The HTC Rhyme, like many others, is a trademark HTC phone, with unibody design. But the pleasant change comes in the form of unique set of accessories and availability of the phone in some pretty cool colours. HTC seems to be reluctant to call it a ladies’ phone but some accessories like Charm cube which is designed to hang off ladies’ purse make it more of an attraction for ladies than a smartphone for the geeks.
Build & Design
The HTC Rhyme is available in Clearwater, Hourglass & Plum colours whereas the purple colour is undoubtedly for ladies only. Battery at back side is non-replaceable which make it only 0.43 inches thick and it weighs only 130 g. It’s a slim & sleek smartphone with 3.7” S-LCD touch screen with a resolution of 480×800 pixels. The screen size seems a bit small but we admire it as the phone can be easily operated with one hand only.
The front video-call VGA camera is placed with proximity and ambient light sensors near the earpiece above the screen. At the bottom of the display there are four touch-sensitive well-spaced keys for home, menu, back and search functions. On top of the phone a 3.5mm audio jack and Power/Lock buttons are placed. Microphone pinhole is at the bottom of the phone, the volume rocker is on the right side and a covered microUSB is on left of the phone. We particularly disliked the microUSB lid as it take a lot of effort to remove and plug it in, but it may have been designed keeping in view style-conscious users instead of those who prefer ease of use.
The back panel is divided in 3 parts; in the middle there is an anodized metal piece on which HTC logo is placed, the upper and lower parts consist of plastic which gives a smooth and soft feeing while also making it a bit slippery and difficult to hold, you will have to make a conscious effort to hold the device in hand and prevent it from slipping. The 5 MP camera with LED flash and the speaker are at the upper part with docking cradle pins. The lower part helps accessing memory card slot and SIM compartment. You may find hard to open rear coverinitially but eventually you will get used to it. A let down was lack of a dedicated camera key.
Accessories
Accessories consist of the usual suspects like charger, USB cable and an 8GB microSD card complementing the 4GB internal memory. What makes HTC Rhyme different from others it the unique set of accessories like a leather pouch, desktop dock, flat-tape (tangle-free) wire headphones and the Charm cube that is designed to hang off ladies purse and glows upon an incoming call or message. When placed on the dock the phone is charged and dockmode is automatically activated. In dock mode it displays a clock, music & gallery shortcuts, dock can act as nightstand alarm clock, mobile charger and also boasts Bluetooth speakers which add a fun element to the device, making it a nice bedside music player. It was observed that Rhyme connects with speakers automatically via blue tooth when it is placed on dock but cannot be connected without placing it on dock.
User Interface
HTC Rhyme boasts Android OSv2.3.4(Gingerbread) and the latest version of HTC sense, v3.5 which comes with many new HTC widgets and a new home screen. The lock screen is highly customizable with 4 default widgets which can be easily changed and an unlock ring at bottom which is dragged to any part of screen to unlock the screen, if you want to open a shortcut directly from locked screen you can drag it to the middle of the ring to do so. It has six lock screens styles with different HTC widgets such as 3D Gallery, Friend stream, social updates, animated weather and 17 different clock widgets, these lock screens can be readily changed from the Personalize menu. Sense home screen is redesigned in the new sense version, the old scroll arc in bottom and 3 buttons for phone, add widget and app drawer are now replaced by 2 buttons on lower corners, app drawer at left and dialer at right. Now scrolling between seven screens is much easier as they are looped and when you keep scrolling the screens constantly they shrink and rotate like a wheel, such eye candy may seem useless when the device is used regularly, but if you want to show off something to your friends, it can mean some serious fun/.
You can view thumbnails of all seven screens by tapping on home screen or by pinching the home screen to zoom. In thumbnail view you can reposition and even delete the screens, this was a much needed feature which was not possible previously. The wallpaper changes with every screen unlike the old sense which had continuous wallpaper. Widgets and shortcuts on every screen can be easily personalized, when you tap and hold a widget two options appear in the bottom i.e. Edit and Remove, widget is dragged to the option for respective functions.
