The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

HTC is targeting the lower cost feature phone market with its new HTC Smart. It runs Qualcomm’s BREW operating software which promises a more limited smartphone experience than found on its phones running Winmobile and Android. BREW, which stands for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless, is  not new, but runs mostly on US phones and is virtually unknown outside of the USA. Apparently Qualcomm makes it quite expensive for developers to release software on the platform, which has probably throttled the growth of 3rd party apps. HTC’s strategy makes sense and is likely designed to counter the competition from the new batch of high-end feature phones from Samsung, LG and others. These phones promise functionality nearly as good as smartphones, with faster response times and better battery life. Samsung’s Star is being marketed as “faster than a smartphone”. Once again HTC has stuck its brilliant Sense user interface on top, which should make the user experience on the Smart very similar to the experience on its latest Android and Winmobile phones. The Smart can do the basic stuff such as making calls, emails, messaging, photos, html browsing, twitter and so on. For many users this is likely to be sufficient and the Sense UI BREW combination may be less intimidating to deal with than a phone running Android for example. The phone comes with a 2.8inch touch screen – hopefully and likely to be a capacitive one, 3mp camera, 3g, but no wifi. The battery is only 1000mAh which hopefully indicates the lower power consumption of the BREW platform. If it had wifi I might even be tempted to try one.