Even though the WP7 official unveiling is quite a ways behind us, we’ve been spending quite a lot of time with the respective Windows Phone 7 launch devices. Anand has the LG Optimus 7 and the Samsung Focus, and I got the HTC Surround. There are a number of other devices bound for other carriers both international and domestic, and we’re getting to them in time. 

If you read the launch piece, you probably know most of what there is to say about the HTC Surround aesthetics wise. First off, the Surround shares a lot of design cues with a number of other HTC devices - it’s got the off-grey metal from the Nexus One, the trim and speaker grating from the Desire, and some subtle cues from other HTC phones as well. Suffice to say, it’s an attractive piece of hardware in general despite being an obvious amalgam of design language from all over HTC’s device lineup. 

What’s most striking about the Surround is how HTC has chosen to differentiate the hardware. The Surround - true to its namesake - has a slide out speaker that runs along the side of the handset, for emulated surround sound. The speaker assembly doesn’t slide out much more than a centimeter, but still results in the same added thickness you’d get with a landscape keyboard. 

Compared with other smartphones, the Surround is definitely hefty.

On the other side of the Surround’s slider is an added bonus - a kickstand. The metal strip is held in place with a magnet, and pops out with a quick flick of the fingernail.

The kickstand is spring loaded to keep the arm in proper position, but ultimately works in a very different way than the EVO’s. Where the EVO’s kickstand is somewhat like a table leg at 45 degrees, the Surround’s is more like an arm that sweeps out at the base. It works just as well, but puzzles for a second if you’re used to using the EVO kickstand since it operates so differently.

The back of the Surround is somewhat interesting. It’s a black soft touch material, but embedded in the material are tiny reflective metallic flecks. It manages to be unlike any other device I’ve handled, yet not tacky like a back adorned with glitter would be. The soft touch material feel itself is unchanged. It’s an interesting look that manages to be different, yet not gaudy. In some light, the back looks completely matte black, yet in other light, the flecks are instantly noticeable. It’s a matter of taste, but honestly I think the back looks unique. 

Where the Surround is different is the SRS and Dolby mobile branding square in the middle of the back. Up at the top is the camera and LED flash, and a grating to the left. The chrome region around the camera is raised slightly, protecting the camera from being scratched on a flat surface, but unfortunately the metal itself is ridged circularly and thus will show wear. 

Popping the back off the Surround is interesting - there’s a depression near the microphone port at the bottom you slide your thumbnail into and pry the back of the case off with. What’s different about the back is that the buttons are integrated into the back of the case which peels off. All three buttons - the right side volume rocker and camera button, and the top power button. The buttons press on small buttons integrated into the main body. 

With the back side off, there’s a lot underneath. At the top is the camera which again shoots through a piece of plastic on the cover. The way this sensor is packaged appears very similar to the Nexus One. The LED illuminator off to the right ironically doesn’t have a layer of plastic. What’s curious is just above it - the vibration mechanism, which is exposed.

This is the first time I’ve seen a phone’s vibration module completely exposed. The counterweight visibly spins around inside its chamber if you trigger vibration with the back popped off. Interestingly enough, there’s a detent on the case corresponding to this open notch. 

Popping out the battery doesn’t reveal a lot underneath, but you need to do so to slide the SIM out, which is standard fare. What’s interesting is that to the right of the SIM slot is a strange metal cover. I’d say that if there was an internal microSD card in the HTC Surround, it’s probably under here... More on that later. Even though there are gratings on the back of the device, none of them appear to actually be grilles for sound. It’s deceptive since there’s also that unexplained grille on the plastic case that ordinarily would be where you expect the speaker to be.

The rest of the HTC Surround is pretty self-explanatory, but if you want to check out each side of the device, there are photos in the gallery below.

Last but not least is packaging. The Surround has a decently sized yet somewhat boring box on the outside. Open it up, however, and you get a face full of bright orange. There’s the usual assortment of texting and driving warnings and stickers, but you’re presented with the phone immediately. Down below are the accessories and manuals. The Surround comes with a pair of earbuds with three playback button controls (which appear to be identical to those that came with the Nexus One and other HTC devices), a USB cable, and charger. You can check out the gallery for unboxing.

