HTC Explorer

The HTC Explorer is a plan handset designed at first-time smartphone users, with a focus on trust things simple and easy to use. It's a small but flabby handset which fits nicely in the hand, with a rough plastic casing that feels powerful and has a rubbery surface that helps with grip. even though its budget price, the Explorer comes with all the common smartphone features, including a 3-megapixel camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and access to the Android Market.

Our first concern was the small 3.2in screen, which has a small 320x480 resolution, but in perform we found it bright and colourful, with very little obvious pixellation. There's not a lot of room, however - widgets on the home screen feel far more cramped than we're used to, and web browsing requires landscape mode. You'd also need to scroll around a lot to look at Office documents, but there's no document viewer installed as standard.

The phone is powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-a-chip, and despite its low clock pace the operating system still felt fast, even with a few applications successively. The phone could also play HD video files, although of course they're downscaled to fit on the lower-resolution screen.0

One main problem is the small 85MB of free storage space for apps. Most apps range from 3-5MB in size, whereas games can be 20MB or more, so you'll be very imperfect in what you can install. You do get a microSD card slot, so if you're careful you can stretch out your storage space by moving some apps to the SD card.

A major disclosure is the camera: despite its lowly 3-megapixel sensor, it produced crisp, bright shots with very little noise. This was most evident in our low-light test, where we managed to capture reasonably detailed images, even while the camera doesn’t have a flash. Videos were crisp and colourful too, with much less jerkiness when panning than we've seen from other smartphone cameras. The low 480x320 video resolution is the only downside.

The Explorer runs a later edition of HTC's Sense interface than the larger Sensation XE, but we didn't notice any major differences. You still get all the social networking features, such as inclusion your contacts across a variety of services such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, although not all Sense apps are installed by default - you can choose to install the missing ones through the HTC Hub app, which gives you more control over how much space is taken up with apps.

One small but imperative addition is the inclusion of a data monitor, which gives first-time smartphone users more control over their data usage and allows them to get an idea of how much surfing or YouTubing they can get away with. This is especially useful as many people interested in such an reasonably priced smartphone may want to pay for their data as they go; in fact, most of the contract deals we saw for the Explorer came without data.