HTC 7 Trophy

“Honestly, it’s rather disappointing to see that Verizon is recycling a previous model and making the Trophy as its launch Windows Phone 7 handset. Besides its world phone feature, there’s nothing spectacular to set it apart from the other recently released WP7 devices, but its $150 on-contract price makes it an even harder sell at this point. Unfortunately, this is the only solution available to customers who wish to experience WP7 – meaning, you’ll need to accept it for what it is.”

“It's not even the best Windows Phone 7 phone. To make matters worse, you'll often find the Trophy sitting side-by-side with the equivalently priced LG Optimus 7 when shopping for a new WP7 handset in Europe -- both are €49.90 on contract with Vodafone in Germany or free in the UK with monthly plans starting at £25 (our review unit is sold by Coolblue in The Netherlands for $499). And honestly, given our choice, we'd opt for the Optimus 7 given that it matches the Trophy spec-for-spec yet includes a better exclusive software suite, a beefier 1,500mAh battery, and double the internal storage at 16GB. Yet even with middling hardware and a brand new version 1.0 Microsoft OS that is clearly lacking the maturity of iOS or Android, it's simply hard to resist this sleek little lightweight gem of a handset running a very promising -- and dare we say fun -- take on the mobile OS experience. Try as we might, we can't put it down even though we have an iPhone 4 and Galaxy S at our immediate disposal. The HTC Trophy may not be our smartphone champ but it's definitely a winner.”

“With solid specs, a nice rugged feel as well as solid performance across the board, the HTC 7 trophy delivers a great screen, great connectivity and great performance. Admittedly, the camera could be better and the screen bigger, however, we’d say the HTC 7 Trophy finds a good balance between price and performance. Alternatives to the HTC 7 Trophy include the HTC 7 Mozart for an 8MP camera with a Xenon flash on a very similarly specced device, the Motorola Defy for an Android phone that can take a bit of a bash here and there, or the Nokia C7 for a well-balanced Symbian alternative.”

“Verizon's first Windows Phone 7 device has an interesting interface and decent camera performance, but it's not a phone to end all phones. It's 3G, has a mediocre screen, lacking Internet browser, limited battery life, and call quality was not particularly impressive. At the end of the day, the recently released HTC Droid Incredible 2 striked us as a far better HTC phone for Verizon in this class. If you've been eagerly awaiting the HTC Trophy to arrive on The Network, and don't mind the issues we came across, we'll obviously not stop you from making a move. But you're hereby warned.”