So I was privileged to have the chance of a lifetime; a 2 week special time with the HTC Surround – AT&T Windows Phone 7 Device. In this review I will break the phone down in Pro’s and Con’s, rate both the hardware and software and then give my personal opinion about the device. I hope that during your reading you feel enlightened enough to at least try a Windows Phone 7 Device, especially the HTC Surround.

You will notice a number group beside each category, example: 4/5. This is me grading each category from a 1 to a 5, 5 is the best, so don’t be confused.

Screen (4/5)

The Screen itself was stunning. It was sharp and clear even in the brightest sun light. I was always able to read the screen. Movie watching was like watching a movie on my 1080p 37 inch T.V. just in a 3.8 inch format. The reason I only gave it 4 out of 5 is because I would like to have seen a bigger screen say 4 or even 4.3. This device was “designed” to be a multimedia experience. Why not go big and bold?

Speakers (3/5)

OK, so movies are EXCELLENT! You could not have done any better on the surround sound for movies and music. The Phone speaker (headset) is good quality too, crisp and clear. Now the whole reason I only gave it 3 out of 5: the speaker phone – it sucks! It is almost so bad that I am ashamed to say HTC made it.

My Touch Pro 2 had better speaker phone and it is a 2 year old device. Now I have been told by other HTC Surround users that if you slide open the speaker bar the speakerphone is better. Seriously? I have to slide my speaker bar open to have speaker phone? That is crap in my opinion. Not what I want to do in a meeting or car. Sorry, this to me is a failure on the hardware of the phone. HTC should have done better, much better in my opinion.

Microphone (2/5)

I had people constantly telling me the sound quality stunk. I tried both speakerphone and non-speakerphone. I had several people tell me that they had a hard time hearing me in my truck that there was lots of background noise. Upon inspection it didn’t seem that the HTC Surround had dual mic’s to cancel out noise like 98% of other phones. Again, all I can say is WHY HTC? Just WHY? Again, failure on HTC’s part to give us features we need in this day in a phone.

Size (5/5)

OK given what it was it was nice, felt solid, firm and it was the perfect size for my hands. I enjoyed playing with the phone in all aspects. It was a blast and it just felt natural to have in my hands. I still think overall it needed a bigger screen but hey, I can’t knock the size down since it wasn’t designed for that screen size!

Battery (5/5)

14 hours of battery life. Need I say more?

Overall Thoughts (4.5/5)

I broke my rule. I had to give it 4.5. This phone was awesome to use hardware wise and it had its issues with the speaker and microphone but they were not huge issues. It does need improvement sure, but hey, overall it’s a good device. I would own one if I was on AT&T and if it came to Sprint I would own it in a heartbeat.

Windows Phone 7 is the OS; with that said I am going to review the software much like the hardware above. I am going to break it into categories rate them and give you my opinion on the OS of the phone. Please remember this is the first version of Windows Phone 7 and it’s brand new so there will be bugs.

Metro UI (4/5)

I like Metro UI. It is simple, fast, smooth and finger friendly. Coming from a Windows Mobile Device running 6.1 / 6.5, it was nice change. My Touch Pro 2 had issues with Sense and I like the idea of Microsoft controlling the UI for the phone. It did had issues with the fact that I can’t have a background other than white or black. The lock screen was a nice touch. It was the only real thing you could customize. Coming from Windows Mobile where you can customize everything, I loved it. Microsoft has done a good job at a standard and I look forward to this being developed more. Keep up the good work Microsoft.

Calendars (5/5)

Speaking from a Corp. Exchange user that has Hotmail, Gmail and Outlook Calendars it is amazing to have all calendars in one spot! I loved this feature. No more fumbling around asking what calendar is what appointment on. I can now live life simply and enjoyable. This has to be one of the best features of Windows Phone 7. I can’t think of one bad thing to say. GREAT JOB MICROSOFT!!!

