We’re here at HTC’s swank Ny city press event where the mood lighting and floral centerpieces are as unabashedly girly because the Rhyme, its newest handset for girl folk. We just spent a couple of minutes wrapping out hands round the device, exploring the ports (not that there are lots of) and poking round the latest version of Sense (v3.5). Do you love purple? Are you someone of fashion? Sure you’re. So what are you expecting? Meet us after the break where we’ll run down our first impressions and spot what this thing has to provide beside that lovable design.
Maybe this is because yours truly is a girl, however the Rhyme doesn’t feel small, per se; it’s just not as gargantuan as all of the 4-, 4.3- and four.5-inch handsets we’ve been manhandling lately. It does feel positively featherweight, though. And why shouldn’t it? There’s really not much to this device. HTC’s playing up the minimalist design but, as is the case with such a lot of gadgets geared toward women, it skimps within the ports department. You have got a three.5mm headphone jack, lock button, volume rocker, USB port and… that’s it. The device comes with 4GB of internal storage on board, which is not too shabby, together with an 8GB microSD card, which you’ll be able to unfortunately ought to access by sliding off the battery cover.
Relating to build quality, this looks like a normal HTC product. That’s to assert, it feels solid, well made — not unlike the Incredible 2, lower to size. Though Verizon’s version bears that plum hue you will see repeated throughout our photo gallery, the only headed to Europe and Asia will are available a more gender-neutral silver (and be dubbed “Hourglass”). Either way, that tri-tone design at the back is, by now, quintessential HTC — the type of design language you’ll also find at the Status and Flyer tablet.
The telephone packs a single-core 1GHz Qualcomm processor. And yes, we realize that may be a turn-off for you, our readers, but hey, you are not the objective customer, now are you? (Okay, you’re!) For what it’s, the performance was brisk and precise as we swiped the display and pinched it to get an aerial view of all seven home screens. Speaking of these home screens, this runs HTC’s Sense UI on top of Gingerbread, though what you could not have anticipated is this is the subsequent generation of the software. We need to say, we’re digging the redesigned clock widget. HTC says it’s more modern, but we just got the immediate impression that it’s less obtrusive. You’ll also find the house screens peppered with customizable icons with preview panes that update with new photos etc. Also new to this version: the power to manipulate music from the house screen and a “paper-like” quality to the icons (whatever meaning). Jargon aside, this still appears like Sense — just, perhaps, a more streamlined version of it.
We also got a opportunity to play with the Charm Indicator, an oddball of an adjunct that plugs into the headphone jack and flashes if you have a decision. The belief is that you can find your ringing handset if it’s buried on your purse bag. The cable’s roughly two and a half feet long, topped off with that flashing geometric bit — a design that makes it look not unlike an antennae. The catch, for sure, is which you can’t have headphones plugged in, which stinks for anyone who uses her phone as a music player. One interesting tidbit: we’re told that the sunshine will keep flashing for 5 minutes, even after the telephone stops ringing. Assuming your folks get impatient, then, and only wait a couple of rings, here is more of a slipshod, secondary notification light than anything.
So that’s all she wrote, folks — at the very least until we will get this beautiful little thing in for a review.
Zach Honig and Joseph Volpe contributed to this report.
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