The HTC Tattoo is the first budget Android smartphone. It’s not super cheap, but clearly offers a lot of value compared to other smartphones in this price range. From this perspective you could call it a middle-of-the-road smartphone – if you are looking for lots of features at a decent price point, the HTC Tattoo is definitely worth considering.
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You already know about the HTC Magic and Hero, so there shouldn’t be too many surprises in the Tattoo. The main difference is its size–the Tattoo is a small and neat gadget with a thickness of 14mm and a width of 55mm, meaning it easily slips into your pocket. At 113 grams it also sits comfortably in your hand.
Design and Features
The Tattoo’s design is otherwise relatively discreet in the standard layout. What makes it stand out, however, is that you get to design your own custom cover (for a fee). You just visit the Tattoo customization website and here it’s only your own imagination (and sense of decency) that limits what you can do to the phone. Once your creation is complete you place an order and receive a new skin in the mail. If you don’t feel like your artistic skills are up to the challenge, there are also plenty of professionally designed skins to choose from.
There’s thankfully a standard headphone jack on the Tattoo, and for the first time in an Android phone it also has a built-in FM radio, which uses the head-phone cable to get a signal – hardly revolutionary, but a pleasant surprise nevertheless. The app that controls the radio is very basic, but does what it’s supposed to and has no problem saving your favorite stations.
User Experience
Compared to Hero and Magic, the screen is 0.4 inches smaller, making it 2.8 inches instead of the 3.2 in its predecessors. If you are used to a bigger screen this could be an issue, but if it’s your first Android experience chances are you won’t notice the difference. A downside with the smaller touchscreen is that it’s more difficult to use with big fingers. Switching to landscape mode considerably improves usability of the on-screen qwerty keyboard.
Since it’s an HTC, the Tattoo comes with the excellent Sense UI, which adds a more full-featured layer on top of the standard Android user interface. Sense adds several extra features including some great-looking widgets for Facebook, Twitter and more. It is worth mentioning that Facebook for Android is a great experience – you can virtually do anything that you could from a computer, plus you get status updates and messages delivered straight to the Android taskbar.
By and large, the Tattoo is otherwise equal to other Android smartphones from HTC. It occasionally slows down a little bit, but no so frequently that it becomes annoying. The camera is the same sub-standard variant as in most other HTC handsets, and basically useless except in good light. Instead of a trackball, HTC has opted for a normal set of keys for the Tattoo. This hardly matters much, as most users will use the touch screen almost exclusively anyway.
Conclusion
On the whole, the user experience is lightyears ahead of any Windows Mobile phone currently on the market, which makes the Tattoo one of the cheapest smartphones to date. It has most of the functions you could be looking for in a modern mobile phone: 3G, Wi-Fi, music player, alarm, calendar and GPS through the Google Maps interface. And as usual; if anything is missing, chances are you’ll find it in the Android Market.