Emails (4/5)

I like how the emails are smooth, snappy and very well presented. Much better in my opinion than Outlook/ActiveSync on Windows Mobile. My phone was syncing 4 accounts (Hotmail, GMAIL, Yahoo, Outlook) and they seemed fine. Only complaint I have is that it does not appear that I could make the choice to download pictures/email content automatically. This became a hassle as lots of emails have pictures embedded in them, or HTML style emails. I think this should be checked into Microsoft.

Bluetooth (2/5)

So I tested the Bluetooth with 3 different devices and 4 different cars. Bluetooth headsets worked amazing. The bluetooth connection to computers was a challenge for me, it did not always like the connection and would refuse items every once in a while. I also tested with my BlueAnt ST3 speakerphone/car kit and it worked, but with volume up and speaker phone all the way up it was still like a whisper to me. It seemed to also fluctuate in volume, like it was never “set” always changing louder, softer, louder, and softer. I also took it to a Lexus and Acura dealer and both those cars had issues connecting and once connected the audio quality was subpar in quality. Microsoft really needs to investigate this. I am assuming it is a driver issue since that has been reported on multiple phones not just the HTC Surround.

Zune (5/5)

Can you say mini Zune player? It was awesome. I have Zune on my computer and it was just like that, clear steady stream of music. I loved it! Even with the sound bar being out it was an awesome experience.

Internet (5/5)

This is nice! Finally an internet worth using on a mobile device. I swear I could not put it down. Keyboard was nice and easy to use. The screen was always easy to read, portioned right and overall amazing. I found myself in Wal-Mart using it to find idea’s for different products; reviews and such for games. It’s  just simply amazing!

Bing (4/5)

Bing was awesome on the Touch Pro 2 with turn by turn directions, instant search and voice searches. That’s all there in Windows Phone 7 BUT the turn by turn directions. I think this needs to be added. Sure we have Bing Maps but yeah, we need those directions announced. I love the voice feature and the button to access Bing. That was the best thing ever thought of in my opinion.

Marketplace (Apps) (4/5)

With version 1.0 the  new market place has around 6,000 apps. Seems fair, even if quality of apps are lacking it was nice to have apps to test. There are alot of free ones as well. Only problem is that I would like to see an ability to search for just “apps” or just “games or “just music,” not everything together. Other than that I like it. For where for the marketplace is now, I wouldn’t say it has too many improvements to make, maybe a few, but ask me again in 6 months I might give you a different opinion.

Overall (4/5)

For version 1.0 of Windows Phone 7 we have a good quality product. Sure there are flaws, but let’s be honest here. Who had a perfect device on the first release of Android? Nobody. We are at version 2.3/2.4 and 3.0 Honeycomb now and they still have flaws. Apple – HA, yeah let’s just call that a work in progress. WebOS, Where is version 1.0 and 2.0 at now? That’s what I thought.

So my point here is simple; the OS grows as it matures and we see features added, removed with time. We love it and hate it. This is a good start though right?. I would recommend Windows Phone 7 to someone, even a geeky person as myself. It really did do what they said, “In, out and back to life.” Keep up the good work Microsoft because I liked it. I will miss Windows Mobile though, but hey times change and we adapt.

PPCGeeks, please below let me and the others know what you think of the HTC Surround now that it has been torn apart from top to bottom. I enjoyed this review. It was fun and atlas I was sad to have to send the HTC Surround back. Simply because i have to go back to using 4 different calendars and no ability to link (merge) them together in one place. The Facebook address book was cool. It was nice to have one central place for contacts that are always updated. Features not above can be discussed below, and who knows maybe I will get another chance to review Windows Phone 7, then I will ask you what you want to see in a review. So tell me what you thought below. Grip, rant, rave and praise it. Just tell me!  What do you think of Windows Phone 7?

