Review: HTC Surround with Windows Phone 7
Calls
If you need to make a phone call, you'll have to do so from the main Start screen. Press the Phone app, and the call history is the first thing you'll see. There are small (perhaps too small) icons at the bottom that open the dialer, the People Hub or voicemail.
On the HTC Surround, the seven most recent calls are immediately visible. You need to scroll down to access more. If you'd like to dial a number right away, press the little phone icon next to the number and away you go. Press a call log, and it will open up the basic information about that entry. There's a little icon of an old floppy disk at the bottom. Press that if you want to save the number to your contacts.
After a call has connected, a small pull down menu lets you do most of the expected things, such as add a call, put a call on hold or mute, or activate the speakerphone. Most touch phones work the same way in this regard. I was easily able to add a third party to calls.
Contacts
The contact application is no lightweight. The People Hub is an essential part of the WP7 experience. Rather than offer a simple list of phone numbers and email addresses, Microsoft made the same move as Google and fully integrated the contact application with social networking services, such as Facebook.
Because People is a Hub, it has the left-to-right layout with columns separating everything. The main view is "all", which is a huge list of all your contacts. Your most recent Facebook status appears at the top. There are two little buttons that, when pressed, allow you to search through your contacts or add a new one. The fastest way to search for contacts is to open the People Hub. It appears that you can't search from the home screen.
Swipe the entire page to the left, and you see the "What's New" column. This is a list of the most recent status updates from your contacts. This includes rich content such as images, links, and videos. Pressing any of the status updates from your contacts will pull up that person's entire list of recent status updates.
The last column is "Recent", which is a list of the contacts with whom you've interacted the most recently.
WP7 allows users to sync Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and of course Exchange contacts to their device. Each contact page holds plenty of information, including email addresses, numbers, street addresses, birthdays, web sites, and so on. If there's a particular contact who's stuff you want to see more often, press the little pin icon to pin them to your home page. Alternately, using the options at the bottom of the page, you can link their Facebook account to a traditional contact card and so on. It's a robust application.
...and yes, you can initiate phone calls, text messages, and emails directly from the People Hub.
Windows Phone 7: Hands-On
HTC Surround