For full specifications, check out the table below:

The front of the HTC Surround is pretty standard fare. There’s the ambient light sensor and proximity up at the top just to the right of the HTC logo, and the three required WP7 capacitive buttons at the bottom. Thank goodness that the order of buttons is standardized, from left to right: back, windows, and search. The capacitive buttons on the Surround actually work extremely well and have proved much more responsive than I’m used to them working on other devices. Perhaps because they’re spaced out and have a much larger active area. Capacitive touch on the display itself is also thankfully responsive and accurate. The entire surface is unbroken glass.

Though the Surround does not have an AMOLED display, rather just a normal TFT LCD, I found it decently contrasty in normal use on auto brightness. Unfortunately, at maximum brightness, the black levels on the Surround aren’t quite as good as other devices we’ve looked at. 

The Surround looks slightly warm next to the Fascinate, Nexus One, and iPhone 4. It's very subtle, but still detectable with the eye. 

Click to enlarge (huge version)

Again, all WP7 devices are the relatively standard 800x480 WVGA resolution - the Surround’s 3.8” size gives it a fairly decent 246 pixels per inch. WP7 actually has very good subpixel font smoothing on normal LCD displays - I’m very interested in seeing if or how subpixel font smoothing is implemented on the AMOLED devices PenTile pixel matrix. 

Viewing angles on the Surround are very good. Outdoor visibility is decent as well, but the Surround is noticeably more reflective than other phones. That said, it’s still more readable than the non-super AMOLED display on the Nexus One. Part of what makes the outdoor readability story on WP7 a bit different is that (unless you've changed it) most of the time you're looking at white text on black. As you've no doubt noticed in my photos so far, that makes reflection and fingerprints on the screen surface even more visible.

Auto brightness on the Surround seems to work well, however the dynamic range of brightness never seems to extend to the maximum and minimum brightnesses you can set manually. The result is that in complete darkness, the Surround isn’t dim enough. Interestingly enough, I haven’t really found myself wishing for more brightness in the converse situation.

If you read our launch piece, you’ve probably already heard and and seen much of what I’m going to talk about regarding the Surround’s camera. That said, things have been fleshed out a bit since the launch piece.

First off, the Surround packs a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash. Photos are 2592 x 1944 on the Surround and average around 4.5 MB between 700 kilobytes and 1.6 MB (update: mistake on my part), which translates to a lot of compression. Interestingly enough, the WP7 camera interface on the HTC Surround only lets you change shooting resolution (from VGA to 5 MP in 1 MP steps), not how much photos are compressed. The camera again can be launched either by holding the camera button for 4 seconds with the device off, by pressing the button while it is on, or by launching it from the applications list. Launch is pretty speedy averaging almost exactly 2 seconds from tap to live preview.

To shoot video on WP7, you tap the video switcher in the top left after launching the camera application. Unfortunately, if you’re always firing up the camera app to shoot video, you’re going to have to tap this every time, as the setting isn’t saved. Frustratingly, the resolution of videos you shoot in the camera app also isn’t saved - you need to explicitly demand 720P each time if you want it, otherwise you’ll just get VGA. 

The big design trade off on the HTC Surround is something we’ve already touched on. There’s a big slide out speaker which is unlike anything I’ve seen on a smartphone to date, but with it comes added thickness and heft that makes it feel like a device from a few years ago. Most of the time, that thickness and heft isn’t a big deal because you get the functionality of a real keyboard. In the case of the Surround, you just get a gigantic speaker. It’s sort of polarizing, and ultimately whether that trade off makes sense depends on what’s important to individual customers. There’s definitely a market for a smartphone focused entirely on music playback, the question is whether the Surround is that device. 

In a word, yes. The Surround packs easily the loudest and best sounding speaker I’ve encountered on a smartphone - when the slider is open. With the slider closed, you get muffled, muted sound that isn’t much louder than the rest of the competition. It’s pretty trivial to measure how loud the speaker on the Surround is as well. To do this test, I simply use the same setup I do for speakerphone testing, but instead play an entire music track start to end and average. 

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You can see how with the slider closed, the Surround is almost exactly as loud as the iPhone 4. With the slider open, it’s much louder, easily enough to fill a small room. Subjectively, I’d say the Surround is about as loud as a loud clock radio. 

Audio quality strongly depends on what setting the Surround is in. There’s a button at the top of the slider that cycles through 3 audibly different modes. Cycling through, the modes are Off, Dolby Mobile, and SRS Wow. 

