iHTC Rhym

iHTC Rhym

s an Android smart phone that's looking to hit the big time. With its purple body, updated user interface and range of accessories, is the Rhyme sublime or a waste of time?

The Rhyme will emerge in October for a currently undisclosed price. Here are our first impressions.

Design

The Rhyme has a two-tone unibody design that's purpler than Prince's underpants. If you don't like purple, tough -- the other two colours that the phone comes in won't be available in the UK.

One of the first things we noticed about the Rhyme is that it's very light for its size. The phone also boasts a decently sized, 3.7-inch, Super LCD display. It's clear and crisp, and shows off whizzy animations well as it zips between home screens and apps. A 1GHz processor keeps everything ticking along.

Camera

The 5-megapixel camera includes an autofocus, LED flash and instant shutter. It has a bunch of features that you'd find in a compact camera, including face detection, which ensures that friends are always in focus, a burst mode, and a panorama mode. The burst mode automatically takes five consecutive photos to capture fast-moving action, and you can choose to keep or chuck the individual images. A panorama mode stitches several photos together and includes a handy on-screen horizon line so you can keep your wide landscape shots straight.

The camera offers a range of impressive features.

A high-dynamic-range mode fires three shots at different exposure levels and knits them together, so that there's extra detail in both the light and dark areas. This mode is handy for snapping a scene such as dark trees against a light sky, or a friend stood with the light behind them.

Inside the phone are a back-illuminated CMOS sensor, and a 28mm wide-angle lens with an f2.2 aperture.

Android

The Rhyme is powered by Google's Android 2.3 Gingerbread software, which means you can personalise the look and feel of the phone to your heart's content. You can fill the phone with apps, which are mini bits of software that perform a specific task, like displaying the weather or giving access to a particular website, such as Facebook or Twitter.

You can grab apps from the Android Market with just a couple of taps of your finger, and they automatically install themselves over a Wi-Fi or 3G connection, with no need to plug your phone into a computer.

The phone has several home screens, which you move through by swiping your finger left or right. You can personalise these screens with shortcuts to your favourite apps, or with widgets. 

Widgets can show all sorts of information, from the latest messages and social network updates from friends, including their photos, to the weather, complete with nifty animations of clouds and sunshine. Widgets can display your appointments, messages or pretty much whatever you want. They also update automatically, so you don't have to open an app or surf the Web to see the latest information. Widgets display even if the Rhyme's screen is locked, so you can see important information at a glance without having to unlock your phone.

Sense 3.5

To make things even easier, HTC has added its own improvements to the look and feel of Android with its Sense interface. The Rhyme features Sense 3.5 -- the latest version -- which offers a new home-screen widget: a vertical bar of four icons on the left of the screen.

You can customise which apps or shortcuts appear in the bar, and each app or widget can be expanded on the home screen with a tap, revealing the latest update, like a drawer opening. You don't have to tap exactly in the right place, but it's still fiddly -- whenever we tried to open the drawer, we found ourselves launching the full app.

Another problem is that the bar of apps is basically one big widget, and, if you have it on one home screen, you can't add any more apps or widgets to that screen. Still, at least your wallpaper isn't covered by tonnes of widgets, so, if you have a picture of friends or loved ones as your background, they won't be hidden.

Facebook Chat is built in as a separate app from the main Facebook one. That means you can see which of your friends are available to chat and then have instant-message conversations with them, without having to delve into Facebook itself.

Another nifty app that comes built in is Dropbox, an online storage service that lets you save your movies, music and files online and access them from anywhere. When you buy the Rhyme, you get 3GB of storage for free.

Speaker dock

The Rhyme comes with a nifty speaker dock that both recharges the phone and turns it into an alarm clock or stereo. The charging contacts are three subtle little dots on the back of the phone, so you simply lay the phone in the docking cradle rather than having to jam it into a socket.