Firstly let’s look at the internals.  There’s a 1.5GHz processor and 512Mb of RAM running the thing, but the specifications are good.  To start with there’s a healthy 16Gb of RAM, though like other Windows Phones it’s non-upgradeable and an excellent 8MP camera with dual-LED flash.  All the extras you’d expect from a modern smartphone are there too with a range of sensors and other gadgets.

That screen too is excellent.  While not quite as bright as other Windows Phones it’s clear and easy to read even in direct sunlight.  Then comes the overall build quality.  I was a bit concerned about the back which has a section at the bottom which looks like it slides out and unclips to provide access to the battery and SIM card slot.  In fact it doesn’t and trying to force it could break the back of the handset.  Instead there’s a small clip that enables the entire back of the phone to come away.  I’m not convinced about how wise this is but the clip is solid and doesn’t look prone to breakage.

The front of the phone is almost all glass from edge to edge and it’s truly luxurious to behold if not hold.  At 131.5mm x 70.7mm x 9.9mm and 160g it’s big and bulky.  It’s a stretch for even my hand to hold and grip firmly and you’ll certainly notice it in a pocket.

You might find it odd then to hear that I absolutely love this phone.  Scaling up the operating system by around 30 or so percent brings new levels of clarity and usability to it.  All of a sudden things like the on-screen keyboard work properly almost all of the time, and everything else becomes much clearer to read and see.  There’s no pixelation at all in fact and the screen is almost crystal sharp.

So who might want the HTC Titan?  Well if you want a phone to keep in your jeans pocket then stay away otherwise you’ll look like you’ve got a stiff leg when you walk around.  There are a great many people for whom this phone is brilliant.  For starters there are people who want a proper PDA replacement.  With the full integration of Office and SkyDrive into Windows Phone with the new update, which is pre-installed, this phone is almost perfect for this role.

There are also people who may have motor or vision problems and who would carry their phone around in a bag anyway.  This is a huge market and if you’re one of these people you can be reassured there’ll be no squinting at this phone to read tiny text.  In fact for these groups of people I believe that the HTC Titan is a great introduction to smartphones and a product that very neatly and effectively fills an important hole in the Windows Phone market.

So overall I can safely say the HTC Titan won’t suit everybody’s needs, but for those people it helps, it will be a tremendous help indeed.

In investigating the phantom data leak I had a good look around the forums and, while there were a great many theories about which app was responsible, more people seemed to be pointing the finger at the HTC Hub Live Tile than anything else.  As I’ve got an HTC Mozart I decided to put this to the test.

Now I don’t use the HTC Hub, preferring instead to use the excellent Weatherbug to deliver my weather information.  This too has a live tile and uses almost no data at all.  In fact my data usage for my Windows Phone sits at around 150Mb a month, and that’s with the phone checking my email at least every 15 minutes and with some light web browsing too.

I will always wake up in the morning to see that my data usage hasn’t increased at all because of this.  This is one of the advantages of having an HTC Mozart on the Orange network in the UK, they have an app which allows me to check my call and data usage in real time, any time.  It was this app I called upon in my investigation.

Before going to bed last night I switched in the HTC Hub Live Tile and set it to automatically download weather data every 3 hours.  The only other thing running here to poll the Internet was my email which, as I’ve said, uses almost no data.

At the time of going to bed my data usage was showing at 6Mb for the month, which is nothing really.  Upon waking this morning however I discovered that data usage had shot up to 18Mb, an extra usage of a whole 12Mb during the night.

Now I stress again that this is an unscientific test but in the absence of Microsoft or any other company coming clean and putting their hands up to accept responsibility, people around the world will still be leaking data from their phones and, perhaps, running up hefty data bills in the process.

All I can say is that we want to hear from you.  Try removing the HTC Hub Live Tile from your Windows Phone if you are experiencing phantom data loss and report back to us here whether it did or did not solve the problem for you.

The best way to start is to discuss why I went with Windows Phone 7.  I want to be frank here, I both love and hate smartphones with equal measure.  I like being able to do a little light web browsing and check and update Facebook and Twitter, but primarily I want a phone to be a phone.  This is the overriding concern I have about modern smartphones, they’re simply not phones first!

So what do I mean by this.  Well I discounted both iOS and Android because the former monopolises your main screen with icons for maps, games, utilities and more while relegating the actual phone features to a couple of small icons on the screen.  The latter is even worse, treating your phone’s screen like a desktop with a mouse cursor and widgets.  I have enough trouble sometimes with my desktop on my PC at home.  The last thing I wanted to do was translate those problems onto a tiny 4 inch screen and exacerbate them further.

