HTC 7 Mozart Review

Introduction:

HTC's launch line of Windows Phone 7 handsets includes the most affordable HTC 7 Trophy, the HTC HD7 at the top end, and sandwiched in between the two is the HTC 7 Mozart, the smallest screened handset (by 0.1 inch). It is however equipped with the best camera of the bunch, with an 8MP sensor and a xenon flash on-board. So is the higher-specced camera enough to make buyers choose the HTC 7 Mozart over the competition? Lets find out.

Design:

The HTC 7 Mozart is the most daring in terms of design of the three HTC Windows Phone 7 handsets. With a matte finish, asymmetrical battery cover and a raised swirl pattern on the reverse, it might not be to everyone's taste. It does however have a very appealing fascia, with a grill up top taken straight from the HTC Desire HD and an ergonomic curvature that makes holding it a pleasure.




You can compare the HTC 7 Mozart with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The Super LCD screen measures in at 3.7 inches and has a resolution of 480x800 pixels. Of the launch line of HTC Windows Phone 7 handsets, it has the smallest screen, but also the sharpest. It really looks great, with vibrant colours, fantastic viewing angles and is responsive to the touch. There isn't much in it between this and the Trophy, though both appear to have more punch thaн the HD7 despite the smaller size. Outdoor viewing is on the whole good as are brightness and contrast.


The screen is encased is a slick glossy black fascia, at the bottom of which are three capacitive buttons directly underneath. Above the screen is a great looking grill, with a 3.5mm jack and power button atop the handset and the in-call mic below. To the left is the microUSB port, and a chrome-like volume rocker, and to the right, a two stage camera button. Flip the HTC 7 Mozart over and you'll find the 8MP camera, xenon flash, loud speaker and removable battery cover. The triangular battery cover slides off the bottom of the HTC 7 Mozart to reveal the battery which when unsecured, pops out leaving a SIM card slot in its tracks.



The HTC 7 Mozart therefore delivers a solid, well-constructed phone with some design flourishes that make it stand out. Love it or hate it, the back detailing adds personality, which, when coupled with a great screen and fantastic HTC build quality, makes for an all-round good experience.

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).

Camera and Multimedia:

The HTC Mozart comes equipped with an 8MP autofocus camera with a xenon flash. This is exciting given the lack of great Windows Phone 7 camera-phones. It is also the primary thing that distinguishes the Mozart from the Trophy.


Photos taken on the HTC Mozart offer a good level of detail for the most part, though as with the HTC Trophy and the HTC HD7 autofocus isn't always on the money, which is a shame because when it gets it right, the results are really nice. Colour reproduction is also good for the most part, if slightly dull. Contrast levels are again hit and miss, though for the most part hit, while dynamic range seems fine for the most part. With no flash, the camera produces okay levels of noise. Better than the Trophy, but nowhere near as good as the Nokia N8 for example. Fire up the flash and the phone gets a huge helping hand in the night time and indoor snapping department. As you can see from the party pics, subjects don't look washed out and there is little in the way of noise in the foreground. Macro shots challenge the HTC 7 Mozart, largely thanks to the focusing issue, but once focused correctly, it can take some great close up shots. While not as accomplished as the Nokia N8 and hampered by occasional focusing trouble, the HTC 7 Mozart nevertheless provides a good overall camera-phone experience.



720p HD video is pretty good when the lighting is ideal, and noise handling isn’t terrible when the light goes down, but it isn’t great either. Videos captured on the HTC 7 Mozart play back pretty smoothly and should suffice for most day to day needs.

HTC 7 Mozart sample video:



With Zune on board, the music experience is a giant step in the right direction for Windows. In fact, the music feels more integrated on Windows Phone 7 than on any platform other than iOS, and if you own a Zune, even more so than that.  It's slick, simple to get to grips with and well integrated, with access to basic music functionality on the lock screen for example. Audio quality is good and the Dolby Mobile and SRS Surround offer a great range of output options.


