HTC Freestyle Review

Introduction:

For those of you who may like the look of a smartphone, and want something cool like a touchscreen, but don’t really need a smartphone, there’s a new option…the HTC Freestyle from AT&T. The Freestyle is the carrier’s first device to use Qualcomm’s new BREW MP platform, but layered nicely over it is the iconic HTC Sense UI (or some version of it), which makes the device fairly easy to use. But with a current price of $99 with contract for the Freestyle, it is more than other smartphones, such as the iPhone 3GS for $49, and the same price as the HTC Inspire 4G Android smartphone.

Included in the retail box is the HTC Freestyle phone, 1300mAh battery, wall charger with detachable microUSB cable, and user guides.

Design:

The look of the HTC Freestyle says “smartphone” due to the 3.2” capacitive touchscreen display taking up most of the front. The display resolution is 320x480, which makes small text in web pages look a bit pixelated, but the phone’s menus and applications are readable without any problem. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to view in direct sunlight, as the display looks completely dark, even with the brightness turned up – so you’ll have to use your hand to shade the display at times. Below the display are four buttons: send, end, back, and a multipurpose menu key; while above the display is the earpiece and an LED light that flashes whenever you receive a new message.



You can compare the HTC Freestyle with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.


The metal construction of the HTC Freestyle means it has a good weight (128g) and balance to it, and also feels pretty solid in the hands. Around the sides are the volume rocker, power/lock key, 3.5mm headset jack, camera key, and microUSB port, while the 3.2MP camera and external speaker are on the back. The only thing we dislike is the poorly designed battery door, that has to be popped-off the bottom of the phone, then there’s a piece of plastic you have to flip-down that is holding the battery in-place. This is also the process to get to the SIM card and microSD memory card slot. We would have rather seen a standard battery cover on the back that simply comes off in one step.

Interface and Features:

Truly, the best part of the Freestyle is that is uses HTC’s Sense UI for interaction. It's not really the Sense you'd find in an Android smartphone of the company, but it still has that similar look and feel. There are a total of six homescreens that you can swipe between, which has good fluid movement. Those of you familiar with Sense on HTC’s smartphones will recognize the date/time/weather widget that occupies the middle home screen. Of course, you can add or remove widgets to any of the six screens, including music, shortcuts, weather, home, people, friend stream, photos, messages, internet, and calendar.


Another benefit of the Sense interface is that it comes with two scenes preloaded: life style and work. You can change between them whenever you want, and even create new scenes as well, that allows you some nice customization.

While on the center home screen, there is a large menu icon that will take you to the phone’s main menu, where you can swipe left-and-right between three screens where all your apps are listed with colorful icons. Even though it is visually a nice layout, you can’t rearrange the icons, nor drag them to the home screens – so right there you can tell this isn’t a smartphone.


As far as the included apps, there’s a nice selection, but still nothing to write home about. There’s AT&T Navigator which shows a nice map interface and will give you GPS guided turn-by-turn directions, YP Mobile for yellow-page listings of places in your area, IM for connecting to AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo, AT&T Radio, and Music Video streaming.


You can have up to 2000 contacts with all their information stored in the phone’s memory, or you can access the ones on your SIM card, but the Freestyle can’t sync and import contacts from your Google or Facebook account – something that should have been added.


Naturally you can send and receive a variety of SMS and MMS messages, as well as set-up mobile email accounts for Yahoo, AOL, AIM, Hotmail, AT&T Mail, and Gmail. There is also the option to manually enter your standard POP3 or IMAP account. We used our Gmail account and it worked just fine showing our inbox, and we could easily compose a new message and change to other folders.


For music lovers, there are a few options on the Freestyle. There is the standard music player, which works well as it can display your music by artists, albums, playlists, and songs. When you select a track to playback, it shows the album art on the screen, as well as music control icons. You even return back to the home screen and use a music widget from there. Music playback quality was lacking though, due to the small speaker on the back of the phone, with noticeable distortion if the volume was too loud. Another option is the AT&T Music app that is a subscription based service, which will also play your own music files, but also allows you to search and access music and ringtones for download. Your third choice is the AT&T Radio app, which is also subscription based, but will steam live or pre-recorded radio stations from around the country right to your phone. If you don’t want to pay for that, then use the standard FM Radio app, but it does require you to use 3.5mm headphones for them to act as the antenna, and the reception isn’t that great.


The included 3.2MP camera does a mediocre job of capturing your images, so you won’t win any awards here. Images that we took outside were lacking in detail and were generally soft, as well as having poor color representation and saturation. Going indoors the image quality quickly went down-hill, as there was noticeable grain in low-light pictures, and the lack of a flash didn’t help. Videos are recorded with the 3GP file extension, but you can choose to encode them using MPEG4, H.263, or H.264. Out of these three, the best looking was the MPEG4 video since it allows for the highest resolution of 480x320. While this may look fine playing back on your phone’s small screen, viewing it on a PC can be pretty painful, and with only 20fps, videos can look a bit jerky while there’s movement. You can also playback your own videos on the phone off your memory card, as we could play an MP4 video with a resolution up to 640x480 without problem.







The web browser works well for a non-smartphone, as you can use the capacitive touchscreen for easily moving pages around, selecting links, and pinch-to-zoom. Since the HTC Freestyle is limited to 3G, most graphic-intensive web pages are going to take about a minute to fully load, and Wi-Fi is not present, so there’s no way to get sites to load any faster. For a feature-phone, the web browser on the Freestyle is one of the better ones we’ve seen, though Adobe Flash is not supported (which isn’t surprising). Unfortunately, the browser won’t change to landscape view automatically when the phone is flipped on its side. Instead you have to go into the browser menu and change between landscape and portrait modes manually.


A few other software features included on the HTC Freestyle include a calendar for keeping all of your important appointments, alarm, calculator, file browser, and an image gallery. You can also download a lot of other programs using the App Center, just make sure you check the prices before you download.

Performance:

One area we were not thrilled with was the call quality. In every call that we placed, we could hear in the earpiece a constant “hiss” sound in the background, almost like white-noise, and there was no way to get rid of it, even when changing over to speakerphone. For quick calls this may not be a problem for some, but for heavy talkers, this will become annoying. However, the actual voice quality on our end was pretty good, though callers said we sounded a bit muffled on their end. Signal reception was good, as we had 3 bars showing most of the time and didn’t drop any calls.

The included 1300mAh battery is rated to provide up to 6.5 hours of talk time or two weeks of standby time. During out tests, we were only able to get about 4 hours of talk time on a full charge, and with mixed usage, we had to charge the device each night.

The HTC Freestyle uses a Qualcomm MSM 7225 processor operating at only 528MHz. While this does not compare to the 1GHz processors found on today’s smartphones, it still provided plenty of speed opening apps and using the HTC Sense interface without any lag.

Conclusion:

Overall, we like the HTC Freestyle except for two points…the poorly designed battery door, and the continual “hiss” heard while on calls. The second of these we consider the more serious, and a deal-breaker for some, as it becomes annoying for any calls lasting more than a few minutes. However, the remainder of the device is pretty nice for a feature-phone, as the Sense UI is visually appealing and is implemented over the BREW MP quite well, with six home screens, plenty of widgets, and different scenes to fit your mood. But as we mentioned earlier, we can’t see the $99 price point here, as you could get a real smartphone for the same price (or less), though it would be subject to higher smartphone data fees. If the Freestyle were $49 or less, then we’d consider it a bargain, despite the background noise while in calls.

Software version of the reviewed unit: BREW MP 1.0.2.549.1, ROM 1.75.502.0 117245

HTC Freestyle Video Review: