The HTC Smart may be aimed at those who want a cheap phone for staying in touch with their mates online, but there’s no reason they should be left without proper media support when even the most bare bones handsets can play MP3s these days. How does the HTC Smart cope with your digital media library? Find out in this part of our HTC Smart review.
Read the rest of our HTC Smart review
HTC Smart review
HTC Smart review: HTC Sense simplified?
HTC Smart review: Touchscreen and build
Though the HTC Smart doesn’t run a smartphone OS like Android or Windows Mobile, any savvy online social networker will still want to dump their music, video and images on it for playback. Unfortunately, while we like HTC’s interpretation of Sense on Brew OS, it’s only a passable phone on this front
When it comes to build, the HTC Smart meets most requirements. There’s no internal storage, but a microSD slot means you can add up to 32GB with the right memory card (We tested it with an 8GB card), and it’s hot swappable, so you can replace them without having to turn the phone off. There’s a 3.5mm audio port on the top of the phone, a volume rocker on the left hand side, and unusually for a HTC touchscreen phone, a physical camera button on the right, where you’d find one on a compact camera.
For music, too, it’s adequate. The HTC Smart is savvy enough to hoover up music from wherever it’s stashed on your microSD card, and sort it with tags and cover art where possible. It won’t work with doubleTwist for iTunes style syncing, sadly (and wouldn’t mount on a Mac at all, alarmingly), but if you’ve got a PC and a music collection, you can just drag and drop what you want once, and let it do the rest.
Music playback is straight forward, as the music player can be accessed from a HTC Sense homescreen widget, and it plays MP3, WMA, WAV and AAC files so the chances are your catalogue will load with no hitches. Sound quality is perfectly fine for a cheap phone: the HTC bundled headphones are surprisingly decent, though chunky and split much too close to your chin, so you’ll want to bring your own cans still. The volume rockers also don’t skip and pause tracks, which is a pity, but we can cope.
Be careful what you try and do with the HTC Smart while listening to music though. Lock the screen and leave it running in your pocket and you’ll be fine, but open FriendStream or the web browser on it and music will start to skip. Open up something more intensive like the camera (Slow to load at the best of times) and you can set off a total freeze.
Unfortunately, trying to play videos on the HTC Smart is much more unpleasant. It won’t open H.264 streaming web videos, so you can forget about peeping any YouTube clips your friends link to on FriendStream. And while it theoretically opens low resolution MP4 files, they’re more like slideshows than videos, and completely unwatchable. 3GP format videos open, but playback is staggered like a loaded packhorse with a missing leg.
The camera meanwhile is par for the course for a touchscreen phone available for £100. It’s three megapixels of mediocrity, churning out shots with overexposed whites and lots of noise, and low-res QVGA videos awash with mottle and stutter. It’s made slightly more bearable by a flash, though it’s frankly more useful for the Flashlight option when stumbling around in the dark looking for the keyhole. But we don’t expect any better at this price, and it’s passable in daylight.
The HTC Smart does a slightly better job with the pictures once you’ve taken them though: you can bung them on Facebook from FriendStream, or just simply slide through them in the gallery. The sliding zoom bar is fairly speedy, and goes someway towards making up for the lack of pinch to zoom gestures as found on other HTC Sense phones.
The HTC Smart won’t satisfy music fans like a new Nokia Xseries blower, and we’re not fans of any OS where music starts skipping, but if you’re a casual Facebook grazer and nothing more, it’s fine for the odd train commute. At the HTC Smart’s price point, that’s just about OK.
Read the rest of our HTC Smart review
HTC Smart review
HTC Smart review: HTC Sense simplified?
HTC Smart review: Touchscreen and build