Hey guys. Tony here bringing you another video review for WP7. This time we take a quick glance at the Twin Blades side scroller and the classic game of Pac-Man. If you have an app or game you would like me to review for WP7 or Android, email me at anthony.pollard@staff.ppcgeeks.com.

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Courtney1985 here, just saying be sure to hop into our forums and discuss this game. It looks very addicting and I must say, I can’t wait to try it out! What about you?

(EDIT: I apologize at the error in the video, the app is NOT free as mentioned in the video. It’s a one time fee of $2.99.  Many apologies.)

Hey there, Oridus here with a video review for Deluxe Moon from LifeWare Solutions.

As described on their website, LifewareSolutions.com

“The Moon is our closest celestial neighbor and the most prominent object in the night sky.

Although the Moon is so much smaller than the Sun, it strongly affects everything on the Earth, including many aspects of your life. Not only tides and animals are affected by the Moon, but also it influences human emotions, relationships, blood pressure an even finances.

Many forms of life on Earth depend on the Moon movement. If you keep track of it, you will soon discover some amazing relationships. This knowledge could help you make your life better!

We would like to offer you the tool to discover more about the influence of the Moon, your mobile assistant which is always at your service wherever you are.

Enjoy our Deluxe Moon application and save money: it is completely free. “

Features: o  Visual picture of the moon phases and the percent of the illuminated area.
o  Full names of all moon phases.
o  Zodiac Sign the moon is in.
o  Current moon’s age: how far along the moon is in its full cycle.
o  Moonrise and moonset times for your location.
o  Amount of time from moonrise and to moonset.
o  Supported languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian. Learn more
o  Calculations for the current and other dates.
o  Network independence: you can work anywhere in the world without Internet or cellular connections.
o  Your current location determined by GPS or cellular network.
o  Resolutions: QVGA (240×320), HVGA (320×480), VGA (480×640), WVGA (480×800).

Compatible with: Square 240×240, WQVGA (240×400), Square 320×320, SquareVGA 480×480

If you hang around our forums enough, you’ve probably seen me around. I’m part of our administrative staff here at PPCGeeks and manage our software and servers. I’ve been a ‘Geeker for almost 3 years now. To give you guys a little background, my first smartphone was the Sprint Treo 700wx. From there, I went on to the Vogue aka Sprint Touch. Then I moved over to At&t and got the Fuze aka Touch Pro, then the Google Nexus One, the Samsung Captivate, and now the HTC Surround. I’ve also used the Sprint Touch Pro 2, HTC Diamond, HTC Evo 4G and Blackberry Tour. You could say I have a pretty well-balanced experience of Windows Mobile and Android. I’ve also used an iPod Touch, but not extensively, and I’ve never used an iPhone. I have flashed ROMs on every phone I’ve had (except the Surround of course), but I’ve never cooked any.

When it comes to Windows Phone 7, there’s some highly mixed opinions here on PPCGeeks. Some people have thoughts about it without even using it. About a month ago, we posted Noir’s thoughts on WP7. Now its time to share my thoughts.

Live Tiles

You either love them or hate them. The idea behind them is that they’re supposed to be similar to Widgets in Android. You can “pin” shorts to apps on your home screen, and you can even pin contacts. I’m sure the usage for these will grow as the OS matures, but right now, there’s not many apps that take advantage of it. If you have a contact linked with a Facebook contact, the tile will show their picture, then show their name, then their latest status update. I use Weatherbug on my phone, which gives you a Live Tile with push notifications for severe weather and it displays the temperature and current weather conditions. The Calendar tile will show a short agenda view for the day. The People tile shows random pictures of your contacts/Facebook friends. The Messaging and Email/Outlook one will show you an unread count. The phone tile will show you a missed call count. Other than those, I haven’t found much use for them.

Similar to Android though, you can pin any app, giving you quick access to it, so in my opinion, the functionality is like Android. The biggest difference is screen real estate though. With Android, you could easily have 16 shortcuts on one home screen and can have a number of different screens. The shortcuts in WP7 are fairly large, with only 2 per row, which can make for a lot of scrolling if you have a lot of them.

