Speakerphone: The HTC Surround's bitter irony

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.

Antenna

We’ve made a point of testing each and every device for signal attenuation problems, and thus far have been consistent about it. Unfortunately, we’re somewhat reliant on there being a way to read raw signal strength from the baseband to run our tests, and haven’t found a way to do that on WP7 quite yet. It’s still early, and we haven’t done a lot of poking around for dialer codes which will expose a field test program, if WP7 even has one. That said, the HTC Surround does seem to be on par with the vast majority of smartphones in being relatively grip insensitive.

The antenna on the Surround appears to be at the very top, and there's possibly another at the bottom. With the back over off, you can clearly see a black ribbon cable coming from a notch in the plastic cover. Inside are clear outlines from the radiative surface inside the flex cable. There’s a piece of black tape holding the middle in place, and another antenna flex cable on the far right potentially for WiFi or Bluetooth 2.4 GHz radios. 

The Surround is only available on AT&T, and as such we see support for AT&T's UMTS bands. The HTC Surround is a tri-band UMTS device, but you do get GSM/EDGE support for other bands as shown below. 

WiFi Speed

WiFi transfer speeds I’ve measured are decent at 15.026 megabits/s using our 100 MB test PDF loaded through the browser. I’ve seen sustained connection rates of up to 24 megabits/s when the device is performing wireless sync with Zune, however, which seems more representative. Wireless range on the Surround is actually quite impressive - I can make it all the way to the curb without dropping connection, which is just as far as the best smartphones I’ve tested can go. Similarly, hand-on and hand-off happen without issue. Oh, and WPA2 Enterprise works fine on the HTC Surround, I tested on a WPA2 Enterprise network with all Cisco APs running full 802.1x PEAP with certificates and never experienced a hitch - bravo to WP7 for getting this perfect on the first attempt.

We've also been paying attention to GPS closely ever since the Galaxy S GPS situation - the Surround gets fixes fast and accurately. Whatever Microsoft is using for its location services does a good job getting a rough position indoors, and GPS takes it the rest of the way outdoors just as quickly as I'm used to on other devices.

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