HTC Surround was first introduced to the public during the launch event in London in mid-October. It is among the top five device running on the Windows Phone 7 platform.
The HTC Surround Release date is sometime in December 2010 in the USA. HTC Surround in UK and other European and Asian countries will be available in the first quarter of 2011.
While being among the best WP7 devices HTC Surround has a lot of interesting features to offer.
Packaging
The model comes with standard accessories in the package that include a Lithium Ion battery, a headset and a charger.
There is also a HTC Surround manual that comes handy when you need some reference. If you are looking for some good HTC Surround cases, you have to buy one from the market.
Design
Much like other HTC touchscreen phones, HTC Surround sports a stylish design that captures attention right from the first glance. The phone comes with a terrific Landscape slider form factor that bears the signature HTC style which is being improved with each novelty. No surprise that it is pretty close to some of its cousins like Google Nexus One and HTC Desire. The gray and matte black front is mainly devoted to the 3.8” LCD display. That is a little boring unless you have a look at its horizontal speaker, which slides up and provides a robust music experience unlike what you get in most recent phones. The speaker is equipped with Dolby and SRS audio enhancement. You get a complete “surround sound” experience which exactly explains the name of this HTC smartphone.
The folded key stand is another of the coolest HTC Surround features that we liked immensely. Slide the display to the left and a stand comes out to support the phone and make it stand on its own. Neat and very effective for watching movies and videos we would say. At least this is a gadget that is adopted for this very reason.
The buttons are pretty standard but well positioned for calling them user-friendly. The right side has the volume and camera shutter keys. The 3.5 mm headphone slot and the on/off button are very conveniently located at the top-right of the phone. The USB slot is also well placed at the bottom which allows you to use the phone while you are copying music files onto it from your PC. The rear boasts of a 5MP camera.
The slim design makes it easy to hold the Surround though the weight of 165 grams, makes it a bit heavier than expected. Much of the weight comes from its speaker. The plastic rear with aluminum edges is similar to most other smartphones.
Hardware
We were pleased to find that HTC Surround is equipped with a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 processor. With the Snapdragon around, you know how smooth the operations can be! A 448 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM drives the Surround.
What really got our attention is HTC Surround expandable memory issue. Come on, this is a smartphone and the HTC guys could not even put in a single memory slot? Thankfully, there is a 16 GB on-board memory that is pretty decent for average users and cost-saving too. But we would have much preferred a 32 GB capacity with expansion slots.
The phone bears basic connectivity features like Bluetooth and USB for data transfer. For surfing in HTC Surround you have Wi-Fi, 3G, GPRS and EDGE . The maximum speed of the smartphone is 7.2 Mbps in HSDPA and 2 Mbps in HSUPA. Sadly, there is no infrared. The capabilities turn out to be rather operative. We got HTC Surround on AT&T and with the carrier’s inconsistent coverage, the pages loading takes around 4-5 seconds . The HTC Surround has 3.8” LCD screen with a resolution of 800 X 480 pixels which displays the text and images quite sharply.
The HTC Surround specs are quite average but decent enough to help you grip the phone and use it for long hours. The HTC Surround dimensions are 4.7 x 2.4 x 0.5 inches. The solid build gives it a robust appearance.
HTC Surround Display and Keyboard
The capacitive touchscreen display is good enough for a gadget of this class but not as good as of iPhone 4 or Samsung Focus. The main disadvantage that comes when compared with Apple device is the clearness of the screen under the direct sunlight.
That does not mean however, that the screen is a downer. You can watch Youtube Videos and even Netflix movies with a quite sharp quality. Images and videos are decent enough even if not comparable with iPhone. The screen supports around 16 million colors.
Unlike other smartphones like LG Quantum, there is no QWERTY keyboard beneath the display. The virtual keyboard is the only thing you have to rely on for data input. But Microsoft has done its job well and despite coming with minimal keys, we found that the screen board is an excellent one. The responsiveness is awesome and there is an integrated word suggestion feature to make your job easy while typing.
Camera
We found the 5MP camera is an average shooter! You can activate it even in sleep mode with just a press of the camera shutter key. You can capture videos in HD at 720p- feature that is rather popular among HTC smartphones of the new generation. Images can be shot with a possible resolution of 2592х1944 pixels. Among the rest of the loaded features we have LED-flash, Geo-Tagging and Auto-focus.
