One week with the HTC Trophy

On May 26, Verizon made their first phone running the Microsoft Windows 7 OS available, the HTC Trophy. I placed my order before getting ready to go to work and Verizon was nice enough ship it FedEx Next Day (Thanks Verizon!). The phone came on Friday and a spent the entire weekend becoming familiar with it.

I’ve now had the phone for one week and I’ve enjoyed every bit of it. I love the user experience, especially the little jumps and nudges that get your attention and direct you to more features. Previously I had a Blackberry Storm 1 and the Trophy is 10x the phone.

My wife hated the Blackberry Storm. As a test, I gave her the Trophy and asked her to make a phone call. On the Storm, this simple task would frustrate the hell out of her. On the Trophy, she got past the lock screen (I had to give her the code obviously), launched the phone app and made the call. I asked how she knew to get to the keypad on the lock screen, given that she’d never used a WP7 phone before. She didn’t know. “I just did” she replied.

I love the phone but it’s not perfect. I used the Storm for two years and the Blackberry OS is much more mature. It’s only natural that I carried some expectations over to the Trophy. Here are the things that I don’t like or wish that WP7 supported (in no particular order):

- Integrated inbox.
WP7, just like the Storm, is capable of syncing with multiple email accounts. However, the Storm can present a unified inbox. I understand that this might be a feature in the next version of the WP7 OS, Mango.

- You can’t change the base font size
My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. I’ve been told that this is a common complaint from people over the age of 40. It would be nice if you could change the base font size for the device. It is nice that some apps and features support zooming but then you’re stuck panning around the screen.

- Battery life
My sense is that the Storm had a better battery life. I would frequently only recharge the Storm every other day, even though I had enabled Bluetooth and had a number of apps that would download data in the background. On the Trophy, turning off Bluetooth has helped a lot. I rarely enable Wifi. Now, to be fair, multiple people have expressed that “less than optimal” battery life is a common trait for HTC phones.

- Unable to flag an email
I had this on my list since it was something that I could do on the Storm and not WP7. However, I’ve recently discovered that I can flag messages but only for my Exchange and Gmail accounts. I can’t find a way to flag messages coming from my Hotmail account.

- No filters for message syncing
Blackberry supported defining filters as part of the email account subscriptions. I used them to exclude emails coming from discussion lists. I really miss this feature.

That’s it! Just five crummy complaints and none of them serious enough to drive me back to the Storm or another platform.