Windows Phone on the other hand does things differently.  You don’t, for example, ever have to go into a Facebook app if you don’t want to.  All the information you need about your friends is right there in your contacts lists (we can also look forward to twitter and other services being integrated here in the future).  The OS also prioritises the phone functions of the device.  While any smartphone OS will live or die on the quality and quantity of the apps available for it, Windows Phone shunts these off, by default, to a second screen.  This is where I want them to be.

The other reason for wanting a phone that works in this way is that I use my mobile phone mostly as a clock and calendar.  For the last couple of years I’ve been struggling along with an HTC Touch HD Windows Mobile handset.  I’ve upgraded the firmware many times to try and make the thing more usable and some firmware implementations have almost worked in that regard.  The thing I’ve always liked the most about it though is simply being able to switch it on and see at a glance the time and any forthcoming appointments.  Android can do this, but with widgets, the iPhone won’t do this at all, and I believe Windows Phone does this best of all.

Then there were the Symbian handsets from Nokia and Sony Ericsson.  These were all discounted early on because the OS is simply not up to the polish that iOS, Android and Windows Phone have.  Palm’s WebOS was also discounted because the OS is in such a dubious place right now that future updates and support are uncertain.

The HTC Mozart Windows Phone

So what about the handsets?  Here is where I faced a real problem because without a shadow of a doubt, the iPhone and many of the current Android handsets are much better than the first batch of Windows Phones.  Phones such as the HTC Desire have been picked up by many of my friends because they’re just so good.  Indeed I’ve been very impressed by the build quality of HTC handsets in general.  The iPhone 4 though is also a fantastic piece of design and a wonderful handset I’d be delighted to have in my pocket.  It had to be a Windows Phone though so I had to make a choice.

My own carrier in the UK is Orange which gave me a choice of three.  The HTC Mozart, the Samsung Omnia 7 and the LG Optimus 7.  The LG was out straight away as I feel the plasticky buttons along the bottom of the screen are both cheap (in look and feel) and will eventually break.  Both the Mozart and the Omnia are excellent handsets but I wasn’t strictly tied to Orange so I had a look at the other carriers.

The HD 7 I felt had a very poor screen, it felt pale and washed out, so this was discounted early on.  The only other handset available was the HTC Trophy on Vodafone that feels like the poor cousin of the Mozart.  So sticking with Orange it was.

This is where the choice became very difficult and let me tell you why.  I had a Mozart for 10 days a couple of months ago when Microsoft sent me a review unit.  It’s a lovely phone, the gorgeous metal case and its smallish size make it an absolute pleasure to pick up and hold.  Because it’s not too big, with a 3.7 inch screen, it feels like a phone and not a computer too.

There is one major flaw with the Mozart though and it almost became a deal-breaker for me.  Because Windows Phone will let your switch off the phone simply by pressing and holding the power button, with no on-screen prompt to turn it off as well, this is exactly what happened every time I sat down to put my shoes on (I keep my phone in my front trouser pocket).  It is hugely irritating finding out your phone has switched off AGAIN just because you’ve sat down and leant forward!

This made me seriously consider the Omnia 7, one of only two Windows Phone handsets (and the only one in the UK) to come with an AMOLED screen.

This screen is an absolute joy.  It’s incredibly bright and the contrast is clear between blacks and whites.  But even this fantastic AMOLED screen isn’t without its problems.  At 4 inches it’s a little large for its resolution and a sort of fuzzy pixellation can occur around the edges of icons and the Windows Phone live tiles on the front screen.

It’s not noticable at a distance but for close work, which is what you do with a mobile phone most of the time, I knew that looking at these fuzzy edges and knowing that the operating system is really drawing a straight line, would annoy me.

There was also the build quality of the phone.  It’s made from solid-feeling metal but has a cheapness to the edging and the back that just could have been done better.  It’s just not up to HTC’s high standards and the large Samsung logo plastered across the front is too large to have to look at every day for the next couple of years.

Even so it was a close run thing.  The Mozart’s power button issue meant I had to consider the Omnia very seriously indeed (the Omnia’s power button is on the side), taking friends to my local Orange store to see it for themselves and reading review after review of it online (I’d already had a Mozart so knew what to expect with that handset).

In the end the HTC Mozart simply came out with more pros than the Samsung.  The only other choice was to wait and see what additional handsets came down the line in the next few months.  It was at this point though that I looked back at Windows Mobile 6.5 on my HTC Touch HD and knew I had to run away screaming and embrace a new handset whatever it’s foibles.

There can be no doubt that the second generation of Windows Phone handsets will improve on and fix these problems and be far better.  They will probably challenge the current crop of Android handsets, though whether anything will be a serious challenger to the hardware of the iPhone in the next few years is debatable at this point.

So there it is, laid out in bare metal for you why I chose my Mozart.  It can be such a difficult decision these days choosing a handset and the reason I wanted to write this up as an article is two-fold.  Firstly there may be some of you out there about to go through the same agony, but also because it’s just supposed to be a phone…  Why should this be a difficult choice?