Overall, I still like the tiles and I think there’s potential if app developers start making use of it.

App List

Everyone has to launch apps on their smartphone, so I might as well mention the app list or launcher. My biggest complaint about this is that there’s no customization to it. Every app has an icon and the name next to it. There’s only one app per row. Since there’s not many “must have” apps in the Market yet (we’ll get into that later), its not a big deal yet either. As you install more apps though, there’s going to be more scrolling to get down to your favorite app. You can see about 10 apps on the screen without scrolling. They’re in alphabetical order, and I haven’t seen a way to change that. I would consider sorting my by most used. With Android and iOS, you can get quite a few apps to show on each screen, making it faster to scroll through.

All of your games are grouped into the Games XBox Live link. You can have this as a tile on your home screen or access it through the app list. Once you’re in the hub, you’ll see all of the XBox Live games you have installed listed first, then a section for Other Games. This keeps them separated out of your regular apps list.

It would be nice to be able to set categories to your list, where you could list all apps, then scroll right/left to get to different categories (like Games, Tools, Web, etc). Just a thought.

Keyboard

Since we all type on our smartphones, I thought it would be good to mention the keyboard. As of now, there’s now 3rd party keyboard options out there, so you’re stuck with the default one, but that’s not really a bad thing. The keyboard and word prediction has been good for me. I can type just as fast as I could in Android and better than I could in WM. Sometimes I’ll push in an area that closes the keyboard, so I’ll have to click in my text box to open it back up, but overall I’ve been pleased with the keyboard. It works good in both landscape and portrait, even for someone who’s 6’5″ with big hands.

Zune Integration

This is one feature I wasn’t sure about. I’ve never used a Zune MP3 player and one of my biggest complaints about the iPod/iPhone is that you had to use iTunes to sync, and I never cared much for the iTunes software. For syncing, I still don’t like the fact that you have to use the Zune desktop software. I would much rather connect my phone as a mass storage device and just drag-and-drop my files onto it. The Zune software isn’t that bad though, and I guess neither is iTunes. They both get the job done. Zune has some fancier graphics than iTunes. Since I never really used any music organizer app before, I had to go through and clean up A LOT of my ID3 tags in my MP3 files.

When it comes to the Zune software on the phone, its BLOWS AWAY the old Windows Media Player on WM. I actually like it a lot. Its a toss up between that and the music player app in Android. They both function in similar fashions and offer some of the same features for music already on your phone. You can play music and videos that you have synced all through the same app. You can also sync podcasts from Zune to your phone. If you have a Zune Pass, you can also stream any song from the Zune Market and purchase it right from your phone. I like this streaming feature and have used it a couple times. You can sign up for a free trial Zune Pass too.

Office

This is one thing I’m disappointed in. I understand they’re marketing this phone to regular consumers more than business users, but they still need to add some more basic functionality to this for me to use it. Right now, there’s no way to sync documents through Zune to get them on your phone (I believe you can sync One Note documents though). So the only way to get them on the phone is to email them to yourself. With all their focus on the “cloud”, they also could have integrated it with SkyDrive too. I would have loved the ability to edit a document I have on SkyDrive on the fly and just save it. The software itself isn’t that bad and can get the job done, its just a pain to get documents to and from your phone.

Pictures Hub

The Pictures Hub is pretty good, its fast loading and gives you some sorting options. There’s no way to hide pictures that you sync with your device though, so that could be a problem for a few people out there. If you have it synced with Facebook, the What’s New tab will pull over recent pictures uploaded by your Facebook friends.