What are the main disadvantages? Well, Both image and video bear a smudgy appearance. Also, if you change the resolution settings once, you need to re-adjust it again each time you turn on the phone. In case of the HTC Surround front facing camera is one more thing you will lack.
This impairs the entire experience. Unless you are not too keen about quality, it is not going to affect you anyways. But we seriously hope Microsoft looks into the camera minuses as quickly as it can. Such dawdling is not going to take it much higher in its race with Google and Apple.
HTC Surround Battery Life
The Surround has a pretty good battery life. The 1230 mAh Lithium Ion battery offers a continuous talk time of a little more than 4 hours in 3G. We used the phone extensively and found it lasting for around 3-4 days. You get 4 hrs of talk time in 2G. The stand-by time is about 275 hours in 2G and approximately 255 hours in 3G.
Software
You may not forget the HTC Android devices but you will simply fall in love with the HTC Surround WP7. The OS is simply great and it truly provides a first-rate user experience. The ease and comfort with the interface, navigability and applications are near-perfect and excellent barring a couple of glitches.
We are already visualizing the smile the HTC Surround is going to elicit from application lovers. Into the HTC Surround AT&T has packed in a number of handy applications to charge up software users.
These includes:
• AT&T Navigator
• AT&T Family Map
• AT&T myWireless
• AT&T Radio
We particularly enjoyed the awesome AT&T U-Verse Mobile app that allows subscribers to browse U-Verse TV programs. No more chance for missing out TV programs. There is also the Bing Search that yields effective results for all your queries.
Another highlight of this Windows powered mobile phone is the “Windows Markeplace” hub. You can download as many apps you like from here. The hub also has a specific section named “HTC Apps” where you can find apps solely for HTC users and related to separate sections like Health, News and Finance. You may also download list games and music of any kind into your HTC Surround .
We found the homescreen interface quite tacky for use. Average Joes may not mind too much but Android and iPhone users are not going to like the UI too much. To be fair, the UI of the games and apps look quite great.
Accessories and extensions
Nowadays, a dozen extensions hit the market as soon as a new model comes on the shelves. The Surround has a fair share of extensions exclusively made for it. There is the Belkin USB Extension cord that can extend the standard Surround USB cable by about six feet. You can also get the Universal Windshield Car Mount to fix the mobile onto your car and even rotate it 360 degrees. An armband is also available for you to carry the Surround along if you really want a hands-free conversation.
Performance
As far as basic functionalities are concerned, Surround offers a decent experience. The call quality is clean and crisp, but strictly okay in noisy environment. You can slide up the HTC Surround speakers for a better sound experience. SMS, MMS, E-mail and chats are perfect and provide with no reason for complaints whatsoever.
As we said, surfing could not really be judged with AT&T’s inconsistent services. Speed is a bit sluggish but we had no complaint with the xHTML and HTML browsers. Once a page fully loads, the text and images come fully optimized for your screen.
With 16 GB internal memory you can practically store unlimited call information and phonebook entries.
The HTC Surround sound capabilities are great as well. Like we said, the slide up speaker practically takes things to an altogether new level. The inbuilt audio player supports music formats like WAV, MP3, WMA and eAAC+. Video playing is excellent too with the phone being friendly to formats like WMV, MP4, H.263 and H.264.
Conclusion
That boils down to whether you should go for the phone or not. As you must have by now guessed from our AT&T HTC Surround Review, we are pretty excited with the slide-up speaker and kickstand. The overall design, multimedia capabilities, applications and basic functionalities are a turn-on too. However, the below-par camera, lack of an actual keyboard, no memory slot and ho-hum UI are the areas where the phone fails miserably.
The speaker is the only innovative feature of the HTC Surround cell phone and the only reason that we can recommend you to buy this device. Unless you are excited about the really brilliant slide-up speaker, the Windows 7 powered Samsung Focus is a better option.
Buying from AT&T is going to set HTC Surround price at around $200. This HTC Surround cost is applicable with a two-year AT&T contract in the US.
You can find more reviews of HTC Surround @ TestFreaks.