There is no doubt that smartphones have made choosing handsets increasingly difficult, but I’m happy with mine now and it should be delivered tomorrow  :)  You can read my full in-depth review of the HTC Mozart and the Windows Phone 7 operating system at our sister site Windows7News.

Elsewhere the phone has 16Gb of storage, the “world’s first” 4 inch curved AMOLED screen, front and reaf-facing cameras and improved voice control.  All that aside though is it a wise move for Google to release this phone under their own name?

When the company launched the HTC-made Nexus One a year ago there was a great deal of talk about whether this would alienate Google’s hardware partners.  Fortunately the Nexus One was a resounding flop and was closely followed by far better HTC devices so this was never an issue.  It’s inevitable though that this question will be asked again.

It’s easily arguable that Google’s Android operating system is now the de-facto smartphone OS of choice so Google no longer have anything to prove personally.  The uptake among handset manufacturers has been almost universal with only Nokia and Sony Ericsson hanging on to their Symbian platform while they see it though a slow and painful death.  Despite the launch of Windows Phone there will be no change to this as the market is clearly big enough to allow both operating systems to exist side-by-side with all parties making a decent profit.

You can think though that the only reasons for Google to release another own-branded phone is because either, they want to showcase the very latest stuff (in which case I go back to my original point about annoying partners and having a potential flop on their hands as Samsung prime another handset of their own), to reinforce the Google name in people’s minds (though the public don’t and may never think of Google as a hardware company so I can’t help but wonder what the point of this would be) or simply because they can and they felt like it.

This last one is far and away the most likely scenario.

Anyway it’s here but will anyone notice?    Hopefully Samsung have learnt a thing or two from HTC’s mistakes.

The Nexus S will be available to buy or on contract after December 16th.

Engadget are reportingthat smartphone maker HTC are building the device which will sport a 1280×720 multi-touch screen, 2Gb of RAM and a minimum of 32Gb hard disk storage.  It’s also possible that the tablet will also sport a webcam, GPS, 3G and Wireless G and N.

What’s not clear is if the device will be hardware crippled in any way that would prevent a user from installing another operating system, Windows 7, Ubuntu or Android for instance, as the main OS or in a dual-boot configuration.  Certainly a minimum of 32Gb of storage would allow for this.  It would also make the tablet much improved because the main problem with a cloud-based OS is that it’s only usable if you have an active and stable net connection.

This, presumably, is why Google have partnered with Verizon as a distributor.  It can only serve to put yet more strain on the mobile phone networks though, who have already been complaining that their infrastructure is creaking under the bandwidth-hungry data plans for other tablets such as the iPad.  A completely cloud-based OS can only make this situation worse.

The price?  It’s possible that the device could come completely free on a monthly data plan, though there is no confirmation of this at this time.  Certainly this is where HTC’s expertise would come in, in building the tablet down to a price.

The device is rumoured to launch on November 26th in the US.

Get over to the other side and get updated in the mean time.

Nokia X6 To Land In The UK This Friday

If you have been eyeing Nokia’s latest touchscreen music phone – the X6, it is coming to the UK Friday. As is usual with many phones there, it has found a carrier who will be offering it for free against a long-time contract. This time it is Orange for £35/month.

For the SIM-free version you will have to pony up £449, which is roughly around $670 at today’s exchange rate. You can pre-order it from shop.nokia.co.uk from today. [read]

Skype Nokia N900 Demo Video

Nokia N900 comes with Skype built-in. So now you have more reason to buy the N900 for $649, that is if you can wait for the next shipments to arrive. The last I heard of it was that it was pre-ordered to capacity and new orders were behind huge queues. At least now you can get one for $480 on Amazon ($530-$50 mail in rebate). [read]

Skype has demoed Skype for Maemo on an official video. Since Skype is already available on Linux, this port could not have been all that hard to execute. [read]

UK Retailers Pull Satio, Big Bugs Need Squashing

Bad news folks, Sony Ericsson’s Satio is now as good as off the shelves right now. This decision had to be taken after numerous customers came in with complaints about freezes, mysterious powering down of the phone and other problems. The two major retailers of the Phone in the UK – Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U – have decided to offer replacements to customers who are returning the Satio.

Official word from Sony Ericsson is that the issues will be fixed before Christmas. The bugs are apparently to deep for normal updates to tackle. Well, I guess that’s what we get for lusting after a too-good-to-be-true 12MP camera phone.

