DiGi Smartplan with HTC Aria!! New!!

blogged by GmyDotCom

It's sort of hard to believe, but AT&T finally has an Android phone worth paying attention to. Mind you, the AT&T compatible Nexus One is easily the best Googlephone on America's largest GSM operator, but this is the first one that the company has bothered to brand and sell on a subsidized plan within its own stores. Pundits could argue the reasons why forever, but considering that the carrier's doing all it can just to keep up with the demand for iPhones, it's hard to imagine that AT&T has been longing to pursue Android with reckless abandon. 

Believe it or not, it's been over 1.5 years since T-Mobile gave the world the first taste of a mobile OS that would soon rival (and surpass) the other options already on the table, but outside of the forgettable Backflip (and the nowhere-to-be-found Aero), there's been no Android to speak of on AT&T. HTC has somehow managed to break down the blue and orange walls, piercing the heart of a hardened operator and squeezing a delightful mid-range Android smartphone into a lineup that's about to be monumentally overshadowed by the iPhone 4. 

So look, it's pretty obvious at first blush -- this is essentially an Android-infused HD Mini with a few chrome accents, a yellow interior (that no one will ever see, sadly) and a reworked button panel. While we certainly appreciated the HD Mini back at Mobile World Congress, we're going to hand the overall design award to the Aria; the silver faux screws on the rear, power strip at the top and volume rocker on the side are pure class, and the vivacious innards tickle us far more than they truly should. In a world where it's practically guaranteed that the next great smartphone will also be the most humongous smartphone, it's actually a breath of fresh air to see someone going in the opposite direction. 

Measuring 4.1- x 2.3- x 0.46-inches and weighing 3.8 ounces with the 1,200mAh battery installed, the phone is light and tight in every respect. We also adore the matte black rear that both rejects fingerprints and slides easy in and out of the average denim pocket. We will say, however, that the über-glossy display (a 480 x 320 resolution capacitive touchpanel) was a tad too glossy when taken outside, and even with the brightness jacked, we had to squint to make out text when perusing Twitter updates under the blazing North Carolina sun. 

We've also got mixed feelings about the button layout beneath the LCD; the optical trackpad works well enough (though we'll confess to missing the tactility of a trackball), but the capacitive buttons just don't do it for us. We're huge fans of feeling buttons depress, even if it's subtle, and we instantly wished that the home, menu, back and search buttons were more like those found on Huawei's S7. The haptic feedback definitely helps in letting you know if your input has been recognized, but we'd still prefer physical keys for easier use when not looking directly down at the handset. 

For starters, we're huge fans of the HTC-built Sense overlay on top of Android 2.1. Having seven home panels (as opposed to five), a dedicated phone button at the bottom and an array of gorgeous widgets to choose from are real boons, and it's easy to miss these little things when using a stock Android build. By and large, we were shocked -- shocked -- by how quickly this phone hummed along. Given that Qualcomm's 1GHz Snapdragon was nowhere to be found (the Aria is outfitted with a 600MHz MSM 7227 alongside 512MB of ROM and 384MB of RAM), we didn't expect much on the speed front. Talk about having expectations shattered. 

Even with a host of apps running in the background and home screens loaded with apps, we never experienced any notable lag when going from screen to screen or app to app. We were continuously impressed with how quickly the screen recognized our swipes, and it's safe to say that you're getting every last ounce of power from this 600MHz power plant. We even dialed up a few YouTube HQ videos over 3G while having a smattering of apps open in the background in an attempt to slow it down -- needless to say, our experiment failed in spectacular fashion.