"Quietly Brilliant" – that's HTC's latest marketing slogan. And although we're not generally won over by such rhetoric, in this particular case, it rings pretty true.
While Apple has been busy trying to convince the world that the launch of the iPad is akin to the second coming of Christ, HTC has spent its time in a less ostentatious manner, launching some of the best mobile phones we've ever seen.
The new HTC Smart has a lot to live up to when you consider the company's recent track record. In the past few months we've seen the beautifully crafted HTC Legend, which was quickly followed up with the HTC Desire – arguably the best mobile phone money can buy right now.
Even a Windows Phone operating system couldn't stop the HTC HD Mini from being a great handset for anyone who's resistant to buy into Google's Android platform.
But the Smart is a very different proposition to those feature-packed handsets. Although it clearly falls into the smartphone category, it's not aimed at the kind of power user who would want an HTC Desire or Apple iPhone.
The Smart is aimed clearly at the average consumer who would like a few smartphone features, but doesn't care about lightning fast processors or app stores. Oh, and they want it to be affordable too, even without a contract.
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.
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