HTC Status (AT&T)

Facebook the world, two lines of text at a time! The $49 HTC Status, the country's first "Facebook phone," entices you to share everything you're doing by pressing its softly glowing dedicated Facebook logo button. But this Android smartphone's tiny, horizontally oriented screen offers a very cramped window on your social world, making this phone less of a slam-dunk.

Physical Features and Call Quality
A beautiful, well-crafted handset, the HTC Status features excellent call quality and one of the best physical keyboards in the business. The phone is a BlackBerry-style slab made of high-quality matte white plastic with silver metal accents and a slight bend in the middle that curves the phone to cradle your face. The bend also makes it easier to type and improves call quality, so I'm all for the bend. At 4.5 by 2.5 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 4.3 ounces, it's light and fits perfectly in the hand.

The four-row keypad is almost exactly as big as the 2.6-inch touch-screen LCD, and has huge, oval plastic buttons with a very satisfying click. There's no dedicated number row, but there are dedicated cursor keys, and of course that Facebook button.

The Status is a very good voice phone that connects to AT&T's 3G HSPA 7.2 network, and to 2G EDGE networks abroad. Call quality in the earpiece was very clear in my tests; although the phone didn't get stunningly loud, voices sounded quite sharp and punched through background noise. Similarly, while some background noise came through the mic, my voice sounded loud and clear over the noise. The speakerphone was loud enough to use in a car, though not in a noisy outdoor area, and speakerphone transmissions were very clear. There was no side tone, the reflection of your own voice in your ear, which helps some people avoid yelling when they're on the phone. Battery life, at 7 hours, 14 minutes of talk time, was solid.

Voice dialing is a mess. While I could activate voice dialing with my Plantronics Voyager Pro+ headset ($99, 4 stars), the phone had a tremendously long delay, up to 30 seconds, between my speaking a name and it dialing. It recognized names, but not numbers.

Data speeds are good. I got approximately 2Mbps down on AT&T's HSPA 7.2 3G network. The phone also works as a tethered modem or as a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five devices, with the appropriate service plan. Like most modern smartphones, the Status aso supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth and GPS.

The Screen Dilemma
The Status is beautiful, but its horizontal, small 2.6-inch, 480-by-320 display isn't very usable. The screen resolution isn't an issue in itself. The iPhone 3GS ($49, 4.5 stars) has the same screen resolution, as does the successful LG Phoenix ($29, 3.5 stars). The problem is that it's sideways, and a lot of apps don't know what to do with that, including Facebook. Some apps just display their interfaces rotated 90 degrees, never to be straightened. I found that with the Ookla Speedtest.net app, the Delta Air Lines app and MHGames' free Jewels game. Other apps don't properly cue UI elements below the screen. Loading Google Maps, for instance, the What's New page looks strange because it doesn't signal that you have to scroll it to see what's actually new.

When the sideways screen affects the Facebook app, though, things really hurt. For example: if you're commenting on a photo and your comment is more than three lines, it pushes the Comment button below the screen margin, and there's no way to scroll down to get it. You just have to make your comment shorter.

If you're typing a reply to a Facebook message, you can only see two lines of the message at a time, because the entire rest of the screen is taken up by status bars, the Facebook logo and other guff.

The horizontal screen also makes Web surfing a bit more difficult than on vertically oriented devices, because the status bars take up a larger percentage of the screen (and thus you see less Web page.) The 2.6-inch panel ensures that even at this resolution, text can be too small to read.

Android and App Performance
Under the hood, the HTC Status is powered by a Qualcomm MSM7227 processor boosted to 800MHz from the typical 600. It's running Android 2.3.3 with HTC's Sense UI and a few AT&T apps thrown in for seasoning.

The phone benchmarked slower than I thought it would, more slowly even than 600MHz phones, and I found several hiccups and delays in the interface. When recording videos, for instance, the phone would stutter, and I was left watching a spinning "loading" wheel several times when trying to load Facebook comments or watch the Women's World Cup on AT&T's streaming video service.

I ran into several bugs, as well. The Facebook app crashed, and at one point, I was told my phone's 150MB of internal memory was very low and I needed to clear my caches. I haven't seen that often on other Android phones. And as I mentioned before, third-party apps were liable to load at a 90-degree angle, never to be quite straightened out.

The performance issues are a bummer because the software here is otherwise beautiful. HTC's Sense UI is by far the best of the phone-manufacturer skins. The lock screen is ingenious, letting you drag a ring over the icons of four frequently used apps to jump to them. The useful home-screen widgets have been reformatted to fit the odd screen; the Home screen has a great-looking clock and social networking updates stacked neatly on top of each other, and swiping to the right reveals more updates and your most recent Facebook chats. HTC has altered the app tray to put your third-party apps into a neat category together, but the category selector uses up valuable screen real estate.

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