HTC HD7: Now With NoDo
by Vivek Gowri on May 12, 2011 6:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Windows Phone 7
- Snapdragon
- Mobile
- HTC HD7
Conclusion
This is a multipart conclusion, so let's start with the HD7. I've long felt that with the Venue Pro and the HD7, T-Mobile ended up with the two best WP7 launch devices, at least in the US. AT&T's range includes the Surround and it's pointless speaker, the Quantum and it's overall lack of desirability, and the Focus, which is thus far the most popular WP7 device. I'm not the biggest fan of the Focus; the SAMOLED screen is needlessly oversaturated and it tends to hurt battery life if you do a lot of messaging or email, mostly because WP7 has a lot of white-themed UI elements. But it's well placed to be the most popular WP7 handset in the US market, and it's designed and built well, so I can't fault them too much.
The Venue Pro was a fun one for me, but the sheer bulk of a 4"+ slider is a little much for most people, especially with a design that doesn't try to hide the size in any way. The HD7 is much easier for carrying, because it's still relatively thin. But the screen is still an issue—for a high-end smartphone, the 4.3" LCD panel that HTC is still using will just not cut it anymore. HTC recognizes this, which is where the HD7S comes in. Basically the same as the HD7, except with an Super LCD screen and AT&T 3G bands, it fixes my chief complaint with the current HD7. But really, as long as you avoid the Quantum and the Surround, almost all of the WP7 handsets are good bets. Pick the design you like best and go from there, because on a hardware level, you're basically splitting hairs. One has a slightly larger battery, one has a slightly better camera, one has slightly better built quality, one has a slightly better screen, but all four have a QSD8250, 512MB memory, 8GB flash storage, and an identical OS. There's too little hardware diversity in Windows handsets right now to say anything different, and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. I think after the next wave of hardware releases comes with Mango in tow, we'll be able to say something more meaningful than the technological equivalent of "everyone played hard."
Now for the more difficult part of the conclusion. Although I'm a fan of Windows Phone 7, I have to say that it's a flawed platform at present. The main issues right now form a laundry list of things that the platform is sorely lacking. Chief amongst them are 3rd party multitasking, decent JavaScript performance, Silverlight, Flash, USB mass storage support, some decent form of IM support, VoIP and video calling, tethering or WiFi hotspot support, file transfers via Bluetooth, and custom ringtones. This is 2011 guys, let us add our own damn ringtones.
I'm just getting started, too. Wikipedia has an awesome list of stuff that WinMo had that WP7 no longer does, it's kind of funny to read; I just listed the stuff I've been annoyed about in the last few months of using WP7 phones. Mango will bring a lot of that with it—multitasking, JS, Sliverlight, and Twitter. The rest? God knows. And that's a big problem, because that's what Microsoft needs to catch up TODAY. Five months from now when Mango actually hits devices, the list will be longer.
But what about NoDo? At launch, WP7 was comparable to iOS 3.0, minus the copy/paste support. Post-NoDo, it’s right around 3.1—there have been some tweaks, but it’s overall not that different.
And that’s my problem with NoDo. I want an earth shattering update, and WP7 really needs one if it wants to be competitive with the iOSes and Androids of the world. NoDo, in and of itself, is a good update, but it's late. This update should have been out in January, with Mango following in the ides of summer. To catch up, Microsoft needs to be very aggressive with its updates, almost to a Google level.
Google, for the record, went from Cupcake at the end of April 2009 to Donut (September 13, 2009) to Eclair (2.0 on October 26, 2009, 2.1 on January 12, 2010) to Froyo (May 20, 2010) to Gingerbread (December 6, 2010). In 18 months, they had five major revisions to the platform, turning it from something with a lot of good ideas and not much execution to a legitimately well rounded and well executed platform. I don't think Microsoft, as a company, has the kind of mobility necessary to match that release schedule, but I'd like to see a major update every six, maybe nine months at most. Matching Apple's one year release cycle isn't a good strategy, unless they're willing to pack two or three times the amount of development into the same timeframe.
Microsoft got all the big things right (or will add them with Mango), and that's very good, because it means they're now in the conversation. The deal with Nokia got them to the number three spot almost by default—we're still waiting to see how the HP devices turn out, Nokia just took themselves out of the smartphone platform race, and for a company called Research in Motion, RIM as a company is pretty much standing still. The promising QNX OS made its highly anticipated debut on the PlayBook, but all signs point to BB 6/7 staying on handsets for at least another year.
