T-Mobile announced its first two Windows Phone 7 devices Monday, a wide-screen entertainment phone called the HTC HD7 and a phone with a sliding keyboard called the Dell Venue Pro.
The HTC HD7 is clearly the carrier's flagship. It's a huge, slab-style phone at 4.8 by 2.7 by 0.44 inches (HWD) and 5.7 ounces, with a gigantic 4.3-inch, 800-by-480 LCD screen on the front and a kickstand on the back. It's similar in size to the previous HTC HD2 and to the Motorola Droid X, both of which are just at the size limit for something you'd want to use one-handed.
HTC and T-Mobile have added software to the base Windows Phone 7 stack. The HTC Hub is HTC's reinterpretation of its Sense user experience. Click on the Hub, and you get an animated graphic of flying through clouds. That deposits you on a page with a 3D clock widget and an alternative program launcher with several games and utilities.
I'm intrigued by T-Mobile Family Room, a new app that lets phone owners form ad-hoc family groups to run a shared calendar, write on a virtual group chalkboard, or send out group messages. It's similar but different from Family Room on the Android-powered Motorola Defy.
Netflix and Slacker both come bundled on the HD7 for streaming movies and radio.
The new T-Mobile TV is a streaming video service supplied by MobiTV, which also runs TV services for AT&T and Sprint. T-Mobile TV will offer channels from ABC News NOW, FOX Sports, PBS Kids, Azteca America, and other partners with both free and paid tiers.
Like all Windows Phone 7 devices, the HD7 also supports Xbox Live multiplayer gaming and Zune music and video services.
The HD7 certainly looks like a super-phone, but oddly, some of its specs are a little last-generation. The HD7 uses a first-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 1-GHz processor and accesses the Internet using HSDPA 7.2 on T-Mobile's and foreign networks, along with Wi-Fi 802/11 b/g/n. Other phones, such as the T-Mobile myTouch, have moved on to the more power-efficient second-generation Snapdragon and the faster HSPA+ 21 network.
The phone has 16GB of internal memory and no memory card slot - that's all you get. The HD7 also has a 5-megapixel camera with HD video recording and dual-LED flash, GPS, an FM radio, and Bluetooth.
The HD7 will be available in mid-November from T-Mobile, the carrier said.
In T-Mobile's press release, the carrier also teased the Dell Venue Pro, a sliding phone with a QWERTY keyboard. The Venue Pro also looks big: it has a 4.1-inch screen, 5.1-megapixel camera and the same 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor as the HD7.
The Venue Pro will be available from Dell "and select retailers" - it looks like it might not be sold through T-Mobile's stores. That's unusual, for the U.S. Dell has had a rocky re-entry to the U.S. mobile market recently, with the widely panned Dell Streak and Dell Aero phones for AT&T, so T-Mobile may be holding back a bit to see whether the Venue Pro will catch consumers' fancies.