The mid priced smartphone market can be a difficult to negotiate. Deciding which one to buy can be a long thought process in this crowded section of the market.

The mid priced smartphone market can be a difficult one to negotiate, with so many brands offering what seem like great options in terms of Android phones, and so many tariffs and data plans to choose from. If you have decided that you don’t want to go with an iPhone or anything else at the top end of the range in terms of price, it is certainly still possible to get a great device that does everything you need it to, looks respectable when you take it out, and is also fun and easy to use, but deciding which one to buy can be a long thought process in this crowded section of the market.

Windows Mobile, which is what the PC giants originally called their mobile OS, was a bit of a disaster, and their shockingly low market share told them what we had all suspected – that nobody would touch an original Windows phone with a barge pole. Like the Zune, the disastrous Microsoft “rival” to Apple’s iPods, the original Windows Mobile devices seemed very out of touch with what the mobile market wanted. Now, things have changed, and Windows Phones are actually pretty cool, and in the middle of the market, a very viable choice over comparable Android phones. One of the biggest problems with Android is that where it is designed to work on hundreds of devices, it isn’t really optimised for anything, meaning it can be slow and clunky. Apple iOS is obviously a lot faster and better in this respect, purely because the developers only had to worry about its performance on Apple’s own devices. With Windows Phone on a quality device like the HTC HD7, you get a lot of the performance advantages of an optimised operating system, without the Apple price tag.

The Windows Phone 7 interface you get on the HTC HD7 is great to use, and really easy to configure to keep all of the things you use most in the most easy to access places. While it’s really a matter of personal taste whether you like the tiles and the way it looks better than the interface on a comparable Android, it is stable, works well and gives you a lot of cool features that make your home screen a really useful at-a-glance environment. The calling quality on the phone itself is good, and the camera is decent, as is the 4.3” high resolution screen which is a great size for using most mobile versions of sites along with Windows phone apps. One nice touch on this device is its little kickstand, which makes it easy to prop it up if you are watching something on it. Where the HD7 really comes into its own, however, is gaming. This model takes you beyond fun little phone games and lets you harness a lot of the power of Xbox Live to play on your mobile.