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HTC Smart hands-on
At a glance, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense that HTC would be devoting time, money, and energy to moving downmarket into the dog-eat-dog world of dumbphones -- but after chatting a bit with the company today, we've got a slightly better sense for why the Smart exists: it's a stepping stone, not a final destination. It's promoting the Qualcomm Brew MP-powered device as a way to get folks who would otherwise buy... say, a Samsung Corby, and use it to get them interested in (and locked into) the Sense UI, which looks surprisingly similar here to what you'd find on anything else HTC makes. The Smart's screen animations are pleasantly fast and you've got basically all the stuff you'd expect to find on a basic new-in-box smartphone including full HTML browsing and support for Twitter, email, and so on. The 2.8-inch resistive display seemed totally usable to us; clearly, a full QWERTY keyboard won't be terribly comfortable on any 2.8-inch screen, but it ain't bad. In a word, we're impressed -- we wouldn't buy it (and we suspect you wouldn't either), but it's definitely got a valid target demo. Follow the break for video. %Gallery-82006%
HTC Smart is, ironically, company's first dumbphone
Remember that Touch.B that leaked a few weeks ago? Well, it's real now -- and amazingly, it turns out that the rumored non-smartphone status is totally confirmed. This would be the first time HTC has released a device that doesn't run a true smartphone operating system in the traditional sense of the word, instead going with Qualcomm's Brew Mobile Platform -- the very same setup AT&T's standardizing on for its dumbphone range starting later this year. It's got 256MB of RAM and ROM, a 3 megapixel cam, Euro-friendly 3G plus quadband EDGE, and the now-familiar Sense UI that the Smart shares with its WinMo- and Android-powered siblings. Look for this puppy to launch across Europe and Asia this Spring -- likely at a very, very competitive price point, if we had to guess.