HTC 7 Mozart Review

Interface:

Windows Phone 7 is an aesthetically unified OS, visually bringing all its functionality into a Zune inspired system of panels and panning. This looks great on the HTC 7 Mozart. The start menu (home screen) is filled with Live Tiles (animated shortcuts to apps) aligned in a very simple vertical grid of two columns and multiple rows. On first glance, it seems simplistic for a home screen, blurring the lines between home-screen and menu, however, it is also cleverer than it looks, displaying key live information within tiles.

Slide the homescreen out of the way to reveal a list of applications. All these can be pinned to the start menu with a long press, or just opened from the list. We’d imagine that once we have 20-30 additional apps on the phone, this list will get too long, however, visually, it’s clean and in line with the rest of the OS.


Tapping a tile results in a visual cascade of current tiles revolving out of the frame, and a stream of new elements either decoratively appearing to deliver oncoming information. These would look like overkill on any other OS, however, thanks to the styling of Windows Phone 7 being so very simple, it works to have this one extravagance.

At the heart of this simple styling are the themes. Go into settings, press the themes option and you can change your phone's background and accent colour. As far as background colour goes, your options are whittled down to black or white, which is a good, minimalistic way to ensure the user doesn't make Microsoft's shiny new phone OS ugly. Accent colours are applied to app tiles and standout text. To compensate for the minimal choice of background, these can be one of 11 colours, green, red, blue, orange, pink, brown, lime, teal, purple and magenta. Network provider colours may also be selectable. This simplicity lends itself to an identity Microsoft is clearly trying to attribute to Windows Phone 7.

The interface is intuitive with very few layers of menu and is very clearly marked out. Some applications are lacking the extensive functionality their Android or iOS counterparts  may have (i.e. selecting which Google Calendar to display if you have multiple under one account), however, we shouldn't forget that Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 OS is still in its early days, so a lot of the missing functionality will surely be added down the road. So, at this point the HTC 7 Mozart may offer reduced functionality when compared to Android or iOS phones, but thanks to the ease of use, visual flare and the fact that there really is no lag, there is definitely a place in the market for this smartphone.


Phonebook, Messaging and Organizer:

As a phone, the HTC 7 Mozart works well, with a good dialer sporting big, responsive keys. Type a number in and there is a save button underneath the dialler. It's all very easy and intuitive. The phone book falls under the people tile. This offers very tight integration with Facebook, with a right swipe from your contact list taking you to friend's recent updates. The search capacitive button adapts its function depending on which menu you're in, so contacts can either be scrolled through or searched for directly as expected. Long press the Windows capacitive button to activate the voice dialler. We found this worked exceptionally well out of the box.


Messaging is also a pleasure for the most part. The keyboard is a good size on the HTC 7 Mozart both in portrait and landscape and the predictive text is very good indeed. The keyboard looks clean and simple with no gradients in sight which is great, though no copy and paste means functionality is hampered slightly, though Microsoft promises this in the near future.


Organizer features include alarms, calculator, calendar and notes. The calendar is the most finger friendly we've used in a while, looking very clean and feeling really intuitive. Adding appointments is simple, and the whole experience was a pleasure in every aspect other than the aforementioned section regarding multiple Google calendars (you can't choose which calendar under your Google account to use).