HTC HD7 review

The HTC HD7 uses the default Windows Phone 7 browser, which is Internet Explorer. Microsoft tells us that this is a combination of IE 7 and IE 8, taking good bits from both (but also some less than impressive bits too).

The plus points are easy to see – reactive pinch to zoom, double-tap to zoom to into columns and a large and easy to read screen thanks to the WVGA resolution.

However, there are other things that are missing: text wrap for closer zooming would have been a lovely touch, and the lack of Flash and Silverlight in the browser is a confusing omission indeed.

We were often greeted with an 'upgrade your Flash player on your browser' command on a number of occasions, which was annoying and looks, well, looks like an iPhone interface.

There are other plus points though: tabbed browsing is enabled, with up to six open at once, and the bookmarks are also in the same place as the history, making it easy to find where you've been or where you want to go.

The real problem is the overall speed of the browser though: it's just not up there with the likes of the WebKit enabled Samsung Galaxy S, iPhone 4 or HTC Desire HD.

Some sites, with the framework already downloaded and cached, would be as fast, but often we found that we were left hanging even on simple sites, which grated a bit when Microsoft promised this would be a lot faster.

It's not the HTC HD7's fault though, as we checked it out with other WP7 handsets from other manufacturers and the same problem occurred.

However, the large screen was a boon in terms of seeing more information and offering more when zooming in, at times almost feeling like a tablet in terms of the browsing experience; we just wish text wrapping was enabled too as we mentioned.

The internet experience on the HD7 could be a lot better in our opinion. It's good, solid and will get the information you need, but still needs a bit of upgrading – copy and paste integration would be a start for easier use of this whopping handset.