in and the sound was brilliant (Although I was listening to ‘From the Inside’ by Alice Cooper so it was hard to be totally objective).
It pulls in all the artwork too, it’s like the iPhones coverflow system just a little bit different.
Camera
The camera on the phone is pretty good (5 mega pixel) and is capable of recording 720p hi def video although that size of picture eats memory and even with the 8GB’s of storage you wont be able to remake Titanic.
Sometimes with phones on cameras (sorry I mean cameras on phones) everything looks a bit too ‘real’ and all your pictures look like a still from ‘You’ve been framed’. Luckily on the HTC the colours are good and I took some pretty good pics with it.
Battery
Was good ans seemed to last for ages and I only charged it up 3 times in a week and I used it quite a bit.
Games
This could be the biggest reason for buying this phone. The interface can be linked to your XBox Live Gamertag and there are TONS of different games available to download. You can trial them all for free before you buy and most are around £2.50 – £3.00, and a lot of them are just 79p which is pretty good value I think.
Need for Speed Underground (pictured) is great (£3.99) and with the motion detector you can use the whole phone as the steering wheel.
Apps
The App store is still a few steps behind Apple in terms of the range and quality of apps available, but things are moving fast and recently a lot of developers (unhappy with Apple over Flash) have responded well to Microsoft’s open approach and the user friendly DTK (developers tool kit) and the gap is closing on Apple all the time. Of the couple I did try, The Barcode scanner App I tried worked pretty well, it allows you to photograph a bar code and then search for the cheapest place to buy the product online.
Handy tip 1: Next time you are being ignored in a big chain High St Electrical Store just take a photo of the barcode on the box of the thing you want and find it cheaper online.
There are good Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook apps (although those of you wired into your social network may want to wait for the new HTC Cha Cha and Salsa phones come out).
There is also a great map / GPS System that will locate you on Earth when you emerge from the party blinking into the morning light.
Negatives
Shares? Does everyone apart from me own shares?
Whenever you switch it on there is a big box on the screen if you press it it can keep you up to date with the latest share price of BP or whatever companies you want to monitor.
This is great if you are a City Trader, but it seems odd to cater so generously for a relatively minor portion of the population (maybe Stock Traders are the only ones with any money now?).
Surely a ‘Whats new in Hollyoaks’ latest box would be more appropriate?’ ….I’ve been through the settings (and I may be wrong ), but there doesn’t seem to be a way of removing the thing.
Integration with your life
That leads me on to another very small irritant, it’s great that you can sync up your Facebook and Hotmail and Twitter accounts and upload to your Skydrive straight from the phone etc, but if your phone fell into the wrong hands they could delete your Facebook account, take rude pictures, post them to your Twitter, tell your Linkedin contacts to take a running jump and generally ruin your life in a matter of minutes.
To be fair you this ‘multi-connectivity’ problem is something most new phones suffer with and you CAN set a password, but do you?
I don’t.
You just know that until they have retina scanners or fingerprint security some people are going to face weeks of work and tears repairing damage done in seconds by a malicious person. Don’t let it be you!
Handy Tip 2: Put a password on your phone NOW before it is too late, (you will thank me).
The HTC Trophy did most things pretty well and some things really well…
It didn’t totally blow me away, but when the time came to say goodbye we left on very good terms.
If you are mad on games and your phone company offer you a Trophy with your new contract you could do ALOT worse than choosing this phone.
