HTC has release another mid-range compact smartphone called, the Explorer.The device has a pin-sharp screens and powerful processors of other phones in order to provide a simple-to-use, cheap Android phone. The major good things about the Explorer is small in size, its sturdiness in the hand and the overall high level of build quality. But if you're not much of a phone user and just need something simple to handle the essentials, this is the phone for you. The HTC Explorer provides a simple interface and cuts back on screen quality and processor speed in order to come up with a much more affordable price tag.
The Design
The Explorer have a rubber-textured back panel, casing with a strip of metal down the middle feels very comfortable to hold. As part of an increasing trend, the Explorer has a sort of homage to the 90s trend of interchangeable coloured back covers in case you feel like going a bit crazy. The device had a unique brushed aluminium camera surround on the rear of the handset, which makes the handset much better looking dark grey finish. The rubber also helps to add extra grip, which will be very welcome to those of you with massive hands who find it difficult to keep hold of tiny phones.
The four control keys at the bottom of the handset are capacitive and work fine, but the physical power button on top and the volume rocker on the side are oddly embedded into the device, which makes the device awkward to use especially in a hurry. The HTC Explorer offers a much more pocket-friendly experience. At a mere 103mm long and 57mm wide and weigh 108g. There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack and a micro-USB port for charging or for connecting the phone to a computer.
The Display
The screen is quite small this is expected ad the device is not too big itself and the bad side the device doesn't provide the best image quality. The Explorer has a 3.2-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen and in fairness the touch sensitivity is very good indeed. The 320x480 pixel resolution provides a pixel density of 180 pixels-per-inch (ppi), which is a lower resolution than similarly-priced models, it's not going to make life easy for those of you who want to do a lot of web browsing. However is it's fairly bright and handles colours adequately so it will be fine for Twittering or a spot of Angry Birds.
Storage
The Explorer only has 512 onboard storage and only 116MB that is usable, it also supports micro SD up to 32GB and for connectivity it has Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Hotspot creation, GPS and FM Radio. Annoyingly, to view the gallery requires you to have an SD card installed, even though photos have been saved to the phone's memory and can be viewed via the camera app. It's an irritating quirk and one that is likely to baffle new mobile users who don't wish to shell out on an SD card to go with their new blower.
Engine Room
The Explorer is clocked with a 600MHz ARM Cortex A5 processor on the Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7225A chipset, which features an Adreno 200 graphics processing unit (GPU). Not exactly powerful, but at least there's some solid technology running the show. And it shows too, as despite not having that high-end capability, things in general do run quite smoothly. It's only have 512MB of RAM, which no doubt helps things along. It won't handle demanding photo and video editing tasks, but it will cope with your messaging and social networking needs and even the odd game.
Operating System
The phone uses Android 2.3 Gingerbread overlaid with the HTC Sense 3.5 user interface (UI), which HTC appears to be extensively tweaking with each new phone and making it a much better experience. The Sense 3.5, the ARM processor and Android 2.3, it is working together very well indeed and we hope HTC continues with this kind of clever optimisation.
In terms of interface features it's fairly typical of what we've seen of HTC's UI before. Some very useful functionality and quick shortcuts have been added to the default Android drop-down notification bar. Meanwhile, HTC has simplified the bottom tray and it now only includes tabs for ‘Phone' and an app drawer entitled ‘All apps'. By default the app drawer has some useful snap scrolling which makes navigating easier and you can also filter apps by using the ‘All apps', ‘Frequent' and ‘Downloaded' tabs. The ‘Friend Stream', ‘People' and calendar widgets all make a welcome return and contribute some way to getting your Android experience more intuitive and aggregated with regards to multi-contact messaging and social networking feeds.
HTC has made the messaging, music, camera, browser and Android Market buttons bigger and more prominent on the centre home screen for quick access to these more commonly-used applications.
Camera
Very dissappointed on camera as the device have only 3.15-megapixels which, produces fuzzy images and video at a lacklustre 480p. It is quite well-catered for in the camera features and functionality department.
The handset sports a digital zoom, though we wouldn't recommend using it, given picture quality being what it is. On top of this, the Explorer is equipped with a self-timer, self portrait mode, capture effects (sepia, greyscale and so on), exposure control, white balance, ISO control, geo-tagging, auto-enhance, face detection and autofocus.
Typical price
The Explorer will only cost you around £120, which it's not a bad phone at all actually, it's relatively inexpensive and, provided you aren't after high-end gaming and intensive media capabilities it delivers decent enough performance.
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