HTC has been grabbing headlines with its new range of Android devices this year at Mobile World Congress, but that hasn’t stopped it also playing in other areas too.

The HTC Smart was announced for the UK at the event too (coming with O2 in the near future) and it was dubbed a ‘different direction for smartphones’.

The phone is certainly on the dinky side – it’s got a 2.8-inch screen (only QVGA resolution, but that’s less of an issue for a phone of this size).

The specs are pretty low as well – the phone only has a 300MHz processor and 256MB of RAM – hardly the top end stuff the HTC Desire is made of.

But for all that, it’s a fairly well put-together phone. We’re not saying that it will make iPhone or Palm Pre owners think twice or anything, but O2 has stated that it will be aiming this handset at the 16-22 year old market.

The cool thing about the HTC Smart is that it’s nabbed some nifty Sense features from the Android and Windows Mobile range – meaning it’s got a pretty fully featured platform to work from.

The BREW platform is made by Qualcomm – it’s basically meant to facilitate low cost phones like this one and the INQ Chat 3G and Mini 3G.

The UI means that you can drag your finger up from the bottom of the home screen (of which there are seven, accessed by swiping right or left) and access your pre-defined programs.

You can also pull down from the top of the screen to access your ‘Scenes’ menu – basically a collection of different homescreen and widget layouts so you can use your phone in different ways at different times of the day.

So this means that if you want email during the day, but Friend Stream in the evening, you can set them to just switch when you feel like changing.

The texting keyboard on the screen thankfully follows the Android rather than the Windows Mobile path – the former is awesome, the latter terrible on the HTC range.

Messaging is threaded and easy to read – all your contacts’ conversations with you are either in the messaging application or readable through their profile in your address book.

You can set your favourite contacts too in a easy to use grid – again, a good idea nabbed from its smarter brothers.

The internet on the phone sadly wasn’t working in the demo model we saw, but we’re happy to report that there’s the usual text reflow we’ve come to love from HTC.

There’s no pinch and zoom functionality here, but rather a slider bar at the bottom that pops up when you tap the screen twice – making zooming in and out a little harder in our eyes.

In fact, HTC’s got a weird button configuration for the Smart. We’re on board with the call/terminate buttons (although the latter does lock the device, which it takes a while to get used to).

But there’s a big ‘Back’ button as well, which doubles as a menu key on the home screen as well.

And to add to that, there’s a very-easy-to-miss little button in there, which calls up the mini on-screen menus for any given application.

It’s certainly a different layout, and we’ll be interested to see how it plays out.

There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack on the HTC Smart, as well as a microSD slot, so you can add a fair whack of multimedia to the phone as well.

There wasn’t any video loaded onto the Smart we were playing with, but we’d imagine it would be no great shakes with a QVGA screen and a 300MHz processor.

Music was OK though, and the dedicated player felt pretty high end for this budget handset. That can also be added to the home screen as well, for easy access to your tunes.

The camera was also in the OK category – it took the pictures we asked it to take fairly well, but a 3MP camera is always going to be limited in this area.

You can see you snaps in a little pile on the home screen to look through later, but either it was a software glitch or an oversight, you couldn’t flick through them from this view, as you can with Android and Windows Mobile.

The HTC Smart is a hard phone to define. Generally budget phones aren’t much good for constant use – people buy them because they’re cheap and have got a touchscreen or a half decent camera.

But the Smart has a lot of… well, smarts about it. It can multi-task better than other handsets that cost three times the (expected) price, and it’s got a lovely form factor.

It’s not going to stop the hard core tech lovers from desiring a Desire or salivating over the next iPhone, but it might play well in that youthful category O2 is apparently after.

MWC 2010: Hands on: HTC Smart review via http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techradar/phone-and-communications-news/~3/n3O2p2mL2Aw/story01.htm TechRadar Mobile

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