Bottom Line The HTC Arrive is a solid Windows Phone 7 for Sprint, but it's stuck in the Internet slow lane.
The HTC Arrive finally brings Windows Phone 7 to Sprint, with Microsoft's easy-to-use interface and excellent office software. But without 4G, this cell phone doesn't deliver the best Internet experience the carrier has to offer.
Physical Features and Phone Performance
The Arrive is a classy, businesslike phone, made of gray metal and soft-touch plastic. At 4.6 by 2.3 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and 6.5 ounces, it's a bit heavy, like it's made of some sort of neutron star material; that density helps it feel expensive. The front of the phone is a standard 3.6-inch, 800-by-480 LCD, but slide the screen to the right and something unusual happens: the display moves over and tilts up like a mini-laptop, revealing an excellent five-row QWERTY keyboard.
I have mixed feelings about the hinge. Sometimes it's great: it reduces glare outdoors, and indoors it lets you sit the phone up on your desk. But I worry it will get stuck over time, and the Arrive suffers from the problem all landscape-format Windows phones do. Much of the Windows Phone OS doesn't work in landscape mode, so you're left with this little laptop on your desk where the interface elementas are sideways.
Specifications
- Service Provider
- Sprint
- Operating System
- Windows Phone 7
- Screen Size
- 3.6 inches
- Screen Details
- 480-by-800, 16.7m-color TFT LCD screen
- Camera
- Yes
- Network
- CDMA
- Bands
- 850, 1900
- High-Speed Data
- 1xRTT, EVDO Rev A
- Processor Speed
- 1 GHz
More The Arrive's phone performance is mixed. RF reception is downright excellent: I successfully made several calls in a very weak signal area. But while the earpiece is nice and loud, a few of my test calls were interrupted by audio artifacts, such as pops and clicks. Transmissions through the main mic were a bit blustery but perfectly understandable, with a slight hiss in the background. The speakerphone is quiet enough to be almost useless. I got 4 hours, 32 minutes of talk time, which is acceptable, but not great for a 3G phone.
I paired the Arrive easily with an Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) and activated the refreshingly accurate voice dialing system.
Apps and Internet Experience
Windows Phone 7 has unparalleled compatibility with Microsoft office setups, including a terrific Exchange client and built-in Office document software. The Web browser isn't bad, either. So it's a pity that the Arrive's Internet speeds are so slow.
The Arrive lacks 4G WiMAX, which speeds up Net access on both Sprint's HTC Evo 4G ($199, 4 stars) and Samsung Epic 4G ($249, 4 stars) phones. But it's also slow for 3G. When I tested the Arrive directly against an Evo using the browser-based DSLReports speed test and two downloadable speed tests (Ookla on the Evo and BandWidth on the Arrive), I got noticeably slower speeds on the Arrive five out of six times, with no Arrive result higher than 663Kbps down and 510Kbps up. Sprint's other top smartphones leave this phone in the dust. At least the Arrive has Wi-Fi, and it connected easily to our WPA2-protected network.
Like all Windows Phones so far, the Arrive is based on the now-older, first generation 1GHz Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon processor, which offers fine performance. The Arrive may be Sprint's best gaming phone, thanks to the many excellent games among the 10,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace. But note that Sprint doesn't yet have any phones based on Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip, which offers superior gaming performance.
HTC, Sprint, and Microsoft have enhanced the standard Windows Phone software here with a couple of apps and one big feature: Copy and Paste. Copy and paste worked for text in every app I tried, with one caveat: you need to zoom in beyond a certain point to be able to tap on words, see them highlighted, and copy them. That can be very frustrating.
You can get several useful apps through HTC's Hub portal. There's a notepad, flashlight, graphic equalizer, photo enhancer, but most notably a very cool app called "attentive phone," which does things like increase ringer volume if the phone is in a bag and mute the ringer if you flip over the phone on a table. That's neat stuff, and should be a default feature.
Sprint's major contribution is a TeleNav-powered GPS app that locked into my location quickly and accurately, and works perfectly in landscape mode. That's a big bonus over Microsoft's Maps app, which doesn't work properly with the keyboard open.Media Features
Media features are similar to most other Windows phones. The phone syncs with Zune software on Windows or with Microsoft's iTunes connector on Macs. There's 14.63GB of on-board storage and no memory card slot.
HTC and Sprint add some useful media apps to the stock Windows lineup. HTC adds a real, HQ-supporting YouTube app. Sprint offers Sprint TV & Movies, which wouldn't download to my device but that Sprint said is coming soon, and streaming Sprint Radio ($5.95 a month)
Music sounded great over wired 3.5-mm headphones and Altec Lansing BackBeat 903 Bluetooth headphones ($79.99, 3.5 stars), but I had a few concerns with video performance. While most of my test videos played smoothly, even in 720p HD, a few videos transcoded from HD AVC1-encoded files were jerky, but since that's pretty obscure format, I'm not too concerned.
The phone refuses to use Bluetooth headsets to play sound from any videos, or from anything streaming over the Web such as YouTube. If you have a Bluetooth headset attached, the audio will just play over the phone's speaker. I consider that a bug.The Arrive's 5-megapixel camera is really fast—in some cases, too fast. You can snap pictures in 0.2 seconds, often before the autofocus has locked in, resulting in some very blurry photos. Pressing the shutter button halfway down first makes sure you always have the right focus. The camera takes super-sharp (even a bit oversharpened) photos with a slightly yellow cast, good exposure balance, and white halos around black edges when you zoom in. Low-light photos are quite sharp, as long as you let that autofocus work.
You can capture 720p HD videos, but they aren't great quality at 24 frames per second outdoors, and a noticeably jerky 16 frames per second indoors. Videos taken in VGA resolution, on the other hand, are sharper; you get 30 frames per second outdoors and 20fps indoors.
Conclusions
The HTC Arrive is the first Windows Phone for Sprint, true, but it's already behind Sprint's flagship devices. Most notably, the lack of 4G and the somewhat slower 3G performance mean that the Arrive crawls where the Evo and Epic cruise.
I also have a problem with the disconnect between manufacturers making landscape-format Windows Phones and Microsoft's lack of a landscape-format interface. It makes the experience more frustrating than it needs to be.
The Arrive is still a good choice for many people. Windows Phone 7 is easier to use than Android, and some of the Microsoft Office integration features are spectacular—if you have a Sharepoint server or use OneNote, for example, you'll be in heaven. Windows Phone's great selection of game titles also makes this a good choice for mobile gamers. But the Samsung Epic is still our Editors' Choice for a keyboarded smartphone on Sprint. It's lighter, it has a better screen, it's faster all around, and Android has more apps overall. The HTC Arrive is a good try. Hopefully the next generation will arrive quickly.
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