Sprint HTC Arrive Impressions

Bought the phone on ebay to replace my Samsung Epic so my wife can use Epic and replace her Hero + Nexus One combo. Just want to document my impressions on the phone and on windows phone 7 OS.


7/13/11
Decided to reinstall Mango again. Although it was successfully updated yesterday, the laptop rebooted half-way through. Restored via Zune (dead easy) but laptop rebooted again on the same laptop and this time the update doesn't seem to complete and I wasn't able to restore. Restarted everything on another laptop by first flashing the original ROM from here (power off, press volume down and power button to enter recovery, then flash). This time everything went smoothly.



7/12/11
Called another number for Sprint and activated the phone in 5 min.

3G
Data speed seems OK. Reception feels more stable than my Epic. Can stream Sprint radio for quite a while without any interruptions. Streaming Sprint TV does had interruptions now and then but it's better than Epic's 3G. The phone does get quite hot when charging via USB and streaming video.

OS
NoDo feels smooth when dealing with the main OS, but the apps on WP7 all felt a bit rough around the edges. After some pondering, I decided to upgrade the phone to Mango beta following this link. Still testing things out but so far so good and I can finally filter contacts by google, facebook or windows live.

Things I don't like
*No easy toggle to switch wifi/bluetooth on/off.
*The 3G, battery status on top disappears after a while. Kinda annoying when the signal is not good and I have to go through an extra swipe to check 3G speed.
*IE rendering. Even with Mango beta it has trouble rendering some page, especially one with chinese.
*Multi-tasking solution looks ugly.




7/11/11
First impression.
The phone is heavy! It's thicker and heavier, but smaller in width and height than Epic. It feels very solid. The keyboard is excellent compared with Epic's keyboard. Screen is obviously not as vibrant as Epic's Super AMOLED but it's pretty good to me. Have not found a way to disable auto rotate yet. Very little configuration option for the phone.

Software
It took me a while to navigate around windows phone 7 especially I wasn't able to do ESN change to have the phone activated on my account. But using WIFI I was able to get most of the stuff setup. When first connect to Zune it took a while to update the phone to the latest update.

Music
Syncing with Zune for music is pretty easy. Playback quality is good to my ears. Have not sync any videos yet but it won't be as easy as my Epic (drop and play).

Contacts
When using the phone it asked for my windows live ID and there was NO WAY to NOT SYNC the contacts. Since I mainly use google as my email/contact/calendar source I added my Google account via account setup. I also added my facebook account. Once I went to the people hub my contacts are just a mess before I spent sometime to link various accounts and clean up my windows live contacts. I wish there was an easy way to filter out contacts like on Android, e.g., only google contacts and not windows live contacts.

Browsing
The built in Internet Explorer is OK for most browsing, but certainly falls short when compare to Android 2.2/2.3 browser.No flash support...

Messaging
Built in messaging app is clean and works. Can't wait for Mango so all the windows live messenger/face chat are integrated.

Other software
Sprint provides a few useful software: TeleNav, Sprint TV and Sprint Radio. HTC also provides a Youtube application that works pretty well. Bing map is alright. Number of apps is growing but it's very annoying to see the free apps in Android market costing money here, and sometimes more expensive (Xda-developer for example)! Some applications also lack functionality compared to other version (MLB At bat has no video streaming). Hopefully all these will change when Mango is released.