Unfortunately, outside of the HTC Sound Enhancer app in the HTC Hub (more on this later), there’s no immediate visual feedback about which mode you’re in. Distinguishing the off mode is easy, but the other two don’t immediately present hugely different soundscapes until you pay attention to the detail. Inside the Sound Enhancer application, you can set the sound enhancement mode manually for both audio and video playback modes. There’s an additional equalizer setting exposed when you have headsets plugged in. I shot a short video comparing audio playback on the Surround to the iPhone 4 and Nexus One:

On the whole, the audio presets actually do a fairly decent job leveraging the good part of the Surround’s response curve. With audio enhancements off, sound is tinny and sometimes sounds distorted maximum volume, with way too much emphasis in the highs and mids, and no lows at all. It’s what you’d basically expect from a smartphone. With either of two presets enabled, the response is much flatter - there’s no distortion, much less of an insane difference between emphasis on the highs and mids, and just a tiny bit more in the lows. Honestly, the lows are still pretty bad, but they’re still much better than anything else I’ve heard from a smartphone. 

The Surround almost doubles as a sort of modern boombox - maybe a few more dBAs of audio power and I’d feel safe saying smartphones are a modern day analogue. So is the HTC Surround, well, surround sound? No, not quite. One of those audio modes sounds a heck of a lot like a virtual surround emulator, which is exactly what the HTC Surround is doing in software to have so much presence. It sounds good, don't get me wrong, it just isn't surround, er, surround.

The only remaining problem is that the Zune software doesn’t have landscape support. The result is that if you try and listen to music with the kickstand out (like you’d reasonably expect to be able to do with the device on a desk or table), you’ll have to deal with a rotated interface. It’s somewhat frustrating, honestly.

Videos of course play back the right orientation, but it’s still frustrating that WP7 is again a platform with landscape support only some of the time. The most notable exception of which is the home screen. It’s confusing considering how well the rest of the platform (even the settings app) has landscape support. Clearly this is something the WP7 team thought about. 

Microsoft has set relatively strict rules for what carriers and manufacturers alike can and can’t do to the WP7 experience. Back in the Windows Mobile days, things like carrier skinning and default installs with a plethora of carrier sideloads were the norm rather than the exception. HTC’s device skins definitely extended Windows Mobile’s longevity an extra year or two, but ultimately led to chaotic platform confusion.

The result is that (as we’ve noted in our other WP7 coverage), there’s no carrier skinning. But HTC TouchFLO that became Sense lives on in spirit on the HTC Surround. This time, however, it’s in a specific HTC Hub. 

Fire up the hub, and you get to the trademark HTC clock after an animation. Tap on it, and you get weather forecast for the next few days. If you’ve seen HTC Sense on Android or TouchFLO on Windows Mobile, this is almost the same thing, but relegated to what amounts to an application.

There’s some nice eye-candy in the application itself, which bodes well for WP7 performance, but honestly the hub itself is of marginal practicality. You have to sit through the launch animation each time, and outside of just showing off the platform, it doesn’t really serve much use 

The hub itself does little more than offer the clock, weather, and shortcuts to specific HTC applications you’re granted free access to by having an HTC phone. Sound Enhancer which we’ve talked about earlier, Stocks, Photo Enhancer, Flashlight, Converter, Lists, Connection Setup, and a few more. Tapping on any of them brings up the entry in the market. 

Back in the marketplace application, there’s also an entry for HTC Apps which essentially serves the same purpose. The interesting part of what HTC is allowed to do here is that there’s nothing preinstalled from HTC except for the hub itself - to grab things, you have to get them from the marketplace. While that results in less bloat right off the bat, the downside is that installing everything is tedious. Oddly enough, the AT&T applications come preinstalled - but you can uninstall them. 

Sound Enhancer we’ve already been over - you can manually select which sound enhancement you want, if any, instead of using the buttons. 

Connection setup seems to be little more than a way to set APNs graphically, instead of searching for the settings online. There’s a ton of carriers in here.

Probably the most useful thing HTC has added is a flashlight app which actually uses the LED flash. I’m not sure if the LED flash API is exposed to developers elsewhere, but the flashlight app reminds me of the one I’ve seen on Android - same styling and functionality.

Photo Enhancer is a bit basic, offering about a dozen presets. There’s some auto enhancement modes, as well as your usual run of holga/lomo emulation presets for that vintage look. I’m not a fan of presets, as I expected some contrast, exposure, and saturation controls in a photo enhancer app, but for what it offers, photo enhancer does work. In addition, edits thankfully are not destructive, instead saved inside a different album. 

