The HTC Smart is a low-cost smartphone aimed at 16-22 year olds and has just become available through O2 free on contract from £10 per month, or £100 PAYG.

The budget smartphone market seems to be bursting at the seams at the moment and it’s no surprise; despite the top-of-the-range smartphones grabbing the headlines and plaudits for their technological breakthroughs and super-duper features, it’s really the affordable,  low-cost market that provides manufacturers with their bread and butter.

HTC are more well-known for their high-end handsets such as the Desire, the Legend and the HD2, but they do have some experience with entry-level devices – the HTC Tattoo has always sold well and the recently announced Wildfire looks set to spread like its name suggests it might.

However, it’s the Smart that holds the title of cheapest handset – but does that mean we’ll have to compromise on HTC‘s normally excellent performance? Let’s take a closer look…..

SPECS

First of all, we should fill you in with the specs. Don’t get too excited, though, as there’s not too much wow factor in the engine room. A 300MHz processor with 256MB of RAM isn’t going to compete with the iPhone or the Desire, but the Smart is running an entirely different race. Qualcomm’s “Brew”, which has been designed specifically for affordable handsets, is installed as the Smart’s operating system.

You also get a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus, digital zoom, flash and video capabilities, a music player, an FM radio Bluetooth and wireless connectivity from GSM/EDGE, and HSDPA/WCDMA. To keep down costs, there is no Wi-Fi or GPS support.

DESIGN

Out of the box and straight on to first impressions; the HTC Smart is a lovely little phone. OK, so the build quality doesn’t feel as nice as HTC’s top-of-the-range phones, but you get a sturdy, well-built handset that looks good and sits comfortably in the hand. The mobile is compact and lightweight, with a 2.8″ resistive touchscreen display.

Beneath the screen you’ll find 4 hardware controls; a large, “Back” button is found plum in the middle and is flanked by a “Call” key on the left, and an “End” key on the right – there’s also a small “Options” control above the Call key.

At the bottom edge under the mouthpiece is one of HTC’s ExtUSB slots and at the top you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone socket, whilst the side panels have a volume control rocker and dedicated camera button. The back panel slides off to reveal a 1,100mAh battery and space for the SIM card, as well as slot for an SD card.

TURNED ON

Once switched on, you’ll be the greeted by the colourful user interface, which you may be familiar with if you have used one of HTC’s phones before. In fact, you could be fooled into thinking that you’re actually using an Android or Windows-based phone, as the HTC Sense UI has been wrapped around the Brew OS.

This means that you get some – although not all – of the benefits of HTC Sense, including the welcome inclusion of 7 home screens, which can be accessed by swiping across the screen, and different “Scenes”, which you can can customize to fit your needs at certain times of day or particular occasions.

There’s various widgets that you can set up on each screen, the most eye-catching of which was the Friend Stream, which links up with your Facebook and Twitter accounts to display updates and gives you their profile pictures to use beside their name and number. However, don’t expect to post videos directly to your Facebook pages; there’s no support for this, or indeed, access to Youtube.

You can access the Menu by pressing the Back button (incidentally, this did take me a while to work out), from where you’ll find the typical sort of Menu set-up – icons for messaging, music, settings, phone contacts etc. The Smart actually feels quite speedy trawling through the menus, despite its low-powered processor, although it’s likely to slow down a bit as you fill up space.

Phone contacts can be accessed easily, either through the specific contacts icon in the menu, or on the dedicated “Favourites” homescreen and should you decide to phone, the call quality is clear from both ends and loud enough to pierce through some quite loud external noise (we played Motorhead on a very loud stereo system).

If you decide to use the messaging function, you’ll find the on-screen QWERTY keyboard, which displays in portrait or landscape (although there’s no accelerometer, so you’ll have to flick a switch). The keyboard works well enough, although as the touchscreen is resistive, you sometimes have to press harder than you think you might. Also, if you’ve got big fingers, you may struggle with accuracy – and there’s no predictive text as a safety net.

You can get online by using the Web browser which works well, although you might have to get used to zooming in and out a good deal, as the text on display a little small. Zooming is achieved by an on-screen scroll bar that is OK, but obviously isn’t a patch on the gesture controlled zoom you get on a pricier handset.

The camera is as good as you can expect from a low-cost entry level phone, taking average pictures which look fine on the actual handset until you load them on to the PC, which really exposes the limitations of the 3MP sensor. Video quality is OK for the handset, if a little jerky, but as soon as the images are taken out of their home environment, they’re not worth looking at.

Media playback enjoys comprehensive support for AAC, AMR, QCP, MID, M4A, MP3, WMA and WAV for audio files and MP4, 3GP, 3G2 and M4V for video files. As a shortcut, you can set up a specific music page on one of the homescreens and once you’re there, you should find audio quality is surprisingly good – but you will definitely want to get yourself a decent pair of headphones.

VERDICT

The HTC Smart is an impressive little number for the price and definitely achieves what it set out to do; provide good quality smartphone features to a budget audience. It’s never going to compare with its more expensive relatives like the Desire or the Hero, but then it doesn’t try to. Most budget smartphones offer one particular function that they excel at, whether its a good camera, music facility or social networking functions and although you can’t say that the HTC Smart has a specific “superpower”, it has a better all-round performance than its rivals. Recommended for families on a budget with gobby teenagers demanding a decent phone they can show off to their mates. This should stop them whinging for a while, at least.

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