So Microsoft is a pretty clear (but distant) number three right now, and not in any danger of losing that, but there's a lot more work that needs to be done if they want to catch Apple and Google. The jump from "in the conversation" to "legitimate contender" is defined by the small things, and that's what Microsoft really needs to get on. A lot will be fixed by the Live Marketplace gaining more maturity and more headline apps—people need to go from "developing for Android and iOS" to "developing for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone". But it couldn't hurt Microsoft to include a first-party Live Messenger client and maybe toss a decent Gmail client on there in the mean time. And the ringtone thing. Really, 2011 guys. Custom ringtones aren't that hard; just toss another pane into the Zune desktop client and let us add them. Simple. It's the little things.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
44 Comments
View All Comments
TIGGAH - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
I think the battery life estimates are wrong. I own an HD2, HD7 and Focus - they all get comparable battery life. With the HD2 being a bit worse, the 7 in the middle and the Focus slightly better. Are the battery life figures presented obtained from the manufactures?Just curious.
Also I as always I have to gush about WP7. I support blackberry, android, ios and wp7 phones at my work. Hands down my user base who has WP7 are the most happy and require less support. Once we get a few critical apps that are iphone only available for WP7 we will dump almost all the iPhones.
Once mango comes out I think people will be even happier with WP7. Microsoft has truly created a gem here.
VivekGowri - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
The battery life figures were obtained in instrumented battery life testing. Overall, in day-to-day usage, the Focus and HD7 are very similar, but our battery life test takes a larger toll on AMOLED displays due to a higher percentage of white backgrounds in the pages we load. What I will say is that if you use the Venue Pro or Focus with the "light" WP7 theme, you will get awful, terrible, woeful battery life.I love WP7. I really do. It just needs some updating to get to feature parity with the iOS/Android crowd.
Ushio01 - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Nokia uses 2 platforms S40 and S60, the major differences between these platforms are that the S60 smartphone platform has multitasking and customization while the S40 feature phone platform doesn't those are basically the only difference in software yet the WP7 phones i've used are at best equal to S40 on the software side.Penti - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Actually technically S40 does multitasking since it's a Java ME device.And S60 is legacy.
Nokia has Symbian^3 and Maemo. Both modern OS's with a modern framework on top of them with Qt/Qt Mobility/QML and Gstreamer etc powering it. Modern frameworks and API for writing software. With Symbian still having the legacy frameworks for supporting S60-programs. So you can write POSIX C/C++ programs, Symbian C++ programs, Qt C++ programs, programs in scripting languages like Python, Java ME, Compiled web apps and so on. And you can compile and ship Qt with older S60 devices/apps. To just drop that platform makes no sense. It was the software platform driving MeeGo's mobile branch. Symbian was driving that platform into the wild and into stable code.
Microsoft is basically killing the future of Nokia all together, they sold over 100 million Symbian devices last year, and they kill Symbian and the investment in the software platform that was about to take over even in cheaper devices. Presently Symbian^3 devices only goes down to $309, but it can easily outplace older and cheaper S60 devices and go down as low as maybe $150 pretty soon, and would have sold well if they didn't kill it. Effectively killing all mobile phone OS development outside North America. To promote a platform that isn't as good (currently) or complete. Nokia already has all the modern bits there. In devices shipped already. They can also support stuff like Lotus Notes Traveler so you can have your notes mail in the phone. Which is at the moment technically impossible to do on WP7 phone even if IBM wanted to. Hoping that Nokia survives on S40 like Elop is, is just lunacy. S40 today is sub $150 devices. Not 400 dollar feature phones any more. If they themselves don't outplace the S40 devices someone else will and Nokia will drop their sales by hundreds of millions of devices, which is crazy, for a company that has production capabilities and plants themselves ruining billions in previous investments and tens of thousands of workers must go.
The mobile phone business of Nokia must bring in €40 billion euros to go around. Which of course Microsoft couldn't care less about. The future market of maybe 20 million a year WP7 devices don't make a dent in a company that size. They will earn less and has to destroy property and have it totally written off to have any money for the share holders. Microsoft 2 billion US or so deal will make them loose billions and billions of Euros. They could only keep a few thousand employees busy with building WP phones. The rest of the 60 000 is gonna have no future. They where however profitable before the Microsoft deal. Nokia can't survive on that chump change.
.NET CF before internet sockets, multitasking and alternatively native code isn't much use as a platform.
VivekGowri - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
I almost feel like this comment needs commercial breaks.I think what it comes down to is this - hanging onto Maemo and Symbian^3 was no longer a winning proposition in the smartphone game, while with Microsoft, Nokia has the chance to become the premier handset manufacturer for a platform with a lot of potential for both improvement and growth. Risk vs reward, at the base level.