Notes and Stocks are there, and do what you’d expect them to. The Notes application has some nice eye candy, though they're ultimately extraneous. It does its job, however.

On the whole, it relegating the HTC customizations to one single hub seems to make sense on WP7. On Windows Mobile, HTC's skinning attempts were arguably aimed squarely at making the platform useable and differentiating HTC phones from other devices running what was an increasingly complicated mobile OS. For the time being, WP7's interface is fresh and simple enough that adding a carrier skin would only detract from the experience. Time will tell whether Microsoft sticks to its guns in keeping the entire platform completely consistent - until then, manufacturers will differentiate their phones with a custom marketplace and hardware.

So what about the speaker but in the context of actually placing calls? Strangely, the loudness story is completely opposite when you're making a call and want speakerphone. The first time I placed a call and turned speakerphone on, I was confused. Audio was muffled and muted, and given the grating on the back, I expected audio be coming out of the back of the device. Then it occurred to me - the speakerphone for calls is the slide out speaker itself. 

The problem with this is that every time you want the speakerphone to actually be loud enough to hear, you need to slide it out. Alright, not that big of a deal if it's loud, right?

The problem? It isn’t that loud. In fact, it’s among the quietest I've laid hands on. 

I’m at a loss for why the HTC Surround is so quiet in actual calls, considering how loud it is at music and video playback, especially given the fact that we’re using the same speakers. Volume was at maximum, the slider was open, and we were on 3G UMTS for the call like always. The device is just that quiet. Interestingly, none of the audio enhancements do anything when you’re using the speaker in speakerphone mode. Pressing the button results in the same vibration feedback that it always does, but the event does nothing to change the sound output.

Clearly, HTC or WP7 isn’t setting the gain correctly, and the result is the Surround is simply too quiet to be acceptable for speakerphone calls. It's a bitter irony that the smartphone which packs a gigantic speaker that tops our charts for music loudness is so clearly deficient when it comes to actually making speakerphone calls.

Using the handset normally, I found the volume to be just about typical in terms of dynamic range. Call audio quality is subjectively where I’m used to it being - UMTS 3G voice calls honestly sound very good to me, and the Surround didn’t disappoint. I placed some calls on GSM in EDGE territory on AT&T (which is unsurprisingly easy to find, I drove on the I-8 to San Diego and spent the whole time on EDGE) and they sounded good as well. I experienced the same kind of volume level disparity between GSM (2G) and UMTS (3G) calls that I mentioned iOS still has - more dynamic range at work. Again, I’m still working on devising a subjective call quality test - for now all I can say is that calls to all the usual subjects sounded lik they do on numerous other devices I've popped a SIM in.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the storage medium being used on the various WP7 devices. Like the HTC HD7 and Samsung Focus, the HTC Surround also relies on an internal microSD card for storage. My curiosity about the location of that internal microSD card ultimately led me to partially disassemble an HTC Surround. 

There are 9 screws to remove from the Surround before you can get to the two PCBs inside, and with it, the microSD card. Four of the screws are tiny phillips heads, the remaining 5 are Torx T-5 screws. Two of the Torx screws are marked with void stickers that must be perforated to unscrew the screws, so be warned. Disassembly is relatively easy though.

Yeah, there are only 6 screws pictured here - one more T-5 on the back in white with VOID written on it, two phillips on the side.

The four phillips screws come out of the sides of the Surround, the Torx are all on the back side. There are three Torx screws holding the bottom piece of plastic in place, which comes off first with some gentle prying. The top part pries off easily after, exposing the two-PCB design of the Surround, and the microSD card slot. It’s under that piece of conductive tape. 

Peel it up, and there’s a standard push click-to-release microSD slot. Inside is a 16 GB SandDisk class 4 microSD card. I didn’t have any larger cards laying around, and I’m not sure why you’d go to an 8 GB card unless it was faster, but the usual procedure applies - you lose your data, but after a reset get the card and onboard storage in JBOD. 

There's been a bit of confusion about to what extent Microsoft supports users upgrading storage on their own with a microSD card of their choice. There's a Microsoft knowledge base document now posted about it, but the state of affairs still remains confusing. The long and short of it is that only certain microSD cards meet the requisite performance requirements to be considered compatible with WP7. SD card class refers solely to sequential write performance (the class number refers directly to the speed in MB/s), but says nothing about that all-important 4K random read/write speed. Because WP7 uses onboard flash and the storage card in a JBOD, it's possible that after you fill up the internal NAND and start writing on the microSD part of the storage space, some applications will feel fast, others slow. Interestingly, the card in the HTC Surround is just a class 4 16 GB SanDisk. 

