Dell X51V vs HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 Part 1

I have been waiting a long time to upgrade from my Dell X51V to a smart phone. If you are not familiar with the Dell X51V, it is a Windows Pocket PC with wireless but no phone capability.

Overall (WP7) Windows Phone 7 is a great phone OS. It is rock solid. I have had zero lock ups or crashes on my first day of using it about 5 hours. It succeeds Microsoft's goals of "Always delightful" and "Incredibly Mine".

The phone set up was easy. It brought in all my contacts from hotmail, gmail, and facebook.

I am very impressed with the live tiles and how WP7 handles email. It is easy to delete unwanted messages and get right back out. In fact deleting gmail in the phone is easier than web based gmail itself. You don't accidentally go into the message when trying to delete a lot of messages.

The browser is incredibly smooth and fast. It supports multiple tabs and it remembers the tabs when you go back in. My bank already supports WP7 so it is easy to check balances and make payments. The funny thing is, the Windows Phone 7 forums look horrible on wp7.

The ME tile on WP7 is cool. It allows you to see updates to Windows Live and Facebook. You can change your picture and change your status here. However, it is missing a lot of things. It is a phone and there should be a My Phone Number. It should also have my address if the phone is lost. It should also have an ICE (In Case of Emergency) phone number. It is also missing twitter integration.

The text messaging works great. It corrects words as you type. I like how it indents replies.

The camera is a 5MP camera. It has no image stabilization so it is nearly impossible to take a non-blurry picture. However the video is better than expected for a phone. It is way cool how the phone automatically syncs your pictures to skydrive. The pictures hub works well to organize your photos.

The voice recognition is incredible. It does not require any training, it recognized my voice right away.

Compared to my Dell Axim X51V, my Windows Phone does lack a lot of things that I use every day but it was just released yesterday.

• All the notes in Outlook that I had cannot be synced to Windows Phone 7
• Outlook tasks cannot be synced
  
• Windows Phone 7 has One Note built in but it does not Sync To Sky Drive. I guess I will be using evernote.
  
• There is no To Do List application that syncs to the desktop.
• There is no blue tooth keyboard for the phone like the stow away keyboard for the Axim.
• There is no eWallet type application that syncs to the desktop.
  

On my Axim I get about 2 hours of continuous usage. Battery life is about 3.5 hours of continuous usage on the HTC HD7 where I was browsing the marketplace, downloading applications, installing applications and removing applications.

It looks like WP7 marketplace is following in the footsteps for the iPhone marketplace. Over a thousand applications on launch day is impressive. However, 90% of the applications are crap. Most paid applications have no trial.

More to come...