Just got my hands on a HTC 7 Trophy and it’s not so bad. I might even be able to use it for more than just reading work emails, and perhaps there might even be a chance of it displacing my Nokia 2730 classic. The biggest issue on these phones for someone who enjoys writing like me is of course the miniscule onscreen keyboard. This will make or break this phone for me. I understand that the software is predictive capable which should improve the overall experience, still it is almost tempting to get something like the stylus on the old Palm Z22 I first tried out a few years back, to pick out the letters quickly without mistyping. This phone isn’t going to be the all-in-one that you might hope for, I guess I am going to end up with a separate MP3 player for the music because it has a fixed amount of memory and playback uses up the battery too quickly. Windows Phone 7 is really a preview of Windows 8 and I expect its format is going to become a lot more seen in the future on these types of devices along with full tablets. In my view MS has got the potential with it to give Apple a run for their money.
What makes it hard to choose is that for a little more money you can have a full size tablet albeit without a phone function – but otherwise so much more functionality. As I may have written a few weeks back the iPad 2 has become so affordable (albeit without 3G) at $579 for the cheapest model, that it is tempting to save up your pennies for one of those and keep a relatively cheap “unsmart” phone just for voice or perhaps music. But the 3G model at $779 would be the best to have, just a bit out of my reach though. Maybe I’ll take another look when Windows 8 hits the market to see if there is something that’s a bit better value than the iPad. Maybe – Samsung’s Galaxy and a few other tablet brands aren’t any cheaper just yet. The fact you can use a keyboard that is much closer to a normal size and also on some of these tablets connect an external keyboard makes them just that much more useful than the smartphone.
Still, I’m going to leave further judgment until I’ve had a really good play with the HTC just to see what I really can do with it. However it is a vast step up from the Palm Z22. I remember the appeal of that in having something I could carry around and write notes on rather than putting them onto paper, with the idea I could easily keep track of whatever I was working on and sync it back to the PC. The HTC has that sort of appeal and the interface is a massive improvement on the Z22 so I expect that over time it will grow on me. So far the predictive text has turned out quite clever with being able to compensate for miskeying individual characters of a word so it might not be so hard to write after all. Actually it isn’t really that difficult at all…
