Rumored HTC HD7 specifications look underwhelming

News · 23 Sep 2010 · MTW Editorial Team

Take these with a grain of salt because if this turns out to be true then the HTC HD7 (or HTC HD3) will have exactly the same hardware specifications as the now, one year old, HTC HD2. The only difference being the 8gb of internal memory, the camera button and TI audio chip (for the SRS surround and Dolby Mobile support I guess). Disappointing right? Sure it is when you take into account that the supposedly lower-end HTC Schubert / Mozart has an 8MP camera with what looks like a Xenon flash and an SLCD screen and that the recently announced HTC Desire HD also features the 8MP sensor with the new Qualcomm MSM8255 SoC. I’m going to re-post what I said last night in the comments section here:

The MSM8X50A is actually the MSM8255 (Qualcomm renamed it and it now looks like 1.3ghz isn’t the base clock anymore but the max-clock. The default now being 1Ghz as seen in the Desire HD). Frankly the only real advantage (to the end user) with MSM8255 is the Adreno 205 GPU. But even then this won’t do much to the UX given that developer can’t even tap into it’s power because of the current lack of Programmable Shaders support in XNA. It also has improved video playback but once again this meaningless given that the Zune software will re-encode the videos to WVGA when transferring them to the device. All in all, as an end user you won’t see any difference between an MSM8255 and a QSD8250 with the current version of Windows Phone 7. But it would definitely be nice to have one once WP7 gets updated in a couple of months. It just sounds weird that HTC’s High-end WP7 device has lower-specs than it’s High-end Android which has a nearly identical hardware chassis.

I would like to make it clear that this doesn’t mean that the performance of the device won’t be good. The beauty here (with WP7) is that a lower speced WP7 device will probably be faster/snappier than a higher-speced Android handset because of the driver support (remember WP7 only support one hardware platform so the drivers are bound to be top notch). It just feels like HTC is shafting the end-user by selling the same piece of hardware one year later for a similar price just because it features a new OS.

via WMPU