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HTC Mogul Cell Phone Review - Software

Alfredo Padilla Published on July 23, 2007 Comment on this

Intro Making/Receiving Calls Software Other Features

Tour & Design Messaging Battery Life Value & Comparisons

Audio Quality Organizer Connectivity Conclusion

Imaging Multimedia Hardware Ratings & Specs

OS (8.5)
The HTC Mogul runs the latest iteration of Microsoft's Windows Mobile Professional operating system. This smart phone platform is mature and powerful, providing users with a wide range of built in functionality and the ability to expand capabilities through native third party applications. Windows Mobile 6 brings some evolutionary upgrades over previous versions of Windows Mobile, such as the ability to view HTML encoded email and improvements to Exchange Server support. Unfortunately Sprint chose to cripple one of these upgrades, choosing to leave out the helpful media player plugin that allows you to control playback from your home screen. This issue aside though Windows Mobile 6 on the Mogul will provide most users with all the features and flexibility they will need. Our score for Windows Mobile Professional devices is standardized.

Home Screen Score (8.0)
The Today screen on the Mogul is the usual goodness we get from Windows Mobile Professional devices. There are a number of configurable plugins that provide information about calendar appointments, tasks, email and others. These plugins can be turned on or off in the settings and new ones can be added through third party programs. This provides users with a great deal of power to configure the Moguls home screen to provide them the exact information they want and need. Unfortunately Sprint made a poor decision to disable one of the new plugins the comes with Windows Mobile 6. The media player plugin allows you to easily control music playback from your home screen. Why Sprint would not include this plugin is unfathomable to us and we had to ding them a point because of it.

Extensibility (9.0)
As a smart phone operating system the HTC Mogul allows users to install native third party applications. You have literally thousands of titles to choose from, some free and some you have to pay for. Handango.com is a good place to start looking for applications that can extend and improve the functionality of the Mogul. We were also pleased to see that the Mogul includes a manager for standard MIDP java applications. This is java virtual machine has been customized by Sprint to give users a familiar experience to other handsets on their network. We were able to download and run several popular java programs, including the beta version of Opera Mini, an excellent web browser that gives you a much more "real" browsing experience than Internet Explorer Mobile. We were very happy with the extensibility options provided by the HTC Mogul.

Customizability (8.0)
Windows Mobile Professional on the HTC Mogul provides users with a good amount of customization options. In addition to supporting themes that change the look of the device globally you can also change text size globally on the device. The home screen can be customized with different background pictures and you can customize the plugins that are active. The Start menu on the device, which provides quick access to a list of applications, can be customized to fit your needs. Windows Mobile Professional devices like the Mogul are impressive in that their customization options are not only useful for cosmetic reasons but to make the device functionally personal.

OS Responsivness (7.0)
The HTC Mogul sports a 400 Mhz processor and 64 MB of RAM, of which 26 MB are available when you start the device fresh. The powerful processor and spacious RAM combine to make the Mogul a very responsive device. Some applications were slow to launch, for example see the the messaging timed tests, but once a program is running in memory you can switch to it almost instantly. The spacious RAM means that you can have a large number of programs running in the background at the same time. We also found the switch from portrait to landscape mode when you open the keyboard to be quick, with only minimal lag if you have a lot of programs running in the background. Our experience on the Mogul was a thousand times better than the T-Mobile Wing, another phone made by HTC that shares the Mogul's slide out keyboard design. That handset has the same amount of RAM, but much less free at startup. It's processor was also much slower at 200 Mhz. This combination made for an extremely laggy experience on the Wing that at times was almost unusable; fortunately, the Mogul is much better.

Gaming (6.33)
The Mogul ships with the standard Windows Mobile games: Solitaire and Bubble Breaker. These two games are good to kill some time on the subway, but won't keep most people entertained for too long. The Mogul however has access to hundreds of native third party games as well as java games. The controls on the Mogul should do well for most games. The directional pad is a little small, but very responsive and easy to use. It's not prone to errors as some other directional pads or joysticks. We also like that the Mogul has several buttons close to the screen that games can use if they support hardware buttons. The Mogul won't replace a Nintendo DS or PSP, but it's a solid gaming platform for a mobile phone.