FrederickL - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
Very interesting article Vivek, most informative.
"I almost feel like this comment needs commercial breaks"
Actually what it needs is editing out all the malicious wishful thinking. I do not claim to know whether or not Nokia have made the right decision
- only time will tell. The point with Penti's post is that he/she *wants* the alliance to be a major fail. It will be interesting to see, in the event that it turns out to be a success, just how many of his/her words he/she will be able to eat and how much seasoning it will take to make them palatable.
"Nokia has the chance to become the premier handset manufacturer for a platform with a lot of potential for both improvement and growth. Risk vs reward, at the base level."
I agree wholeheartedly, Nokia have taken a big gamble and we will begin to see in the next year or so how it pans out. Personally I wish them well although I have no current intentions to move to WP7. I am very happy with my Desire Z!
Penti - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
Well even the N8 sold better then all the WP7 phones together, definitively they all together sold well over WP7. Only counting the latest Symbian^3.The wishful thinking is thinking Nokia could sell 100-150 million WP7 devices like next year or so. The market for all the manufacturers won't be that high by all account's even the overly optimistic ones. I do not wish WP7 to fail, but I still think it will for Nokia even if it's great for Microsoft and the users if they manage to sell 20-30 million devices a year again. As said you do realize there is no longer any mobile phone OS development outside of Canada and US? If they would have tired to bought them they couldn't have.
Obviously they had some challenges, but how are they suppose to meet those without any developers? They still turned a profit, so I think it was prematurely and possibly disastrous and harmful for the company, they are god damn fudding their own platform to death before they have a new one. Why behave like a broken company before you are one and stop building for the future.
In the event Nokia won't go under it will still turn into a company with 20 000 - 30 000 employees, and competitors would have gotten a hand on their manufacturing on fire sale outplacing Nokia in every segment. A success would be something like 1/3 of the current Symbian volumes, and that would be huge, and I don't think that is worthy a company like Nokia however I do not think they can't pull that off. And I wouldn't count that as a success, just like Motorola is just a abandoned shell of a company. I have no doubt Microsoft can be successful on the platform, it would do great if they can pull off all the promised features in Mango, however wishing for three platforms doesn't make it so. I don't think firing thousands of developers and closing down OS-business is a way to achieve that. Nokia is simply interesting for Microsoft because of Ovi Maps and Navteq. I wish Microsoft platforms the best, I simply just don't think it's good fit for Nokia as their exclusive platform. I think Nokia would need something that in a few years could sell 150-250 million devices a year, and I don't think WP has a chance do that, but I think their own had a small change to do so at least. Simply I don't see the benefit for the development to disappear. If they whore a failing company I could have seen a benefit to sell the OS/software and development like ones Symbian did in the 90's. Simply disregarding Qt and Nokia's recent effort just seems dishonest. Metro UI won't churn out hundreds of millions of new smart phones from Nokia. There's no reason to be overly optimistic about the move, they could put out some great phones, but I wouldn't translate that to commercial success. This is isn't desktop computers. There's still a good 5-6 months before Mango, and probably you won't see proper WP7 phones until next year. And in 2 years we won't see them sell 100 million smart phones like last year. Nothing malicious about that, it's just a totally different path they are taking. Selling a few millions devices in the US definitely won't save a global company.
They had the ST-E platform ready for Symbian and MeeGo, they had their hardware platform partnership which will just go to waste now when they have to start from scratch. They are also the only mayor manufacturer that will use one platform exclusively on smart-phones. So just closing down Symbian-shop rather then pursuing a multiplatform strategy don't make sense if you would like to be a big profitable company. It's not like S40 can take over for Symbian, neither should it. Nokia needed to get rid off all that, but now they are getting rid off their own company instead, which certainly don't give me confidence.
// Android Froyo, budgetphone user.
paul112 - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
in this review it says there are 2 speakers, there isnt there's only 1 situated next to the camera, i was really dissapointed when i got home to hear the really crap sound quality output it has toodew111 - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
Who's your source for that story? That's not the true story. The circle waiting icon in Windows 7 is nicknamed the donut, so no donuts means that there's less loading time...which there is in NoDo. Ridiculous pastry story killed.Affectionate-Bed-980 - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
Because seriously, I'd like to see how the copy and paste works. It's not all about benches. Just like in motherboard and GPU reviews you spend the first 2-3 pages looking at the external appearance, analyzing the layout etc. You also look at the BIOS for motherboards before you just jump into benches.So seriously, I'd like to see some software stuff. This is like talking about Android 2.3 but just looking at benches only.