To enhance the customization there is a new feature called Skins which changes the look of most of the buttons, options and application screens. Even the colors of many items in user interface are changeable. The default layout of menu is grid layout with option of list view; applications can be viewed alphabetically or onmost recent basis but still icons cannot be rearranged manually. There are the buttons at bottom of app drawer all apps, frequent and downloaded. Personalize button allows you to change display settings, alarms, ringtones, widgets etc. number of HTC and android stock widgets are available and more can be downloaded from market or HTC Hub. Task switcher is launched by long pressing home button, task manager is also present in compliment to task switcher it displays the running tasks and allows to deactivate them.HTC Rhyme comes with single-core CPU and Adreno 205 GPU with768MB of RAM which are enough for Gingerbread/HTC Sense UI 3.5but in this price range most of its competitors contain dual-core processors, it seems that in HTC Rhyme there is more emphasis on accessories than processors as it is implicitly targeting ladies.
Connectivity
HTC Rhyme has excellent call quality with no reception problems. It supports both Smart Dialing and Voice dialing. Using the accelerometer the phone will stop ringing when turned over and loud speaker is automatically activated if phone is placed down during a phone call. The proximity sensor enables phone to use pocket mode which raises the ring volume when phone is in pocket or purse. Sense UI provides excellent integration between contacts from different social media, it also synchronizes social updates and picture galleries with contacts, and you can filter contacts on basis of the origin of the contact. HTC Rhyme has several applications and widgets to support social networking and messaging. For typing it has HTC virtual QWERTY keyboard with well-spaced keys which makes typing comfortable. Rhyme has traditional Gmail app which supports multiple accounts and an updated HTC Mail app. It has latest Android 2.3 Gingerbread web browser with touch of Sense UI 3.5 with excellent performance, it also has flash player and plays YouTube videos up to 480p smoothly. It supports PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, including Office 2007 version and can edit existing PowerPoint presentations and Office 2007 docs. It provides unmatched Facebook and twitter experience with different attractive widgets.HTC Rhyme has built-in GPS receiver and comes with HTC Locations which allows downloading map of your country which will help in navigation. It has Wi-Fi & Wi-Fi hotspot but there are Wi-Fi death grip issues. It has blue tooth v3.0 with A2DP which also helps to connect to its dock speakers
Multimedia
HTC Rhyme is equipped with 5MP camera with LED flash which is capable of taking snaps of resolution up to 2592×1944 pixels and shoots 720p video @ 21fps. A lot of customization and effects are available for still picture and videos. The camera offers face detection, touch focus and autofocus but sadly dedicated hardware camera key is missing. Geo-tagging allows you u tag and upload pictures instantly on Facebook or flicker when connected with Wi-Fi. The picture quality is not up to the mark, we have uploaded some of the pics to enable you to assess the camera quality.The video quality is average; in 2x slow-motion mode audio recording is disabled. It can play several formats of audio and video files , audio player has been updated
Conclusion
HTC Rhyme is just another smartphone with a 1 GHz processor and a 3.7” screen. What makes it stand out from others is HTC Sense 3.5 and especially the generous set of accessories which give the package a feminine touch. We would have liked a dual-core processor with all other specs same as they are in Rhyme, but the tradeoff between a processor and a dock is in no way a bad one, especially when you are not looking to run a lot of power hungry apps on the device.
So, if you are a female and want a phone that is smart and matches your fashion statement, go for HTC Rhyme without thinking about anything else.
Pros
- Dock
- Charm cube
- HTC Sense 3.5
- SLCD WVGA Capacitive touch screen
- Metal Unibody
Cons
- Lack of dedicated camera key
- Extremely slippery
- Wi-Fi death grip
- Single core
- Non user replaceable battery
- Rigid microUSB lid
Related stories:
| Did you like the story? Please subscribe to our Daily Email Service,Facebook or Twitter |