The other interesting thing is that cards initialized on WP7 are locked to a specific device, and moreover, stop being recognized on the desktop - perhaps permanently. I took the card out of the Surround and spent considerable time trying to make it format, first on Windows, then OSX, and finally linux by trying to write  zeros and random data to the disk using dd. This failed, as I only managed to get 'medium not present' errors every step of the way - in fdisk, gparted, every trick I know for really nuking storage. If you decide to upgrade your WP7 device, just be warned that it's probably one-way for your card.

I didn’t go any further with the Surround’s disassembly, but it’s apparent that the SIM card slot and microSD card slot sit atop an EMI shield. Underneath that may well lie the SoC and baseband. There’s also clearly a pigtail running from the board at the bottom up to the top, along with connections from the PCBs to the plastic shields. 

The reason I didn’t hesitate to take this HTC Surround apart is that, honestly, it didn’t work properly. If you’ve been paying attention thus far, you’ve noticed I have two HTC Surrounds in some photos. The reason isn’t that I required two for testing (though that would certainly speed things up), it was that the original device I was given wouldn’t connect to the marketplace, instead constantly giving me an activation error and requiring entry of some six long codes. I later learned this device was improperly flashed or provisioned during manufacturing, and got another one which worked - just in time for our launch piece. Interestingly enough, the replacement device and this device show identical versions of everything in about:

The replacement Surround I’ve been using has worked perfectly thus far, but interestingly enough, performance changed subtly. 

Performance

Of course, performance on the Surround should be in line with the other WP7 devices, which we covered in the launch piece. With the Surround, you get a 1 GHz Qualcomm QSD8250 SoC with 488 MB of LPDDR1, and 512 MB of NAND onboard in JBOD with the 16 GB internal microSD card. Like the rest of the WP7 lineup, we’re dealing with basically the same kind of SoC performance. 

I was surprised previously when there was an  performance disparity between the HTC Surround and the two other WP7 devices we had - the Optimus 7 and Focus. Interestingly enough, I re-ran those two tests and performance fell in place right where it should be:

Sunspider as well:

We’ve talked in the launch piece about IE browser responsiveness on the platform in general. While panning around inside WP7 after the page is loaded is very speedy thanks to GPU acceleration, loading is measurably slower than the competition. You can really get a sense of that from the Browsermark numbers above, and the video below. 

The rest of the story about the HTC Surround is that it’s indeed in line with the rest of the WP7 devices we’ve tested thus far. 

Battery Life

If you read the launch piece, you already know the state of battery life for WP7, which I’ll repeat below. The HTC Surround and rest of the WP7 lineup uses Qualcomm’s 65nm SoC which doesn’t exactly help things, but overall Microsoft has done a good job keeping things reasonable. These tests are again our standard smartphone battery life tests - for call time, we place a call and make noise at both ends until the connection drops, for WiFi and 3G we keep the screen on at 50% brightness and cycle through pages roughly every 20 seconds. 

Again, battery life isn’t iPhone 4 level, but middle of the pack with Android devices. 

Microsoft has learned a lot from Windows Mobile, and is dead set on not repeating history. Chief among those things is that differing experiences on every device running supposedly the same operating system results in chaos and confusion. 

The result is that manufacturers making WP7 devices will differentiate their products in ways other than carrier skins. The HTC Surround is perhaps the best example of a manufacturer trying something different, placing a huge emphasis on sound. Given how much inspiration WP7 draws from Zune, it isn’t surprising. Like anything of course, the result is a trade-off; the Surround is thicker and heavier than the Samsung Focus, but doesn’t come with a keyboard like the LG Quantum. 

On the other hand, WiFi and 3G web browsing battery life on the Surround narrowly edges out the Focus.

The combination of kickstand and loud slide-out speaker makes the Surround an excellent alarm clock (it’s seriously loud), movie watching platform, or a relatively loud portable stereo. With the notable exception of speakerphone volume, the Surround by far sounds the best out of the devices I've encountered in the smartphone form factor to date. It's pretty simple actually, if music playback is your thing, and you want a WP7 phone, get the Surround. Combined with the excellent Zune Pass as Anand notes, it’s difficult to argue this isn’t the best device around for enjoying music - if only we had landscape support.