HTC Smart review

The budget smartphone market has seen utter domination by Android-based phones of late, but there’s now the whiff of competition in the air. The HTC Smart, in a surprising move for the Taiwanese firm, is based not on Google’s popular mobile OS or Microsoft’s Windows Phone, but on Brew MP, a platform developed by smartphone chipset giant, Qualcomm.

That may sound an exciting development, but take a closer look and it seems the Smart is far from fresh and new. The hardware bears more than a passing resemblance to the HTC Touch2 released last year with its 2.8in 240 x 320 resistive touchscreen; only the control panel, which itself looks to have been borrowed from the Nexus One, is different.

To be fair to HTC, it does feel well knitted together, as did the Touch2, and its chrome-trimmed, soft-touch matte black case looks and feels classy. But it just isn’t that exciting, and as the screen is resistive rather than capacitive, there’s no multitouch support.

Neither is there much on its list of specifications to get you going. The processor looks positively antediluvian at 300MHz, there’s only 256MB of storage built in (expandable via microSD), no Wi-Fi, a 3-megapixel digital camera and, although you do get HSDPA, it’s of the slower 3.6Mbits/sec variety. The inclusion of an FM tuner is little consolation.

Surely the Brew MP OS offers something new? Alas, it too brings little to the party. HTC has missed the opportunity to step out on a limb, instead offering a cut-down version of its Sense UI plugged into Brew’s underpinnings.

Initially, it’s hard to tell the difference between the Smart and other Sense-based phones: it looks similar to the front end of the excellent Desire and Legend Android handsets (complete with flippy home screen clock), and there are even alternative home screens reached with a quick swipe of the finger left or right.

These other screens play host to HTC’s social networking Friend Stream module, email, contacts, weather, plus SMS messages and a photo gallery. The browser is Opera Mobile, so websites are rendered both accurately and quickly (considering the slow processor). And everything else works as well as you might expect from what is, after all, a pretty mature software environment.

But, despite the fact that all the major bases appear to be covered in terms of service support – with presets for AOL and Gmail (plus any other POP3 or IMAP service), and Facebook and Twitter on the social-networking side – HTC has decided, for reasons only known to itself, to hamstring Sense elsewhere.

With the Smart you can only synchronise updates and email over the air, leaving your contacts and calendar information high and dry.
To get either of the latter on your phone, you have to wire it up to your PC via the phone’s mini-USB socket and download the sync software from HTC’s website. Even then, your options are limited to Outlook and Outlook Express.

You can’t import via CSV, for instance. Finally, there’s no way we could see to add apps, and no GPS or mapping utility, both staples of the modern smartphone.

There are some upsides to all this. The Smart is, first and foremost, very easy to use. There are few settings to play with and, therefore, very little to go wrong. Battery life, perhaps as a result of the low-resolution screen and puny CPU, is also good.

After our 24-hour stress test, in which we carry out an hour of screen-on time, make a 30-minute phone call, download a 50MB podcast and play it back on loop for a further hour, the Smart had 60% remaining on its battery gauge.

And, given the apparently slow clock speed of the processor, it feels surprisingly snappy in general use, although it does slow a little when panning around complicated websites.

But there’s ultimately no getting past the fact that the Smart is very much smartphone lite. The lack of apps, contact and calendar synchronisation, maps and GPS means it lags way behind the likes of even the cheapest Android handsets. And O2’s pricing policy, which surprisingly sets the price bar for a free handset at a high £25 per month (that’s with “unlimited” data), just serves to seal its fate.

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