21

vishalrao

vishalrao

Global Moral Police
Skilled
Well since we have the first (two?) WP7 showoffs already, thought I would call this (third?) one just "21" :D

Aramex courier guy just handed over to me the HTC HD7, got off flipkart for 30k.

Only just booted it up, still got to set it up and connect all the accounts and all that jazz.

Initial impressions:

1. The UI is awesome smooth with nifty little animations all over the place, this is what I have been hoping for all along to rival Apple's devices. Now Android needs to pull up its UI socks and I personally hoping Nokia's MeeGo can do the same.

2. Love the fresh/simple flat/clean look of the tiles and UI elements, like flat buttons etc.

3. Checked the voice recognition by saying "Start Internet Explorer" and lo and behold it did just that - trippy!

4. Device itself is nice, sensitive capacitive touch display - 4.3 inches isn't too unweildy. Of course this is a regular old LCD not the fancy new AMOLED type displays but looks good even so.

5. Noticed there is very so slight flicker (especially if its a plain black and white textual screen like a settings page) when the entire display/image is scrolling left/right in portrait mode, like moving across screens. All other up/down and left/right animations 2D or 3D are silky smooth - yum yum!

6. Haven't played with other stuff like media playback, camera, maps other apps etc. Just connected to WiFi - let me input my Live ID, GMail etc and see how it works and will post follow-ups...

7. I just hope this thing is stable and does not randomly crash and wipe out data/contact info then I will think about making it my primary phone so I can really start to play with my Nokia N900 and make it unstable :D

Here are a couple of pics I took:





Uploaded with ImageShack.us
 
Thanks guys :)

Still haven't put in my SIM. Got email and facebook etc connected, nice how it pulls the peoples' pics and animates it on the home launcher screen. Marketplace still not available for India - cant even download free youtube app to watch stuff for the time being - don't want to hack around to break/root anything anyway - I just need phone and email/calendar mostly with occasional web browsing.

Internet explorer is ok-ish, some pages the font is really small - it should be able to scale the fonts to readable value for non-mobile optimised sites.

Plus for my large fingers, clicking some links can be hit or miss.

The minor flickering is with dark background (black) and white text elements which you notice. Moved to white background (which I prefer) and brown theme and all UI animations are buttery smooth. I guess OLED displays have an advantage if you make them mostly black for battery savings but since this is a TFT LCD anyway, does not make a difference.

Still have to try things like SIM/making calls and "find my phone" which also does not seem to be working for the moment.

Overall I think once they launch officially in India with the UI/multitasking improvements, more devices (dual core and what not) and enable the marketplace this could be a successful smartphone platform in 2011.
 
ha :) congrats. You can access the market place by changing your location in your LIVE account and PC to UK. Hopefully it works else create another LIVE account with location as UK but change ur PC location first before doing that. There are some nice apps in the store.
 
Thanks again guys.

archish said:
Do update if sometime it gives BSD lol :p
Click to expand...

YES! With the well known brand names like "Microsoft" and "Windows" attached to this phone, I'm waiting to see if/how this thing BSODs :D This is mainly why I'm waiting til maybe Monday before putting in my SIM, need a stable phone for the weekend at least, then will backup all my shite before moving it and trying out GPRS etc...
soumalidon said:
ha :) congrats. You can access the market place by changing your location in your LIVE account and PC to UK. Hopefully it works else create another LIVE account with location as UK but change ur PC location first before doing that. There are some nice apps in the store.
Click to expand...
Hmmm, let me try it, wouldn't mind browsing the apps if it works :) thanks

--- Updated Post - Automerged ---

Just changing the region settings and rebooting the phone, while changing the same on my existing live ID did not work - it started to show the apps in the marketplace but errored with an "this app is not on the catalog" or something like that.

Creating a new live ID with UK settings then again resetting the phone and leaving it in UK regions I was able to install a couple of apps.

Will now try changing the phone back to India (Live ID still UK) region and see if this still continues to work...
 
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