HTC Smart White Mobile phone on O2 pay as you go (Including £10 Airtime)

I wasn't disapointed with this phone. Neither was i overwhelmed with any of its features. It is as it says 'Smart'. But maybe i got the wrong impression from it. It isn't smart for what it can do, more for how it looks and feels. I can't 100% comment on this product as i don't have 'Facebook' Or 'Twitter' and this phone has an integrated 'Friend Stream' feed which updates your phone automatically. Nor do i use the weather icon. But other than that i use all other features on the phone. I purchased this phone to replace my older Sony Ericson, and this phone has the job extremely well. It works almost as good. I've managed to drop it on various occasions and have not noticed any hardware damage just its shell. So it quite durable. Its good features are that it does feel like i smart phone. The resistive touch screen on it works really well and isn't as bad as i thought it was going to be. The phone itself in White looks awesome. And the built in FM radio works as treat. It has a snazzy little torch on it which was good as i didnt want lose that feature which the sony had. Texting and making phone calls on it are easily done, even without the use of an actual keyboard.
The bad points about this phone are that; the camera suffers from servere stababilty control(as in its really jerky and not idea for on the move photage), I noticed that once you start to fill your inbox with messages it becomes really really laggy(Untill you remove them from the phone completely which cures the problem) and the phone overall seems to run quite slowly.

Never the less, i paid £90 for a phone that looks modern enough for me and I am not disapointed with the price. It was an absolute bargin for what i paid and hopefully won't need to buy another phone for a while. Despites its downsides i always say you pay for what you get for. Here you get a nice brand name, smart looking phone and a simple one as well. If you don't intend on using Apps and what not, then this phone is really ideal for that sort of person. You can't complain about any downsides when really your only paying the price for a standard phone.

I purchased this from prepaymania it is a very good value for money mobile phone, they sent me a brand new unopened mobile phone on the o2 network.

This is a touch screen mobile phone, it is not as well thought as an apple iphone, but then it is a lot cheaper.

The Good.

It works very well, it is easy to move around the apps, the camera is very good, never let me down.

The Bad.

The touch screen is difficult to operate and the touch screen component are cheap and you cannot make out the keys in the dark, as the call button is not lit up.
the software is not up to apple standard, it does not behave logically.
keys are a bit small and my hands are even that big.

It is still very good value for money.

I think you should buy it.

I bought the black version for Christmas 2010 to treat myself after my trusty Sagem MY411x decided to stop working after years of use and abuse.

When I recieved the phone, setup was pretty simple as far as the phone itself goes, but if I remember correctly O2 was a bit fussy with getting the number set up properly. However, I finally got the phone working and it's features kept me amused for the day. I'd used touchscreen phones before, and in fact I own an iPod touch 3rd gen, so the pressure sensitive touchscreen was actually quite awkward for me during the first while. The one thing that still happens to this day however, is when you are scrolling through something such as your messages or something online, the phone will somewhat randomly flick the page either up or down, depending on which way you're scrolling, whenever you take your finger off with the slightest bit of linear movement either way, which is the natural way you remove your finger.
Also, friends using my phone have complained to me that they've just saved something that they shouldn't have in the messages, or liked the wrong status on "Friend Stream" etc. Obviously not very "new user" friendly there.
The touchscreen in terms of aesthetics and durability is up to it's job. I use Terrapin screen protectors now after I scratched the screen on a metal button in my jeans pocket, so I can't really comment on the durability of the screen itself, but I can say that with screen protectors, it can take some serious punishment!

After the novelty period wore off, I began to see the phone in a different light.
One thing that irritated me was the MicroSD card that the phone comes with- it also comes with a MiniUSB USB male-male lead for use with the charger and connecting to your PC; which brings me to my next point:
HTC Suite (on Vista anyway) is pathetic. I simply cannot get it to work the way I want it to. Functions are greyed out that shouldn't be, and overall I'm just not impressed. SO, thinking outside the box, I went a step further. Since HTC Suite wasn't doing the job, I bought a cheap MicroSD-USB adapter (not made by HTC) and now use that for all my memory related needs. It's ten times easier to set up than Suite, it's qicker to respond, and best of all- it actually works!

