With less than a week to go until we get to see Nokias new Windows Phone device, we have been taking a look at the HTC Titan running the newly updated Windows Phone OS codenamed; Mango.

The Titan is just the type of Windows Phone we have all been waiting for, and we are pretty sure it is just the type of device Microsoft imagined their OS running on. It is big and of course people are going to be asking just how big is too big? But at 4.7inch, the Titan keeps to being big and beautiful without becoming a burden to our trouser pockets. The Titans 4.7inch size is redefining just how big a smartphone screen can get without becoming cumbersome. We have seen the Optimus LTE and Samsung Galaxy SII with a 4.5inch screen but in comparison, they just do not feel big enough anymore.

At 9.9mm thick, the Titan is far from average, but when you take the rest of its dimensions (131.5 x 70.7mm) into account, it actually looks and feels rather slick. The Titans sides and back are composed of one, easily removable, aluminium shell making battery and SIM replacement nice and easy. The devices shell is decorated with a dedicated camera button,?volume rocker, power / lock key, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a MicroUSB port. The overall look and feel of the Titan is as close to standard issue HTC design as you can get. It merits noting that the single-piece aluminium case feels extremely sturdy and rigid, while fit and finish between it and the Titans internal components is simply?flawless. One concern around devices becoming larger and larger is the bezel size left around the screen. The Titan has less than 3mm on either side of the screen and the top and bottom bezel are large enough only to house the HTC and Windows logo along with a front facing camera and 2 buttons; search and back. Nothing short of superb craftsmens ship from HTC throughout when looking at the hardware design on this device.

The 4.7-inch Super-LCD inside the Titan is its biggest strength. Blacks are deep (almost a prerequisite for a good Windows Phone experience), whites are true and uniformly lit across the screen, and colours lose very little of their vibrancy as you start to look at the phone from oblique angles. Watching videos and browsing and composing photos on the Titans display is a delight. Signing into Xbox Live on the Titan and playing some Plants vs. Zombies, well lets just that say that the experience enjoyed is something Sony Ericsson simply dream they could have engineered with their Xperia Play.

The Titan runs Qualcomms MSM8255 Snapdragon system-on-chip at 1.5GHz. It is been a popular chip in a variety of Android phones this year, with Sony Ericssons full 2011 Xperia line relying on it and HTC inserting it into the Incredible S and Desire S, among other devices. ?The reason undoubtedly for this is that the chip performs fantastically in terms of power efficiency. During our testing process the Titan was consistently able to continue performing long after 20 hours of usage were clocked up. I took the phone our for a test drive over a busy weekend. I unplugged it from its charger at 8.30am on the Saturday morning as I was leaving the house and it was still operational Sunday night at 9PM after a weekend of photo taking, occasional browsing, email (with push notifications), video and Xbox Live play time.

HTC goes above and beyond Microsofts chassis specs by endowing the Titan with an 8-megapixel, backside-illuminated camera sensor. Pictures shot with the Windows Phone are of a consistently high quality, offering a good balance between noise reduction and detail retention. Shrunken down for web use, most of the images coming out of the Titan look splendid. Windows Phone 7.5 does not make any major alterations to the way the camera software works ? you can still jump straight into composing a picture by holding down the camera key on the phones side, and captured stills can be pulled into view from the left side of the screen. The seamless transition between image capture and gallery browsing remains unchanged. From the people hub you can seamlessly almost instantly view your galleries, your Facebook friends galleries, SkyDrive and your camera roll. The front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera is predictably mediocre; do not expect it to give you usable images beyond the occasional 400-pixel Twitter profile pic.

Video can be captured at resolutions up to 720p and generally looks attractive and detailed. I am unsure whether HTC has implemented some form of digital image stabilization or if the Titans just easier to hold steady than other phones, but the videos I recorded with it lacked the usual wobbliness of smartphone recordings. The one thing that disappointed me was the presence of motion blur on subjects that were not moving all that quickly across the frame.

Internet sharing, or the ability of your phone to function as a mobile hotspot, has also been added in Mango and works perfectly on the Titan. You can share your data connection with up to five wireless devices and choose whether to secure it with a password or just keep it open.

All you need to know about the Titans software and performance can be boiled down to just one sentence: it runs Windows Phone 7.5. Responsiveness, screen resolution, and the vast majority of preloaded capabilities are identical between the Titan and any other handset running the Mango update. HTC throws its own Hub into the mix, but all the features that it adds (photo enhancer, notes, stocks, and news apps) are also available on all of the companys (HTC) Mango-updated smartphones.

As to the experience of using Windows Phone 7.5 itself, it is highly impressive. From its inception, Windows Phone has been wonderfully responsive and the update has simply improved the already superb OS. Email threads are a major advance for what was already a very attractive email client and the Twitter and LinkedIN integration throughout the OS keeps Windows Phone right up to date with the competition; The foundations of Windows Phone remains as solid as ever.

Conclusion:

The build quality of the Titan is as good as, if not better than any other phone in the companys recent portfolio, while the improvements in Mango have pulled Windows Phone 7 right up alongside the best in the mobile business in a number of important areas.