Windows Phone 7 in the house - HTC HD7 unboxing

Microsoft is back in the smartphone market with its Windows Phone 7 platform. And the best and biggest of the launch devices is the HTC HD7 - which is why we bought one.

In the UK, it's exclusive to O2: available for £380 on pay as you go, or £40 per month for 24 months on contract.

It's a 4.3-inch, 480x800 pixel resolution, WVGA touchscreen device. Size-wise, it's big and thin: 122x68x11.2mm, and light (162 grams)

It uses a 1GHz Scorpion chip (part of Qualcomm's Snapdragon family), with 8GB of memory, and has a single, rear, 5-megapixel autofocus CMOS camera, offering video up to 720p resolution.

We like it.

Look, O2 has a special Windows Phone 7 bag for its exclusive HTC HD7. It's a little knick nack...

Inside the nice bag is a nice box. And when you slide out the outside box, you find an inner box, and a Windows Phone 7.

It warns you not to apply excessive pressure to the screen or device case. "Please remove the device from your pants pocket before sitting down."

This we have noted. HTC HD7 will not go in our pants.

When you take everything out of the box, this is what you get: a phone, some instructions, a USB power cable/socket, and headphones.

You can even take them out of their nice plastic bags.

Taking the protective covers off the HTC HD7, this is what you get, back and front.



To get the phone to work, we need to take the back off, put in our SIM card, and remove the film over the battery.

Next, we need to plug in the power to charge the battery.



Here's where the power goes in. To the right is the 3.5mm jack socket.



Now we need to get started.



Oh, look. The phone is working, and we've already got a message.



And here it is with the display stand being used. Nice.