Browser Features (8.0)
The HTC Mogul uses Internet Explorer Mobile to browse the web, as is standard on Windows Mobile devices. Internet Explorer Mobile supports both standard HTML and mobile oriented WAP pages. It also supports javascript, images, frames, encrypted sites and cookies. More advanced web technologies like Java and Flash are not supported, although you can download a Flash plugin from Adobe here. You should not however that this plugin won't allow you to view Youtube, although you will be able to go to Flash based sites like Homestarrunner. The level of support provided by Internet Explorer is as good as most other mobile browsers, even advanced browsers like Series 60's Web or the iPhone's Safari browser don't support Flash or Java yet.

Browsing Interface (6.5)
Internet Explorer Mobile provides a familiar browsing interface for users of Windows Mobile. You can view pages in desktop, standard or single column mode. The desktop mode will require a lit of scrolling as Internet Explorer Mobile lacks the overview and zoom approach that is found on more modern mobile browsers like Opera Mini 4. Most users will probably use the single column mode, which allows you to view all the content in a site in a single column that you can scroll up/down in. As always you can change text size and view pages in full screen mode to get rid of the bars at the top and bottom of the screen. The range of options is good, but we hope that Microsoft catches up and joins the overview and zoom camp soon.
The history in Internet Explorer Mobile is saved between sessions and allows you to view the page title or url, an upgrade that comes with Windows Mobile 6. Bookmarks are a little strange, as they have always been in Windows Mobile Professional. Instead of a clean list of bookmarks Internet Explorer Mobile uses a nested system that doesn't make good use of the screen real estate. You can edit bookmarks once they are created and there is support for folders, however for some reason you can't move a bookmark to a new folder after you have created them. This is strange as you can do this in the supposedly "lesser" standard version of Windows Mobile. Still, most of the functionality that users will want is there.
The left soft key in the interface is assigned to "back" while browsing. The let soft key opens a menu where you can access all of the other functions of the browser. In your options you can delete your history, as well as set the default length of time that items are saved for. Your cache can also be cleared manually here and you can set your home page. One omission that may bother people with expectations of Windows Mobile 6 is that the new home page, which gives you access to your top favorites and a search bar, has been replaced with a Sprint specific home screen.
Overall we found Internet Explorer Mobile's browsing interface to be good, if showing its age a little. As time goes on and Microsoft makes only minor upgrades to this piece of software it is starting to fall further and further behind more advanced browsers like Opera Mini 4, Safari on the iPhone and Web on Series 60 devices.

Browser Access (8.0)
To test how easy it is to launch and browse to a page using Internet Explorer Mobile we count the number of steps it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have browsed to our own site. Entering the web address counts as a single step. We use steps instead of a timed test to take network issues out of the process. The Mogul took five steps to complete this process. Our first step was to open the keyboard as this was the easiest way to enter the web address and it also allowed us to use the "i" key on the keyboard to launch Internet Explorer Mobile from the Start menu. This is a good score for a smart phone, the same as the Treo 750, T-Mobile Wing and BlackBerry 8800. We were pleased with the Moguls performance in this test.

Cell Phone	Steps	Score
HTC Mogul	5	8
T-Mobile Wing	5	8
BlackBerry 8800	8	5
Helio Ocean	5	8
Nokia N95	7	5.71
Apple iPhone	4	10

Calculator (6.0)
The calculator on the Mogul is the same as that found on other Windows Mobile Professional devices. Basic functions are supported as are a few more advanced functions like square roots and percentages. It's sufficient to do basic calculations but anything more complicated will require a more advanced third party calculator.

Alarm (8.0)
The alarm on the Mogul is the same excellent one found on all Windows Mobile Professional devices. It allows you to set up to three different alarms with complicated recurrence patterns and unique ringtones for each one. This level of flexibility is much better than what is found on other smart phone platforms like Series 60 or BlackBerry devices.

Document Software (6.0)
As a Windows Mobile Professional device the Mogul includes Office Mobile. This allows you to both view and edit Word or Excel files, as well as a viewer for Powerpoint presentations. In addition the Mogul includes Adobe's PDF viewer for Windows Mobile, although this doesn't include any editing functions. Still, this is better than Nokia's N-Series phones like the N95, which only include document viewers. It's also better than the BlackBerry 8800 and other BlackBerry devices that only allow you to view documents attached to emails.

Other Software (2.0)
In addition to the software discussed in this review the Mogul includes a couple of other items that are worth extra points. As with all Windows Mobile Professional devices the Mogul has a file explorer, so you can manipulate files on the device directly. Windows Mobile 6 includes a Windows Live application that provides access to various Windows Live functions. Both of these are helpful additions, although we wish that Live Search had been included as well as it is on the T-Mobile Dash. Of course you can just download this piece of software for free if you want it.

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