HTC Smart review

Rating:

Verdict: A decent, well made smartphone for less than you'd expect.

Price: O2 only from free with contract or £100 PAYG

Pros: Classy looks, BREW OS with Sense UI, good battery life

Cons: No Wi-Fi, no GPS, low-powered processor, resistive touch screen

Design: Classic HTC

Operating System: Brew

More Info: HTC website

Time was when smartphones were very much a niche market, the reserve of tech geeks and business folk. The iPhone changed all that, of course, but it didn't do much to drop the price to pocket money levels. Now however, affordable smartphones are in, and the latest is the HTC Smart, the company's first to use the cut-price Brew operating system, and while it lacks WiFi or GPS, and you can't add to it with apps, it's still got quite a few things going for it.

Handset

Budget price and specs aside, the Smart doesn't look like a budget handset, with decent build quality, rubberised plastic case and chrome trim. It's light and compact at 104mm x 55mm x 13mm and 108g and has a distinctive look too, with its extra large back button and tiny menu button. The sides are bare except for cunningly hidden volume rocker and camera shutter (both of which blend into the chrome trim), plus there's a mini USB power/sync slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack. O2 is selling the Smart with a 2GB microSD card on board – you'll need to remove the back cover to get to it, but fortunately not the battery.

Operating system and user interface

The Smart is HTC's first handset to use Qualcomm's Brew operating system, which is designed specifically to offer a smartphone experience on a budget. What it actually looks like is a little different to determine since HTC has also incorporated elements of its Sense user interface which we've seen on the likes of the Desire and the Legend. There's a similarity to Android, but there's no widgets, just a flick-up menu of nine shortcuts which you can configure how you will.

There are nine homepages you can access by flicking sideways, but most of them have fixed themes such as contacts, messages, email, FriendStream (which pulls together your Facebook and Twitter updates), pictures and the weather.

Touch screen

The 2.8in resistive touchscreen offers just 320 x 240-pixel QVGA resolution so it ain't the sharpest screen on the block, but it's okay. Less forgivable was the lack of sensitivity from the touchscreen, which had an irritating tendency to interpret our brushes as pushes, accessing functions that we'd hoped to scroll past. Not all the time, but enough to annoy.

Browser

With no WiFi you're stuck with network access to the web and although it's HSDPA high-speed 3G, it can only handle up to a maximum of 3.6Mbps, which inevitably leads to a little lag from time to time. You can zoom by double tapping the screen, which also brings up a zoom bar, and options such as bookmarks and changing your home page are available via the menu button. But while pages are generally well displayed, the lack of WiFi and Flash mean it's a little underspecced for serious browsers.

Camera

Cameras are rarely a high point for HTC phones and this one is no exception. It's got 3 megapixels and a flash, but there's little else in the way of features, not even a digital zoom, and general picture quality is less than impressive. Colours don't always look as natural as they should and edges tend to look a little fuzzy. It doesn’t handle motion well either, blurring easily with all but virtually stationery objects. Video resolution is a paltry 320 x 240 pixels and again blur creeps in much too readily.

Media

Watching video on the Smart could have been better. It can handle MP4 and 3GP files but it won't stretch them to fit the already modestly sized screen, which, with its relatively low resolution doesn't deliver particularly sharp images either.

The music player is better, mainly because it keeps things simple with an easy to follow interface and generally decent sound for MP3, AAC, WMA and WAV files, as well as FM radio. To get that decent sound though you'll definitely need to replace the supplied headphones however, which are tinny and harsh.

Battery

As a smartphone, the Smart excels in terms of battery life, still going strong after three days of moderate use (normally we'd only expect a day or so from a similar handset). The modestly powered 300MHz processor with 256MB of RAM is partly to blame/thank, as is the lowish resolution screen.

The HTC Smart certainly isn't intended as a rival to the do-everything high-end smart phones we've been drooling over since the arrival of the iPhone, but it does offer some smartphone style for a very modest budget. Yes, it shows its limitations, particularly with the lack of WiFi, but it's a solid, well built device with more than enough features to justify its price.