HTC Smart review

But, despite the fact that all the major bases appear to be covered in terms of service support – with presets for AOL and Gmail (plus any other POP3 or IMAP service), and Facebook and Twitter on the social-networking side – HTC has decided, for reasons only known to itself, to hamstring Sense elsewhere.

With the Smart you can only synchronise updates and email over the air, leaving your contacts and calendar information high and dry.

To get either of the latter on your phone, you have to wire it up to your PC via the phone’s mini-USB socket and download the sync software from HTC’s website. Even then, your options are limited to Outlook and Outlook Express.

You can’t import via CSV, for instance. Finally, there’s no way we could see to add apps, and no GPS or mapping utility, both staples of the modern smartphone.

There are some upsides to all this. The Smart is, first and foremost, very easy to use. There are few settings to play with and, therefore, very little to go wrong. Battery life, perhaps as a result of the low-resolution screen and puny CPU, is also good.

After our 24-hour stress test, in which we carry out an hour of screen-on time, make a 30-minute phone call, download a 50MB podcast and play it back on loop for a further hour, the Smart had 60% remaining on its battery gauge.

And, given the apparently slow clock speed of the processor, it feels surprisingly snappy in general use, although it does slow a little when panning around complicated websites.

But there’s ultimately no getting past the fact that the Smart is very much smartphone lite. The lack of apps, contact and calendar synchronisation, maps and GPS means it lags way behind the likes of even the cheapest Android handsets. And O2’s pricing policy, which surprisingly sets the price bar for a free handset at a high £25 per month (that’s with “unlimited” data), just serves to seal its fate.

Price when reviewed: Free