HTC Rhyme Review

Right from the time the Rhyme was just a rumour doing it’s rounds on the Internet (it was known as the Bliss, back then), it was categorized as a phone for the fairer sex, owing to its pastel trim and the fact that it would ship with a ‘charm’, an accessory popular with women. Once HTC launched the Rhyme though, they’ve steered clear from any categorization. You won’t find any words like ‘women’ or ‘feminine’ anywhere on their site as they’ve kept it as gender neutral as possible. Now, since we aren’t exactly fashionistas over here at Tech2, we’ll go about doing what we do best, reviewing products and telling it like it is.

Design and Build
HTC have done what they do best, making really good chassis for phones. Like its predecessors, the Rhyme also features a unibody design with plastic bits near the camera and the battery cover. The build is excellent and the plastics used seem durable enough to survive the bumps and bruises of everyday use. While there are different colour trims, India will only be getting the ‘Clearwater’ shade. We also won’t be getting any of the accessories like matching Bluetooth headset and the charging dock.

A well built handset

We quite liked the design of the phone - it’s fairly slim and light at 130g.  It’s not designed for shock and awe and that’s what we like about it. The buttons are ergonomically placed with a large volume rocker on the right and the power/sleep button on the top. There are a row of capacitive buttons at the bottom, just where they should be along with a bunch of sensors for ambient light and proximity placed on the top near the front-facing camera. It also packs in a G-Senor and Digital compass inside. The 3.7-inch S-LCD screen is bright and crisp with sharp sensitivity.

A solid 5MP shooter

Round the back, we have the 5MP auto-focus shooter along with a single-LED flash. The speaker is also placed right next to it. This should have been on the side, since when lying flat on a table; the sound is much muted, so you could miss some calls. The three golden spots are the leads for when you connect it to the dock. The SIM and microSD card can be inserted directly, since the battery is not removable.

Features
Interface
HTC offers you nothing, but the best as the Rhyme comes pre-loaded with Gingerbread 2.3.5 and Sense v3.5. We first saw this in the Explorer and thought that it made the 600MHz processor seem faster and the same effect can be found on the Rhyme as well. The 1GHz Scorpion CPU from Qualcomm (MSM8255) is plenty for this phone and the entire interface just feels fluid and snappy. There is a noticeable performance jump between v3.0 and v3.5 of the Sense UI. It’s better organized and less cluttered.

Just when you thought Sense couldn't get any better

The notification bar has the same number of toggle switches like before, just arranged a bit differently, this time around. You can now delete home screens, something that was missing from Sense 3.0. Apart from a bunch of new wallpapers and themes, there’s a new option added to the settings menu for the charm. You can basically use it for just three events, incoming messages, incoming calls and missed calls. You colour of the charm matches the phone and cannot be changed. The idea behind it is if you have the phone in your hand bag (we’re talking about women, here) , then you keep the charm dangling out so you know when you get a call. I, for one found this absolutely useless mostly because you can’t listen to music at the same time, since the charm plugs in to the 3.5mm audio jack.

The charm in action

Excellent music and video player

The video player is also a real treat. While it’s no match for Samsung’s TouchWiz video player (MKV support out-of-the box) on their phones, this one’s pretty close. Video format support goes beyond MP4 to include AVI and Xvid as well, which is a good thing since you’d be missing out on the audio enhancements. Along with SRS, we also have HTC 5.1 Surround effect, which didn’t sound as good as the SRS. You also have the option to trim the video. Unfortunately, the stock player doesn’t handle 720p MP4 too well. While the video plays smoothly, the audio wouldn’t play and if you try to skip ahead, it crashes. Besides YouTube and FM Radio, that’s all the media apps present.