The Windows Phone 7 camera interface takes some getting used to, though. The on-screen touch controls are a bit too small for my liking and I had some trouble tweaking them while snapping a picture. You get a few basic camera controls like Scene settings (auto, portrait, landscape, sports, beach, etc.), Effects (Grayscale, Negative, Solarize, etc) as well as metering and resolution controls.

Photos taken outdoors on a sunny day looked good: colors were bright and details appeared sharp. When I zoomed in on a distant building, however, my photo came out pretty blurry. My indoor shots looked overexposed, even with the flash off. Colors were a bit washed out and details were blown out.

The HD7 captures video in 720p, as most high-end smartphones now feature. My videos looked great, though the microphone is almost too powerful. The microphone picks up a lot of background noise--so much so that it is almost overpowering. Unfortunately, Windows Phone 7 doesn't have direct upload to YouTube in the gallery, which is another painfully obvious feature the OS looks over.

Performance

As I mentioned before, the HD7 does not support T-Mobile's HSPA+ network; it supports HSPA 7.2Mbps download speeds. Last week, I got my hands on both the T-Mobile myTouch 4G and the T-Mobile G2, both of which support HSPA+, and was impressed with how quickly Web pages loaded-when I got coverage. Despite the fact that HSPA+ is still in the early stages in terms of countrywide coverage, it is disappointing--and odd--that the HD7 was left out of this upgrade.