Bringing Smartphone Features To The Masses With The Htc Smart
Bringing Smartphone Features To The Masses With The Htc Smart
The last quarter of 2009 saw rumors circulating online about a new HTC phone that is going to break the HTC tradition of being an exclusive smartphone maker. It’s the HTC Touch B that the online mobile community couldn’t believe is going to be the first full-featured dumb phone from a company that has made its mark as an exclusive smartphone maker.
Well, HTC just confirmed it last January 7 and made the rounds of the last CES in Las Vegas. The world’s first dumb phone from the Taiwan-based smartphone maker debuts this spring as the HTC Smart.
Ironic for its moniker, it’s a dumb phone as it doesn’t run a true operating system that defines what a smartphone is. Instead, it runs on an off-the-shelf Qualcomm BREW Mobile Platform with a 300 MHz processor. BREW stands for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless which is being positioned as a mobile platform that promises cool apps to the low end markets.
Smart Features for a Dumb Phone
First off, it’s a quad band GSM/EDGE/GPRS with 3G/UMTS and HSDPA so you can get on with your social networking and downloading online at high speeds. Keeping the price down often means no WiFi. But you still get Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and a miniUSB 2.0 for local data transfers.
It looks and feels like a smartphone turned off with a 104 x 55 x 12.8 mm monoblock body dominated by a large 2.8” LCD display. Again, to keep the cost down, you only get a resistive touchscreen and 256k colors. Turned on, you get the same look and feel of an HTC smartphone with its HTC Sense UI. And you get the expected accelerometer to auto-rotate your viewing according to handset orientation
Multimedia features are everything you can expect for a full-featured handset. It comes with an FM radio and support for all the image, video and audio file formats. You also get Bluetooth A2DP for wireless stereo earphones but it also comes with a 3.5mm jack for regular wired headphones.
Imaging is so-so with a 3 megapixel fixed focus camera with LED flash. Talk time is only 7 hours and standby time is 19 days from a fully charged 1100 mAh Lithium ion battery. There’s a decent 256 MB RAM and 256 MB ROM expandable to 32 GB from its microSD slot.
What is HTC Thinking?
Some might call this move a calculated desperate act to win a larger market share at a time when mid-to-high end markets are shrinking with the economic recession. HTC’s accompanying press release claims that it has “always focused on listening to customers and setting the stage for new mobile categories and the HTC Smart is the response to customer demand around the world for an easier-to-use, affordable smartphone.” That’s what HTC’s CEO Peter Chou would like us to believe. Except that it is not a smartphone.
HTC may be on to something as the markets really couldn’t care if what they’re using is a smartphone or not. Geeks may know the difference, but for as long the handset does its job wonderfully, it couldn’t care less.
One thing for sure, the new handset won’t be doing much for HTC’s reputation or image but if HTC can deliver on that promise of affordability and functionality, it can win a wider market to its name.
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