When it comes to videos, the Zune software integration lends to compensate for the lack of codec support on the HTC 7 Mozart. The phone will play MPEG-4 and WMV files, and the Zune software will convert other video formats to supported ones, which is handy, but will leave you waiting a while for your movies to sync, also depending on the performance of your computer. Watching movies and videos on the HTC 7 Mozart is great. While not as visually immersive as on the HTC HD7 thanks to the screen size, it nevertheless delivers the goods. With Dolby Mobile and SRS on board, great sound really helped boost the experience, and while colours could have done with a bit more punch, brightness is adequate, playback is smooth and detail is good.

Internet and Connectivity:

The HTC 7 Mozart is a quad-band GSM, dual-band 3G phone loaded with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS on board. Connections include a 3.5mm headphone jack, a microUSB port and there’s 8GB of memory on board. The only things we might have liked to see are DLNA functionality and a mini HDMI port.

Completely in line with the latest and greatest achievements in the area, the new Internet Explorer delivers fast loading times and silky smooth scrolling. The same goes for zooming, which you can do by either double-tapping or using pinch-to-zoom. Both options work flawlessly. In addition, the HTC 7 Mozart’s 3.7-inch screen offers a great trade-off between pocketability and web browsability.


Internet Explorer lacks Flash and Silverlight support, which is on one hand unpleasant, but on the other, it guarantees flawless operation, so we can live with this omission. Android has the advantage here, but we shouldn't forget the fact that scrolling when a Flash element is present is far from smooth in Google's OS.

The email client works great. As soon as you've entered your account details, your emails start to populate. Everything works super smooth. Unfortunately, you do not get a universal inbox like in bada or iOS, so your different inboxes are displayed as separate tiles. However, this isn't much of an inconvenience as flitting between mailboxes is so quick on the HTC 7 Mozart. Another point is that emails are displayed in full HTML glory and look fantastic.



Software:

Bing Maps gets you from A to B on a Windows Phone 7 device. Panning the map around is very smooth, as is pinch zooming. The available options are pretty standard – you can search for a specific location, go to your position, and get directions. Unfortunately, there is no support for voice-guided navigation yet.

Searching for POIs on the HTC 7 Mozart is very intuitive, and once you open a POI in order to see more details, you are presented with the exact address, an option to get directions and a phone number. You can also pin a certain POI to the home screen, as well as share it via text or email.

The GPS managed to get our location fixed very quickly after a cold start and kept locked on through an entire 20 minute journey with no issues.

We were a bit underwhelmed by the Office Hub of the HTC 7 Mozart. While the panoramic user interface is great, we found Word Mobile's options to be quite limited. You can also create, view and edit Excel files (with a range of available functions to choose from), as well as view and edit PowerPoint presentations. However, editing here comes down to just editing text. You can also take notes using the included OneNote software, or collaborate through SharePoint.

Performance:

Call quality on the HTC 7 Mozart is on the whole good. When listening on the phone, there are no issues with regards to either volume or clarity. Listeners on the other end of the line found that the phone was a bit quiet at times, however, repositioning the handset slightly corrected for this. The loudspeaker delivers an overall good noise, though is slightly tinny with a few muffles, but nothing major. With there being no issues with regards to reception or mobile browsing, the HTC 7 Mozart gets an overall thumbs-up in this department.

Get the HTC 7 Mozart up and running and you will find the overwhelming smoothness and visual flare of the OS. Given the hardware and software, 99% of the time, it all runs like a dream.

One final point on performance is the lack of true multi-tasking. This didn't ruin the experience by any means, but meant, for example that a half written text was lost on a couple of occasions when hitting the search button by mistake.

Battery life on the HTC 7 Mozart is pretty standard. With a quoted 6.75 hours talk time and 18 days standby time, in reality, it lasts a full day and maybe a bit more. Better than the HTC Desire, Desire HD and HD7, however, not a patch on similarly specced Symbian phones.

Conclusion:

The HTC 7 Mozart is all the Trophy is and more. With a great screen, comfortable, ergonomic design and an attractive interface with a lot of promise, the phone won’t do everything an Android handset will, however, it’s much easier to work your way around, and with the bonus of an 8MP camera with a xenon flash, it makes for a compelling choice. If you aren’t concerned about the camera, check out the HTC 7 Trophy for an almost identical experience just without the 8MP sensor andxenon flash. Other options include the HTC Desire HD for a more multimedia-centric Android alternative, or the iPhone 4 if you want better app support.

HTC 7 Mozart Video Review: