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.