Overland Park, Kan. – The Windows
Phone 7 smartphone platform will come to a CDMA network for the first time with
the March 20 arrival of the $199 HTC Arrive on the Sprint network.
The phone, priced after $100
mail-in rebate and two-year contract, is also the first Windows Phone 7 handset
to combine a sliding QWERTY keyboard with a tilt-up display that creates the
appearance of a tiny laptop. It also features such preinstalled Windows 7
upgrades as copy and paste.
The Arrive, which is similar to
the HTC 7 Pro offered outside the U.S., can be preordered now at any Sprint
Store with the purchase of $50 Sprint gift card.
Like the multiple GSM/HSPA
Windows 7 phones available here in the U.S. from T-Mobile and AT&T, the 6.5-ounce HTC Arrive meets Microsoft’s
minimum performance requirements, or “chassis spec,” which mandates a minimum 1GHz
processor, 5-megapixel camera, 800 by 480 capacitive touchscreen display,
minimum RAM and flash-memory requirements, and the like. They also feature 720p
HD video recording.
On top of these features, HTC
added its HTC Hub weather and widgets, and Sprint added such services as Sprint
TV and Movie streaming, NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile, and Sprint Football Live.
Other features include 3.6-inch
touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera with flash and autofocus, digital zoom, 16GB of
non-removable memory, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, stereo Bluetooth 2.1 (+ EDR), and SRS
Wow surround sound processing.
The Windows 7 OS was designed to
achieve two basic goals: simplify basic operating tasks using as few taps as
possible and organize information for easy access, Microsoft said. As a result,
all phones feature six hubs where the most common applications and tasks are
accessible and integrated. The hubs include an Office Hub with key Microsoft
productivity applications, a games hub, a music and video hub, a pictures hub,
a people hub incorporating contacts and social-network feeds, and a marketplace
hub for downloading apps. The Office Hub features apps to read and edit
Microsoft Office Applications (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), Sharepoint for
on-the-go collaboration, and OneNote.
The OS’s Live Tiles feature
displays multiple tiles on a customizable home screen, each tile letting users see
live information such as real-time news and weather updates from the Web,
pending messages and appointments, the number of unread emails, or friends’
status on social-networking sites.
Other ease-of-use features
include the ability to take pictures quickly if the phone is off. Users hit the
camera button, waking up the phone so they can immediately take pictures. Users
can also set the camera to automatically send each picture to a cloud-based
storage service as they are taken.
A dedicated search button helps
people find data across applications, whether in contacts, the Microsoft
Marketplace, in e-mail or on the Web. From the Start screen, the search button
accesses the Bing for Mobile service to deliver Web search results, local
information, maps, directions and the like.
All phones are also integrated with other
Microsoft services such as Windows Live, Xbox Live, Windows Marketplace to
purchase or stream music, and the Zune Pass subscription-based music
downloading and streaming service. Users also get access to the more than 4,000
Windows Phone 7 apps. Talk time is up to 6 hours.
