At this year's Mobile World Congress, it was clear that the winning OS was definitely Android. Clearly, Apple has more than met its match, at least in the numbers game. With Symbian and Palm threatening to make some heavy duty changes, it was the turn of the guys from Redmond to show just what they were made of. Long hailed the kingpin in the world of computing, when Microsoft launched its WinMo OS, people were clearly disappointed.

Its interface, which mimicked a Windows desktop, wasn't so user friendly when it came to the much smaller touch screen on smartphones. Plagued by criticism, Microsoft remained in the shadows for a while, but let on that they were going in for a major revamp. When they finally announced Windows Phone 7, most techies were doubtful. But boy, were we surprised…and how. Slick, colourful and intuitive, the WP7 OS is clearly aiming at toppling Android out of its top place. HTC was one of the first manufacturers to take on this OS, and we put the Mozart to the Smartbuy handset test to give you a first-hand insight into all that it has to offer.

Design

The Mozart's fascia offers only three touch-sensitive buttons to make the most of the handset – Return, Home and Search. The home screen greets you with ‘Live Tiles' that arrange most of your apps in colourful square boxes on the screen. You can drag-and-rearrange or delete them from the home screen with a long press.

We had the most frequently used apps slotted at the very top – Phone, People (included our SIM as well as Facebook contacts), Messages and Mail. All updates were instantly displayed on the respective icons and a tap was all it took to open and view the latest e-mail or text.

A small arrow points to the second home screen, which you can swipe to. This lists all the apps and functions you have downloaded and stored on the handset.

The 3.7-inch touch screen was quick to respond and the Live Tiles, Hubs and multimedia came together quite well on the brilliant screen. The virtual keyboard on the HTC Mozart is one of the most accurate ones we have come across. The chances of a typo error were almost zilch even when we were typing in the comparatively narrow layout - the Portrait mode.

The back panel is one of the most beautiful you'll find on any smartphone these days! The aluminum unibody extends from the bezel to constitute part of the back panel, and is shaped like a curved trapezoid. The top and bottom corners are covered by soft, triangular rubberised panels for better grip, with the top one housing the 8-megger cam and the Xenon flash and the bottom one giving way to reveal the SIM card slot and the battery.

Trying out melodies

Named after the homonymous musical genius, the HTC Mozart flaunts its audio capabilities as its USP. The handset is designed with just a single grille of speakers on the rather fashionably designed back panel.

To transfer multimedia to the handset we had to download Zune and then drag-and-drop files on to it. The audio playback was quite rich and clear. However, we didn't have any options to tweak the sound quality or the equaliser setting in the native player. If one chooses to invest in a music-oriented handset this is the least that one would want in terms of customisability. To enrich the audio experience you will have to download the ‘Sound Enhancer' app from HTC Hub. This gives you the option to activate Dolby Mobile or switch on SRS Enhancement. Both seemed to work well on the tracks that we played and were most evident when we had the earplugs on. You have equaliser settings too but these can be made use of only if you connect headphones or a set of external speakers.

Smile, please?

HTC Mozart has been endowed with an 8-megger camera for shooting stills and recording high-def videos and has a front-facing cam for video conferencing. We shot pictures under varying light conditions, indoors and outdoors, to test the quality of reproduction. The photographs weren't very grainy, although there was a little bit of noise visible when we zoomed into the pictures. The colours reproduced remained rich and quite true to the original. However, the camera seemed to under-perform in brightly-lit surroundings – all pictures taken in daylight seemed slightly under-exposed. The fact that we couldn't access any significant camera setting like ISO or exposure didn't help either. The only control we had was over features like Flash, Scenes (Portrait, Macro Sports, Candlelight, etc), Effects (Greyscale, Sepia, etc), Metering and Flicker Adjustment (which would be automatic most times anyway) Also, even if you set these parameters once and exit the application, the phone doesn't remember your previous settings and shows you the default ones.

Apps

Using Internet Explorer on the handset was a pretty pleasant experience. It took a little more than 20 seconds for the Smartbuy web page to load on the browser. The pinch-to-zoom feature was pretty smooth and effective, as was scrolling down the web pages. A long press on any image displayed in your browser gives you the option to either share it or save it on the handset. You even have the option to pin your favourite webpages to the home screen where a small screenshot of it is displayed along with other Live Tiles.

You get to configure multiple e-mail clients on the handset and setting them all up is a breeze. But you don't have a unified inbox – which may be a good thing or a bad one - depending on whether you like to demarcate your professional and personal mails or not.

The HTC Mozart also comes with voice recognition software powered by ‘Tellme'. We stumbled upon this with a long press of the Home button (the one with the Windows logo on it) but there weren't any instructions required to taste a slice of Tellme. It efficiently played the role of a virtual genie as we ordered it to ‘Call Papa' or ‘Open Music' or told us how many ‘Calories in Chicken Tikka'! The only time it fumbled was when it had to deal with typically Indian names, which can be quite a mouthful even for an automated voice response system. Apart from this, the system was quite accurate.

You have the Microsoft office app that lets you create Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, however you can only view PDF files but can't create any. Photo Enhancer, Stocks, Converter and Connection Setup were a couple of apps that we downloaded from HTC Hub and added to our list. We couldn't try out the Xbox Live app – the message we got was that the service wasn't yet available in our country.

Tech specs

The HTC Mozart has an internal memory of 8GB, which is the minimum standard required according to WP7 guidelines. Incidentally, the same guidelines also dictate that none of the phones that'll run on WP7 will come with external storage. This might be quite a bummer for those who are used to loading up their smartphones with a ton of multimedia.

The smartphone runs on a 1GHz processor but the system froze a couple of times and surprisingly not even when it was being subjected to relatively ‘heavy-duty' stuff like downloading apps. The call quality was clear but the battery barely lasts 12 hours with Wi-Fi and GPRS activated along with the regular number of voice calls.

Our verdict

With a design that stands out and hardware that beautifully complements the new Windows Phone 7 OS, it's not too hard to fall in love with the HTC Mozart. However, there are some aspects in which it fails to deliver. For example, the camera doesn't give results befitting a powerful 8-megger. You can claim that most smartphones these days won't last a marathon when it comes to battery life, but the HTC Mozart's is one of the lowest. If you are willing to accept the lower rating on these two aspects and are keen on trying out the brand new WP7 experience on a classy handset, this might your chance. And might we add, with WP7 upgrades coming up soon, you might not regret the plunge!

Love: Great design, intuitive apps/interface

Hate: Poor battery life, not-so-great camera

Rs 26,490

mahananda@thehindu.co.in

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