People Hub

You might spend a lot of time in this area, especially if you use your phone as a phone. Unfortunately, this area could use some more features too. There’s no way of creating a favorite contact list, so everyone is thrown in together. You can search or scroll, that’s about it. There’s a Recent tab, which will show the pictures of your recent contacts (whether it was a phone call, text, etc). If you have it synced with Facebook, it’ll pull over their profile pictures and some other information. Under What’s New, it’ll pull down your Recent News feed from Facebook, showing status updates. You can also update your status from here. They did a good job with Facebook integration for those that use it, and there’s almost no need for a separate Facebook app.

Market & Games

The Market hub could also use some improvements. Its nicely organized into categories and giving you the option to sort by Featured, Top, Free, etc. Unfortunately there’s no way to search. How could you have a Market and not be able to search?!? The other day I was looking for a specific app, and I couldn’t remember where I saw it. I could have found it in seconds if I could have searched for it, but instead it took me over 5 minutes to find it again.

EDIT: Thanks to the comments below, you CAN search the Market. While in the Market, click on the Search button (magnifying glass). It also searches music and artists, but it will list applications too.

A lot of apps seem to be rated pretty low, but there are a few good ones out there. I think the last number I saw was about 3,000 apps. It has a long way to go to catch up to Android and iOS, but its only been out for a few months. There are quite a few apps I miss from Android, but I’m sure they’ll show up in WP7 eventually.

Games are top notch though. I’m sure there’s some low quality ones out there too, but so far I would have to say that the gaming experience is better than Android and possibly better than iOS. I don’t have a XBox, but they did a great job integrated all of its services.

The Netflix app offers both queue management and streaming of movies over WiFi and works pretty well. There’s also a SlingPlayer app, which I haven’t tried yet. For streaming music, there’s a Last.FM app and a Slacker one (although no station caching yet), but not a Pandora app.

Overall
So, after all this, what are my final thoughts? I would say that its a good OS for version 1.0. I enjoy using it, but I’m big on Facebook and social networking and more of a general consumer than a business user. You do have to give it 1-2 weeks to grow on you though. If you just use it in the store or for a day, you’ll probably have negative opinions of it. Like their commercials show, its designed to get you in and out, and it does that pretty well.

I’m hoping the update in Q1 2011 will be a big one. We’ve already heard it’ll feature copy/paste, but everything else has just been rumors to this point. Hopefully they’ll add smart dialing too. App development seems to be going pretty good so far, but there are some apps that I’m waiting on. I would love to have an offline GPS solution like TomTom, iGo, Navigon, etc. It would be great if they offered real turn-by-turn directions in Bing Maps like Google Navigation too. Since I manage a few Linux servers, I could also use a SSH client like ConnectBot on Android.

For their target market, I think Microsoft is off to a great start. For business and production use, it has quite a ways to go. WM and even Android offer more productivity than WP7 at this point int he game.

The OS is very fast and fluid with great graphics and effects. Some games can take a little while to load, but the video quality of them is good.

If there’s anything else you would like me to write about, just post it in the comments and I’ll add it to this article. I’m sure there’s some things I missed that you guys might be interested in.

For those of you that have used WP7, do you agree or disagree with me on any of the points I mentioned?

While this isn’t exactly a scientific experiment, and there’s a number of factors that could change the result, we found this video pretty humorous. They put the Windows Phone 7 HTC Surround, iPhone 4, and HTC G2 on a grill to see which one would die the fastest. The results might surprise you.

While its not really news, it might be a good pick-me-up for a Wednesday morning!

Source: LiveLeak.com (Thanks machek for the tip) via PPCGeeks forums

Hey Geeks! This one comes special, straight from the grinder actually!

A contact of ours (Whom asked to remain anonymous in this scenario) happened to take a quick sneak at the HTC Surround and Samsung Focus, two upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices for American release in just three days. As a result, he sneaked these pics. See more below!

The phones themselves look promising, with a look of Dolby Mobile on the HTC Surround, and an AMOLED screen on the Focus. Specs both are not bad, the 5MP camera a standard to WP7 and expected. Screen sizes look nifty and we can’t wait to see what else this means! More photos below!