Kurara Reviewed, Is OKAY

Like he promised, the man behind mobile review has posted a more detailed look at the Kurara. From Murtazin’s post, it is clear that the phone sounds good on paper but it is pretty ordinary in person. It definitely fits the bill for an understudy of the Idou and should be priced somewhere around half of the high-end offerings. That said, if this phone is priced right, it could become a hot-selling phone for those who are looking for an entry-level touchscreen experience that is slightly better than the Samsung options.

The ARM Cortex Ab with 256MB RAM still is powerful enough to breeze through the Symbian UI. So that part is covered I suppose. Read the extensive review of it right here.

O2’s ‘Free’ HTC HD2

The Brits are at it again. They are really good at giving away phones for free as long as you promise to pay them a hefty sum. If you are in the market for the HTC HD2 and if you are in the UK, you can get it for free from O2 against a long-term contract. You will have to pay a nice £45 per month on it though. So far, I do not think the HD2 retailing SIM-free there. So O2 looks like the only option right now. [read]

The HTC Dragon AKA HTC Passion, is going to be the toast of the Android community if it really has everything that it seems to have. Even though details have been scanty, imaginations speculations have been running pretty wild after the screenshots and live shots were revealed.

Now, Techcrunch claims that the phone has been on the prowl at Android headquarters for quite some time now and top Android people are already using it. It has been undergoing a lot of testing and it is likely that a release is imminent.

It is said to be a lot slimmer than either the Droid or the iPhone. Of course, it won’t have a keyboard so being slimmer than the Droid is nothing to talk about. But the 1GHz Snapdragon processor is. It will blaze through everything that the OS has to offer and will certainly help you with multi-tasking. HTC has recently shown with the HD2 that they are really good at making phones. If they can make Windows Mobile into that good a phone, they should logically be able to make a killer Android phone.

So Techcrunch is of the opinion that this is the next super phone that will carry Android and we agree. If Google is taking a personal interest in it, it has to be something special. I don’t think the top Android players carry and test every Android phone that comes out.

So here we have some of the more high profile Snapdragon phones that are coming our way.

HTC HD2

After that big a whispering campaign courtesy of the leaks and the high anticipation during the launch, there is no way you can forget this mobile phone. Arguably the first device to bring the processor to the limelight, this is the phone that in a way started it all.

If you are not too impressed by the 4.3inch screen, then you might be impressed by the custom UI made by HTC. The UI has been demoed on video and it looks really great and responsive. The acceleration, the transitions and the rendering – all look smooth and fast. That is definitely where the Snapdragon shines its brightest.

But the phone might fail to generate the traction and sales that it deserves simply because of its platform. It is a Windows Mobile device and it runs Windows Mobile 6.5 underneath that great UI. What that means is a (ridiculously) low number of apps and low third party interest, which again translates to a not-so-good user experience when compared to the fast-moving Android or the trend-setting iPhone OS.

HTC Dragon/ Passion [?]

This was rumored to be the Android version of the HD2 but now it has been (almost) ID’d as the new HTC Passion. This would be more like a CDMA version of the HTC Dragon, which is a GSM phone. It has also been revealed that the HTC Passion is heading for Verizon and we could be seeing it in the flesh metal by the end of this year. Well, if they want to sell something this year they have to bring it out before Christmas.

But if this phone does materialize, this would be another Android phone that will be jostling for space at the top rung of things. Now that we have the Droid and the X10, this would likely become the third super-specc’d Android phone. [read]

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10

If you still do not know about the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10, you are clearly not coming out from underneath your rock often enough. The XEPRIA X10 was leaked and discussed frenetically before it was finally unveiled on November 3^rd.

It features a custom UI on top of Android and it is know as the ‘Open OS’. The features to be highlighted are the Timescape and Mediascape features, that give you smarter ways to stay connected with your contacts, communications and media. If you want a hands-on review of a pre-production unit, you can check out this post. Over all, Sony Ericsson has something that is pretty sleek and stylish. If they can deliver on their promises (Timescape and Mediascape), this might become THE Android phone to get. Hopefully it will be up to Android 2.0 when they finally get around to selling this phone in the first half of next year.

Acer Liquid A1

Acer’s Liquid A1 is the company’s venture into Android smartphone field and it has so far received a lukewarm response at best. After announcing the Snapdragon processor and the Android OS base, it became the first phone to bring those two together.

However, as we have seen and heard from the folks who got their hands on the device  – Acer is clearly lacking on the UI development. Plus, the physical design of the phone leaves much space for improvement. Acer’s inexperience in the smartphone category shows through too clearly for this to be a compelling device. Sorry Acer but it looks like you need to step up your game here. [read]

Unnamed Nokia Smartphone For AT&T

Nokia is rumored to be making a new smartphone for AT&T that will be powered by Snapdragon. It is not the N900 and it is something that will be up against the likes of the Droid, the HD2 and the X10. This is a little sliver of a rumor, so more details are currently unavailable. [read]