Review: HTC Tattoo

HTC has been a great pusher of the Android operating system on mobile phones, dating back as far as October 2008 with the first Google OS handset, the T-Mobile G1. Since then it has produced most of the world's supply of Android phones, with only a few others throwing their hats into the ring thus far.

HTC has now brought out its third Android phone of the year, the Tattoo. This phone is not an all singing, all dancing mobile to top the last handset. This is for the more budget conscious user who wants the Google OS experience but does not want to remortgage their house to afford it.

From the appearance of the Tattoo, HTC looks like it has gone retro by moving away from its Android designs for the Magic and Hero, and instead producing a design much closer to its first Touch handset of early 2007. Instead of going for the moleskin feel of its original touch-screen mobile, the Taiwanese phone maker has opted for a flush metal casing, although different designs are available for the handset and even personalised, custom-made fascias are possible.

The Tattoo is quite similar to the Touch. In fact, the Touch handset's overall dimensions of 99.9 x 58 x 13.9mm aren't too far off those of the Tattoo. The Tattoo's form factor measures 106 x 55.2 x 14mm, with only 1g in weight between the two of them. They also share the same 2.8in touch-screen with QVGA 240 x 320 resolution, such that one might think the HTC Touch has been crossed with the HTC Magic.

HTC has cut some corners with the Tattoo to reduce its overall manufacturing costs, therefore making it much cheaper to build. This is evident straight out of the box, as the touch-screen is resistive, not capacitive. This means that the Tattoo doesn't support gentle screen touching to select and execute OS functions and applications, and a more forceful approach is needed. This isn't too much bother, but it could take some time to get used to if you've been spoiled by capacitive touch-screens.

At times the Tattoo's touch-screen is a tad unresponsive, and you need to be precise with your fingers. This could all be down to the smaller screen size of this mobile, as the touch-screen area is much tighter than on other phones.

There were also some bothersome issues with the smaller screen with regard to text entry. On the HTC Touch of yesteryear the portrait keyboard on the Windows 6 OS phone took up a good deal of the screen, whereas on the HTC Tattoo it's really small and cramped, and struck us as not as useful due to its small size. The only manageable way to enter text on the Tattoo is with the keyboard in landscape mode where rather deliberate, careful typing is needed due to the smaller screen.

HTC has replaced the pearl tracker ball from the last three Android handsets, with a d-pad controller just below the screen much like in the HTC Touch, only it's a lot more responsive than the original and it's a welcome addition. We actually never used the controller very much, as we preferred to use the touch-screen for most operations, although it came in handy for text editing, as selecting a single letter on the screen was difficult at the best of times.

The Android 1.6 'Donut' release of the OS runs the Tattoo along with HTC's user interface, which is known as Sense. This means that HTC has once again lost the Google endorsement, which was seen on the rear of the Magic phone. It is a worthy tweak to the OS and there's some deep-down integration with Facebook to automatically populate the mobile's address book and show continual updates for individual users on their own address book page.

There's also a lot more that can be done to customise the phone's home screens. Seven screens are on offer, along with six different variants or collections of screens known as 'scenes' for those seven home screens. All of which means that there are 42 possible screens to customise and populate with applications and widgets, so the user is free to install all there is on the Android Market without fear of cluttering the OS.

The deep integration of social networking sites is a useful feature on this handset, especially if you are a slave to Facebook and Twitter, as both have been catered for and thoroughly worked into the HTC user interface and its applications. There's a decent Twitter widget included, along with the Facebook aspect mentioned before, which also pulls the contacts list from Gmail and merges them all together nicely.

HTC has cut costs once again on the hardware front from the specs seen in the Hero and Magic, all to offer an affordable Google OS powered mobile. These other cost cutting measures affect the camera, which is only 3.2-megapixel and without a flash, but it still takes some nice shots.

The company could have hampered the audio connections by sticking to the accompanying miniUSB/ExtUSB socket for headphone connectivity as previously seen in the HTC Magic, but thankfully it hasn't done so. Onboard is the welcome 3.5mm audio socket, catering for the user's own choice of headphones and not forcing reliance on dodgy OEM listening devices.

HTC also didn't scrimp on the battery either, as it included a 1100mAh unit. In our tests the battery survived six hours and 10 minutes worth of calls and, in a separate test, the phone lasted five hours and 35 minutes receiving calls. All the while the Tattoo was connected to Wi-Fi, updating itself with Tweets, Facebook status updates and emails, making it useful for a good solid day out and about.

Android, 2.8in touch-screen, 3.2-megapixels, 3.5mm audio jack, ExtUSB, quad-band, 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPRS, GPS, GSM, HSDPA, Li-ion battery, microSD.