Now I could go on and on but I'll cut the reason why this phone is not seeing life with me past this Christmas.
During the summer, some awesome miracles happened and a lot of things in my life became less stressful, leaving me time to do things at the weekends and during holidays, and where would I be without a phone to organise things? :)
As a result, the phones usage went through the roof and I was being sent texts very frequently. Obviously, after a while, inboxes fill up and you have to delete things to make space again. I noticed that when I had a lot of messages in my inbox, the phone was quite unresponsive and slow. Now it didn't really bother me that much, and I kept the number of stored messages to a minimum to save myself the hassle of waiting for a longer time each time I recieved a text. On that note, I also noticed that deleting messages can be frustratingly slow at times.
As months have progressed, and holidays have been and gone, I now use my HTC Smart daily, but not hardcore every minute. I don't know if it's a software issue or hardware has been damaged from the summer period, but now this phone is actually painful to watch. It takes forever and a day to load up the main menu, let alone a text. If you're in the middle of doing something and you recieve a text, then good luck to you; if it doesn't freeze, then you're going to be waiting for a good 20 seconds for a response. Usually it takes so long that the phones self locking system kicks in and that text you've been waiting to view suddenly dissapears behind the black screen.
With the locking system mentioned, I feel obliged to warn everyone that the unlock slider on this thing is a joke. I've lost count of the amount of numbers that I've dialled in my pocket without realising. Taking it way back to the start- the reason it's so bad is because the touchscreen is pressure sensitive; at least with an iPhone or similair, they are electrically sensitive, so people don't have this problem with them unless they have their hands in direct contact with the phone.

So overall on this phone, the HTC Smart, I am not impressed at all. I read the reviews before buying and most people claimed it was cheap and did the job just fine, which it does for a while, don't get me wrong, its just that most of those reviews were written shortly after purchase. Remember that this is a review from someone who's 11 months down the line.

Pros:

- The phone does it's job, the microphone itself is clear as it could get, and has a loudspeaker option built in. It just takes unbearably long to load anything when it has messages in it's inbox. Clearing the messages worked for a short while but now it doesn't seem to make a difference.
- The camera is a favourite utility for me (loads at a decent rate compared to internal functions), 2048x1536 pixels is as high as it'll go. That's 3 megapixels to you and me by the way. It's relatively easy to use and you have the option to have a flash or not. The quality of the final images is decent at 3MP but the shutter speed is quite slow and (as far as I can see) cannot be adjusted, so blurry shots are all too common.
- The casing is pretty nice to look at but it does scratch quite easily. I use a silicone cover for my phone, and combining that with the screen protectors, my HTC is more of a tank than a phone.
- O2 in my opinion, are overpriced. PAYG is debatable, but for all the time that I use my phone, £15.00 credit and a month with 500 free texts and unlimited internet suits me fine. Once the deal runs expires though, 12p per text is, coming from an Orange ex-pat's point of view, quite expensive to say the least.
- The phone has a built in FM radio, with the supplied earphones acting as an antenna. I've never used it apart from the day I recieved the phone, but even that was brief, so I can't review this part of the product I'm afraid.
I suppose it's a good idea for those of us on the commute to work and back again every day, but I personally have no use whatsoever for it.

Cons:

- Mainly the speed of the phones processing unit. My days, it is agonisingly bad.
- The phone freezes a lot for no apparent reason, and always has done for me.
- Recieving and sending texts can be an awful experience at times. They take forever to load, and the credit notification that tells you how much you have after EVERY SINGLE TEXT is incredibly irritating. (I see no way to turn it off either...)
- O2 signal quality is poor all over the country. And despite me living about a mile from an O2 mast, the signal in my house is dodgy at the best of times.
- The phone dials it's own numbers frequently when in your pocket, while you are not even aware that it's on. This has cost me so much money, it's unreal.

The cons list could go on forever, but there's the main points anyway.

Additional: I have figured out that the charger makes for a good iPod mains charger. Maybe that's a subliminal message...

2 stars from me I'm afraid.