Want less stress in your OS? Consider sauntering over from a cattle-spooking 'droid to the more relaxing Windows Phone 7. The HTC Trophy ($149), the first Windows Phone 7 for Verizon Wireless, has an easy-to-use operating system that's great for most basic smartphone functions. The phone is especially good for gaming, though we'd warn against using it if you're heavy into photography.
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The HTC Trophy is a pretty nondescript black slab. It isn't particularly slim or light, although it's refreshingly smaller than 4.3-inch-screen phones like the gargantuan Motorola Droid X2 ($199.99, 3.5 stars). The 3.8-inch, 800-by-480 screen is thoroughly average, but fine to look at outdoors, and it appears sharp because the pixels are spread over less of a physical area than on larger phones. The soft-touch black plastic back shows a large metal bulge, which is the 5-megapixel camera with its flash.
All our measurements of voice quality were somewhat above average: The Trophy has a fine earpiece, a perfectly decent speakerphone, and acceptable reception. The amount of side tone, the echo of your voice in your ear which prevents you from yelling, was ideal. The Trophy connected easily to our Bluetooth headset, an Aliph Jawbone Era, ($129, 4.5 stars) and was accurate with voice dialing, though it doesn't offer other voice commands. Battery life, at 5 hours, 3 minutes of talk time, was within the acceptable range but shorter than we'd like. That goes for standby time, too; sometimes, during the test period, our Trophy didn't last a full day of regular use. Amusingly, Microsoft now owns Skype, but this is the only major Verizon smartphone not to support Skype Mobile. That gap will be filled later this year, Microsoft has said.
The Trophy runs on Verizon's EVDO Rev A 3G network; it also has Wi-Fi. That means it connects to the Internet at speeds of around 1Mbps, considerably slower than Verizon's new 4G phones. I bashed the Droid X2 for not having 4G, but it purports to be a high-end device; I don't think entry-level users will mind the missing speed as much. And like all Windows Phones, the Trophy doesn't work as a modem for a laptop.
Specifications
Service Provider Verizon Wireless
Operating System Windows Phone 7
Screen Size 3.8 inches
Screen Details 800-by-480, 16M-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen
Camera Yes
Network CDMA
Bands 850, 1900
High-Speed Data 1xRTT, EVDO Rev A
Processor Speed 1 GHz
OS and Apps
If I was to try to capture mobile OSes in one word, the word for iOS would be "apps." For BlackBerries, "messaging." For Android, it might be "customizable." For Windows Phone 7, it's "simple."
Take a look at our review of Windows Phone 7 for a deeper dive into the OS. Here's the short version: WP7 has a scrollable home screen of "live tiles" that open up into "hubs" of similar activities. For instance, the Games Hub lets you download games, play games, fiddle with your XBox Live avatar or check your in-game achievements.
The tiles are customizable, so you can do things like pin your favorite contacts to the home screen. Scroll to the right and you get a full list of installed apps; there are about 18,000 to choose from as of this writing. This fall, the Trophy, like other Windows Phones, will get a major upgrade called "Mango" with 500 new features; for a look at some of them, see our Mango walkthrough.
All Windows Phones share very similar hardware, so they all perform similarly. All have 1GHz Qualcomm QSD8260 Snapdragon processors, 800-by-480 screens, 5-megapixel cameras, and 3G rather than 4G.
Gaming is a real strength here. Windows Phones don't have the pure hardware chops of Nvidia Tegra 2-based devices like the T-Mobile G2x ($199.99, 4 stars). But they make up for it with games that are fun, well-written and unique. I'd argue that the Windows Phone game selection looks more like the stuff you'd find on a home console than even the list of titles for the game-centric Sony Ericsson Xperia Play ($199.99, 3.5 stars).
As you'd expect, Microsoft Office integration is also excellent, with a terrific Exchange client and Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps. The phone integrates well with Facebook, although Twitter is left to third-party apps.
The Web and mapping experience relies heavily on Bing. In my tests, the GPS locked onto my location without any problems, but I find Bing Maps clumsier and more inaccurate than Google Maps. The Web browser displays pages clearly and well, but without Flash.
Multimedia Support
Like other Windows Phones, the Trophy is also a Zune media player, which means it connects to Zune software on PCs and to Windows Phone Connector on Macs to seamlessly sync pretty much all of your non-protected media. The phone comes with Netflix and Slacker preloaded, and Pandora, YouTube, and SlingPlayer apps are all available for download, although Hulu isn't. The Zune software takes care of converting files into a format that's appropriate for the phone. Music sounds good over wired or Bluetooth headphones; if you're watching video, though, you need to use a wired set, as it won't stream the sound from videos over Bluetooth.
The Trophy falls short when it's capturing media, though. The 5-megapixel camera takes soft photos that are blown out in good light and either blurry or noisy in low light. The continuous autofocus initially looks like a good idea. Because the camera is constantly focusing, you can snap a shot in a blazing 0.3 seconds. But sometimes it didn't lock on, leading to painfully blurry pictures.
The video recording mode captures decent 640-by-480 video at 30 frames per second outdoors, and some rather jaggy, pulsing 720p HD video at 24 frames per second. Indoors with low light, my test recordings were very jerky, dropping to 12 or even 10 frames per second. If you're looking for an ace camera phone, pick up a Motorola Droid X2 instead.
Conclusions
The HTC Trophy is a pleasantly unassuming device that makes a terrific first smartphone, or a step up from a BlackBerry for someone who doesn't feel like doing all of the furniture-arranging that comes with the Android experience. The Trophy's top competitor on Verizon is, of course, the Apple iPhone 4 ($199, 4 stars), which has many more apps and a far superior camera, which earn it a higher rating. Ultimately, though, if you like the look of the Windows Phone 7 interface, the Trophy is a good introduction.
