HTC Tattoo review

The Android-toting HTC Tattoo smartphone is now available in unlocked mode in India, which was released earlier exclusively with Vodafone.
HTC has launched its Android-based phone Tattoo which is customized with loads of features to reflect your style and your kind of world at a reasonable price rate.

The HTC Tattoo is an average looking handset which sports a quite small TFT-LCD touchscreen by today's standards at 2.8-inches. Its 320x240 pixel resolution is on the low side too. If you've been used to anything at three inches or larger you'll notice the cramping right from the start. The small screen does make for tidy hardware, though, and at 106x55.2x14mm and 113g, the HTC Tattoo is comfy to carry around and hold in the palm.

The HTC Tatoo comes with a Qualcomm MSM7225 processor, Bluetooth 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate, Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, a 3.5mm stereo headset jack and expandable microSD memory. It is equipped with a 3.2 megapixel colour camera with fixed focus.

Powered by a 100 mAh Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery, the HTC Tattoo smartphone offers talk time up to 240 minutes and a standby time up to 120 hours for GSM. The Android device comes with an internal antenna and a 4-way navigation control with Enter button.

The somewhat same-old, same-old silver grey fascia has the Android logo on the back to give it a little lift, but you can raise it higher by ordering customised casing for a really personalised look.

Noticeably absent is the trackball that characterises the Hero and Magic. Instead there is a more familiar large D-pad which feels comfortable enough under the thumb. Call and End buttons are also here and there are two longer buttons offering the usual Android functions: Home, menu, back and search.

Side buttons and connectors are kept to a minimum. There’s a mini USB connector on the bottom for mains power and PC connection, volume rocker on the left edge, and on the top a 3.5mm headset connector. You get a rather average headset in the box, and as it is one piece you are stuck with it if you require handsfree calling.

One of the most attractive things about the Tattoo comes in the fact that HTC has decided to skin it with its Sense user interface, making it look and feel very like the Hero. You get the same seven homescreens which you move between with a finger sweep and which you can populate with a wide range of widgets both Android specific and HTC’s own.

So you can drop a weather bar on the main screen, your calendar, shortcuts to music, your favourite contacts, or a range of other stuff. You could theme the seven home screens populating one with games, one with connection shortcuts, one with favourite contacts shortcuts, and so on.

You can even go further and set up several different sets of screens, which HTC calls Scenes, switching between variants for Social, Work, Play and Travel. They are pre-populated, as is an HTC scene, though you can edit them. The Clean Slate scene is, as you might expect, blank and ready for you to fill as you wish.

As the Tattoo, like other Android-based smartphones, is designed to be used without a stylus, it goes without saying that it has to be usable at all times with fingertips. Where this can fall down is entering text. Fortunately there is an accelerometer which pushes the screen into wide mode and this is very useful when typing text.

You can use a full QWERTY keyboard in both tall and wide screen mode, but in tall mode it's a real fiddle to use accurately. In tall mode there a phone style keyboard and a 'compact Qwerty' option too, which puts two characters on one key. None is really comfy, and we found the widescreen QWERTY option the best, though even this is cramped in the small screen.

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