HTC Trophy review (unlocked)

As far as contact management and e-mail, Windows Phone 7 can handle and merge data from various e-mail accounts, including Exchange, Windows Live, and POP3 and IMAP accounts, but when it comes to social-networking sites, it can currently only pull in data from Facebook. In the future, we'd love to see better integration with other services, such as Twitter and Flickr. That aside, we had no problems syncing our various accounts to the Trophy and received e-mail the same time they arrived in our inbox on our PC.

Beyond the Windows Phone 7 staples outlined in our review of the operating system here, HTC throws in a couple of its own apps, such as a unit converter, a sound enhancer, and a photo enhancer. Also, though Microsoft has limited customization by OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and carriers, the Trophy includes HTC Hub in which you will find some old HTC favorites like its animated clock and weather widget, as well as featured apps. You can pin the hub to the Start screen as a live tile, and the company recently updated it so that it will display real-time and location-specific weather information right on the live tile.

Though the Windows Phone Marketplace may not have the selection of apps that iTunes and the Android Market has, it is growing at a fairly rapid pace. The HTC Trophy offers 8GB of internal storage with no option of expandable memory.

We weren't impressed with the camera's picture quality.

The Trophy features a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, autofocus, and 720p video capture. There are multiple editing tools built in, including various scene modes, effects, a metering mode, and flicker adjustment, and of course, there's the aforementioned Photo Enhancer app. The latter came in handy, as the picture quality on images taken indoors or with low lighting were a bit grainy and also had a pinkish hue. Though still grainy, the Auto Enhancer effect at least helped brighten the photo.

Performance
We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) HTC Trophy in New York using T-Mobile service, and call quality was mostly good. On our end, the audio was crisp without any type of background noise. There wasn't much voice distortion, but with the volume set to the highest level, sound could be quite piercing. Friends also had positive things to say about the call quality , though one person mentioned that we sounded a bit tinny.

HTC Trophy call quality sample Listen now:

Speakerphone quality was also decent. Calls didn't suffer from the hollowness that sometimes plagues other cell phones, and there was plenty of volume to hold a call in a louder environment. We were able to pair the smartphone with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset and Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones with no problem.

Despite being on EDGE, the browsing experience wasn't that painful. CNET's full site loaded in 20 seconds, and the mobile sites for CNN and ESPN came up in 10 seconds and 9 seconds, respectively. However, apps took a bit longer to download, as did YouTube videos. Clips also needed to rebuffer several times during playback. However, video files that we transferred from our own library using Zune software played back just fine with nice picture and sound quality.

The Trophy is powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and overall the smartphone felt responsive. Apps and hubs launched almost immediately, but as with other Windows Phone 7 devices, there was a bit of delay when loading games. We also experienced some lag when trying to play Fruit Ninja.

The HTC Trophy ships with a 1,300mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 6.75 hours and up to 15 days of standby time. We were able to get 7 hours of continuous talk time in our battery drain tests over EDGE.