HTC 7 Mozart review: first look

The HTC 7 Mozart is not only one of the first Windows Phone 7 models, it's also the first with an eight megapixel camera.

Orange has added its own Orange Wednesdays app. There's also an Orange Daily app which is a combined RSS newsreader and Twitter feed reader. The Orange Maps was non-functional, display a coming soon' error message. We'll be interested to see how it compares against Microsoft's own Bing Maps.

Our sneak peek at Windows Phone 7 on the HTC 7 Mozart indicates that it has potential but also some irritations. We aren't sure Microsoft has made the right decision in fixing the amount of internal memory. Smaller businesses without an Exchange server will be disappointed to find that there's no desktop synchronisation tool for Outlook. They will therefore have to upload Outlook data into the cloud via Windows Live, and sync it over the air from there. This is especially puzzling since Microsoft's Zune desktop software will synchronise music, video, pictures and podcasts locally over a USB cable.

Verdict

As we'd expect from HTC, the Mozart looks and feels lovely. While Windows Phone 7 is off to a good start and is full of promise, one thing is certain. Adding copy and paste in the planned early 2011 software update is just the beginning - Microsoft still has a lot of work to do.

Connectivity: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 900/2100 Display: 480 x 800 pixels, 3.7in OS: Windows Phone 7 Camera: eight megapixels GPS: GPS Processor: 1GHz Bluetooth: v2.1 + EDR Wi-Fi: 802.11 b/g/n Dimensions: 119 x 60.2 x 11.9 mm Weight: 130g Battery: Li-Ion 1300 mAh

Sandra Vogel
Freelance journalist

Sandra Vogel is a freelance journalist with decades of experience in long-form and explainer content, research papers, case studies, white papers, blogs, books, and hardware reviews. She has contributed to ZDNet, national newspapers and many of the best known technology web sites.

At ITPro, Sandra has contributed articles on artificial intelligence (AI), measures that can be taken to cope with inflation, the telecoms industry, risk management, and C-suite strategies. In the past, Sandra also contributed handset reviews for ITPro and has written for the brand for more than 13 years in total.