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.

LG GT540: Another Android From LG

They just keep on coming and leaking. I am talking about these latest Android phones. They have such a propensity to leakage that you would think multinational companies need someone to educate them about keeping a tight lid on things.

Or may be everyone wants free advertisement like Apple tends to generate with their high levels of secrecy.

The latest to be leaked is another Android phone from LG, called the GT540. We haven’t heard how well the last one is doing so far but it looks like they are already quite far ahead into the second one.

LG did say that a Snapdragon model was headed for Q2 2010 and that a non-QWERTY handset is also destined for 2010. With a screen size is 320×480, it can be any one of those. Which one do you think it is?  [read]

Dell Mini 3i Starts Selling In China

The much talked about Android smartphone from phone-newbie Dell is finally going up for sale in China. They have put up a press release that details on what exactly the phone has inside it.

The PR highlights the fact that has a 16:9 ratio 3.5” screen that displays 640×360 display. Other than that, it is a quadband GSM/EDGE phone that also has GPS on it. You get a 3.5MP with auto-focus, flash, video capture, etc. Dell is probably going to launch it in Europe and the US only when they are confident that the phone will be able to hold out in front of the fast moving competition in those markets. [read]

Sony Ericsson’s XEPRIA X10 Might Go To AT&T

A lot of us were hoping that Sony Ericsson’s new Android superphone – The XPERIA X10 – would arrive on a decent carrier. Those hopes are now dashed. Based on the intel gathered by Phandroid, the radio bands on the X10 are the same as the ones on the iPhone.

QED – even though the X10 has a lot of bands listed on the website the US version will only work with the carrier who carries the iPhone. Say hello to the blue beachball all over again – AT&T. The iPhone is the iPhone, so being on AT&T has not stopped it from going viral. Will the X10 have something similar to help it sell? Only time will tell. [read]

Spotify Exudes Symbian Love

Spotify is spreading its clout over to the mobile OS that holds the largest International market share – Symbian. Spotify has just been released for the Symbian S60 OS. In doing so, they are suddenly up from supporting only a handful of phone models to supporting a long list of phone models manufactured by different carriers. Most of them are by Nokia and others include Sony Ericsson and Samsung. [read]

Spotify, despite its critics and problems, is fast becoming a large rival for other commercial services like iTunes. Spotify has also officially surpassed last.fm in user polls – this after Last.fm was adamant about Spotify not being a competition for them. Now to wait for the true competition to break out. [read]

That’s bad for the environment either way as you end up with two different phone chargers or two similar ones as they are always sold with cell phones. It is also bad if you need to recharge the battery of your cell phone at a friends house only to find out that the phone charger is not compatible with your cell phone.

Cell phone suppliers like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Apple, Motorola and LG have agreed to produce cell phones that are compatible with standard charging devices in Europe. First cell phones are expected next year which is expected to reduce the waste that phone chargers produce each year. About 180 million cell phones are sold in Europe each year which also means the same amount of phone chargers.

According to the New York Times only data-enabled phones (which will account for about 50% of all cell phones sold in 2010) will be compatible with the new chargers which are in the beginning sold with the cell phones. Plans are to remove the cell phone chargers later on and sell them separately. It is likely that other countries will join the initiative.

You see, the firmware of the DVD writer contains information, so called media codes, that tell the writer how it has to handle the media inserted. This includes reading and writing speed. If media are not stored in the firmware the default read and write speed will be used which is always slower than what it could be.

Media Code Speed Edit is a software that reads the firmware of a DVD writer and displays the current list of supported media. It can also modify entries and replace entries. Supported are many DVD writers from companies like LiteOn, LG, Pioneer, NEC, Philips, HP and Benq.

The first thing you need to do after starting Media Code Speed Edit is to load a firmware file. You need that file locally which means that you have to either visit the manufacturers homepage and search for a firmware for your device or visit a website like the firmware page to grab an already modified one. Once you have done that you will see a screen that looks like the one below.

Media Type, name and write speed are displayed in a large list. Media Type is the type of the media, e.g. DVD+R9, DVD+R aso. The name is the media identifier used by the manufacturer and the write speed is the max write speed available for that media on your computer.

We do have two possibilities now. We can change settings immediately if that feature is supported in the firmware by selecting a line in the list and changing the speeds or we can use a program like DVD identifier to identify the media that we are using and replace a line that we are not using with the new media.

Open DVD Identifier and click on Options > Clipboard and activate Attach ‘Media Code’ Block. Now put the media in your DVD drive and click on Identify. The DVD will be identified which takes a few moments. Click on Clipboard to copy the results to the clipboard.

Now open Media Code Speed Edit again and select an unused media code. Make sure that it is of the same media type, e.g. replace a DVD+R with a DVD+R code. Once the line is selected click on Import on the left and paste the contents of the clipboard into the form. Click on OK and you are done.

Once you are done click on Save to save the firmware and patch your DVD writer afterwards with the new firmware. Reboot your computer and test if the changes had a positive effect.

This are lots of information at once. A good place to get started are the forum threads discussing DVD writers of several manufacturers which tell you what can be done and what can’t be done. Below are some forum threads to get you started.

Media Code Speed Edit
BenQ / Philips discussion / results
LG discussion / results
NEC discussion / results
Pioneer discussion / results