Playing it Smart With the New HTC Smart
The Taiwan-based smartphone maker HTC is getting down from its enviable perch as an exclusive smartphone maker that has been giving Palm and Blackberry reasons to worry about over the last few years.
It is now dipping its hands on a “new smartphone category” that HTC believes will redefine the needs of the low end side of the market for a smartphone-like handset that costs no more than your average full-featured dumbphone.
Announced last January 7th and revealed at the 2010 CES in Las Vegas early this month, the new HTC Smart is expected to take HTC into a collision course with mainstream mobile phone makers that have been enjoying mass-market patronage with their cheap dumb phones.
Dumb but Smarter
The new HTC looks like a smartphone alright. It even feels like one. You get a stylish monoblock touchscreen form factor on a 104 x 55 x 12.8 mm body with a generous 2.8″ resistive LCD touchscreen.
Compromises are everywhere to bring the cost down. For one, the display only supports 256k colors. But it’s definitely one of the largest, if not the largest among dumb phones.
There’s even an accelerometer as well, a feature often shared between smartphones and dumbphones of this class. There’s no WiFi which is not entirely surprising for its promised price point. Imaging is also on the mediocre side at 3 megapixel but you get LED flash, another feature you can find in many dumb phones.
But HTC got the good sense to put the HTC Sense UI onto its Qualcomm BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) Mobile Platform running a 300 MHz processor. Turning it on gives you the impression you are using a smartphone. Only to realize it does not give the flexibility of one.
This is a quad band GSM/EDGE/GPRS with 3G/UMTS and HSDPA data connectivity for a really satisfying internet downloading experience.
There’s Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR for wireless local data transfers with other Bluetooth devices as well as a miniUSB 2.0 for wired data synching with your PC or laptop.
It has FM radio and the media players that support all the popular file formats for image, video and audio. Its Bluetooth gives you A2DP support for using wireless stereo earphones. The handset also gives you the option to use regular wired headphones from a 3.5mm jack.
Talk time is a decent 7 hours under 2G with a standby time of 19 days from a fully charged 1100 mAh Lithium ion battery.
Internal memory comes with a 256 MB RAM and 256 MB ROM which is expandable to 32 GB from its microSD slot.
Conclusion
What looks and feels like a smartphone and even smells like a smartphone, but is not a smartphone? It’s the HTC Smart, ironic for its name, but is sure to delight mobile phone users tired of the usual candybar formats. The feature set is nothing to rave about, except to say that it holds up to even most smartphones in the market today.
If HTC can deliver on its promise of affordability, this is one mobile phone that might give HTC the right presence in the low-end markets. Expect it to arrive in the markets early this year, spring at the latest.