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Page 1 of 2   In November last year, a more affordable mobile phone with Android operating system finally appeared in many markets. After several high quality Android phones by HTC, Tattoo was quite a logical step which roughly says: "We have proved that the combination of our phone and Android operating system works well, and now all those whom it seemed nice and expensive may finally afford a phone like this. So here, this is a phone for you". The difference in price compared to several previous models such as HTC and HTC Hero Magic is pretty big, so it was very interesting to test this phone and compare it with older models.
A New Tattoo
HTC Tattoo is apparently intended for younger population. Name Tattoo was chosen due to powerful capabilities of adaptation to the owner, so that each device in some way can become a unique, either because of the various masks that can be easily changed, either because of the possibility of creating a "scene" (something like what we previously called a profile) and other similar forms of personalization. Such options were also on other Androids, but the details were not much discussed, probably because those phones pointed out some more important qualities.
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Even without turning the phone on, it is obvious that HTC cut the price by using less quality plastic for the mask, pretty different to which we are accustomed at this company. The main menu of the software has all the basic things the average user will need, with the emphasis on social networks and things oriented towards younger users. However, being an Android phone, users can download any additional program they want - free of charge or for very little money - from the Android Market. Also, this small package managed to fit the 3.5 mm input jack. The speaker of the phone gives a pretty bad sound and it's not recommended for music playback, but the headphones will perform this task satisfactorily.
Resistive Screen
Our biggest objection to the phone is the resistive screen, far less accurate than so far used capacitive screen. The manufacturer explained that they tested the capacitive screen on this phone and the multi-touch simply didn't give good results on such small screens such as the one on Tattoo. Previous models which used this technology had 3.2-inch displays. Otherwise, resistive screen is lot cheaper to produce than capacitive and it consists of several layers of material, two of which are metallic and the gap between them. When you touch the screen - no matter whether you use the finger, pencil or something else - the two layers of metal are touching, and the place is registered as the contact information on the phone to respond. In practice, this means that the screen does not always respond to your touch at first, so you sometimes need to press a little harder to scroll does not go quite as smoothly as, for example, the HTC Hero. This might be related to the operating system, the new version of Android 1.6, which has some small and not too significant bugs. For example, when you unlock the phone, the clock will often stand in the time that the phone is registered when the previous time was shown. Such problems with Android, however, should not be a permanent and it's creators are certainly working on correcting these bugs.
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Android 1.6, promoted in September, made a few changes visible to users, not just developers. For example, the Android Market has been extended to new categories of applications and now offers screenshots before downloading. Another great and useful change refers to the "search" option. Namely, the Google search engine was quite prominent in earlier versions of Android. Search in version 1.6, however, no longer applies only to Google's web search, but it became some kind of "live" search engine which peeks into the phone - applications, documents, contacts, bookmarks etc.
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