Review: HTC Snap smartphone

HTC has a long history of making Windows Mobile-based smartphones but, with a few exceptions, these have been touch-screen devices.

The HTC Snap, however, takes a page, or more accurately a chapter, from the BlackBerry school of handset design with a wide candybar model featuring a four-row full Qwerty keyboard and roller-ball for navigation.

The phone is nice and light, and has a pretty good design with a slightly rubberised casing and a solid feel in the hand. The miniUSB port is tucked behind a cover but, although this looks nice, it can be something of a pain if you use the port often.

The Snap is a lot slimmer than most phones of this design and, at 120 grams, weighs less than any of its competitors that we're aware of.

Unlike the budget BlackBerry 8520, the Snap does bundle in 3G and GPS, but has a rather paltry 2-megapixel camera with no flash. Onboard memory is limited to 256MB, but there is a microSD card slot for expanded storage.

HTC Home
You won't find anything like the shiny TouchFlo interface that HTC puts over Windows Mobile on its touch-screen phones. Instead, the company has overlaid the operating system with something called HTC Home, which effectively pares down the whole thing, breaking all the most common tasks into separate tabs which can be easily navigated using the roller-ball and keyboard.

Another way the Snap circumvents the lack of touch screen is by letting you press the roller-ball to select the highlighted option. If you hold it down for a bit you can get a context menu when appropriate.

Although the Snap is running a full version of Windows Mobile 6.1, the design makes it feel a lot more hobbled, which may prove an issue for those wanting to add a lot of different third-party applications, particularly if they are optimised for touch screens.

Inner Circle
As well as running this adapted version of Windows Mobile, the Snap also differentiates itself from BlackBerry with a feature HTC calls Inner Circle, which allows you to immediately prioritise certain key contacts.

For instance, while going through the email inbox, hitting the Inner Circle button will immediately filter the list to show only messages including those contacts who are part of the list.

Unfortunately, that's about the extent of the Inner Circle functionality at the moment, but this principle could very easily be expanded into other features down the line. What would be particularly useful is to create several groups of Inner Circles, such as a business circle, a friends circle and so on, which could be cycled through with multiple touches of the Inner Circle button.

Keyboard
The keyboard itself is pretty good. The keys are quite small and rammed closely together, but the curved raised design helps to make it easy to pick out individual keys without too much problem.

Screen
The 2.4in screen is a little disappointing and, although the 320 x 240 pixel display is fine for reading email and performing basic phone functions, those hoping to do a lot of web browsing or watch video are probably going to be disappointed.

Battery life
Despite the slim and lightweight design, the battery life on the HTC Snap is truly impressive, comfortably managing three days between charges with moderate use, and even under very heavy loads you should get a full day out of the device.

It will depend on the mobile contract but, as a SIM-free device, the Snap is a little more expensive than the recently reviewed BlackBerry 8520, which packs most of the same features into the same form factor. But the better screen and BlackBerry email functionality may be a deciding factor for some.

There's no disguising the fact that the HTC Snap is a very bland phone but, if you're looking for a pocketable Windows Mobile workhorse that isn't going to die on you halfway through the business day, the Snap should certainly be high on your list.