HTC & O2 announce the HTC Smart

It’s a device we’ve known about for a while but that we’ve struggle to find out much about, however, at a joint press conference at MWC this morning HTC and O2 have announced that the HTC Smart will be coming to Europe.

The headlines from the announcement then:

HTC Smart – bringing Smartphone features to more people.
HTC Smart to be half the cost of a ‘smartphone’
HTC Smart will be in UK, Ireland and Germany in April.
HTC want more and more people to be using social networking apps. Then they can buy a HTC Smart!
O2 will be adding 1500 cell masts in the UK this year to help cope with the increase in data users.

Full press release and some nice images follow after the break.

HTC AND Telefónica INTRODUCE the HTC Smart, An Affordable and easy-To-use SMARTPHONE for europe

HTC Smart drives new category of broadly targeted smartphones

BARCELONA, Mobile World Congress – February 17, 2010 – HTC Corporation, a global designer of smartphones, and Telefónica are today announcing an exclusive partnership to sell the HTC Smart, an affordable and easy-to-use smartphone in Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The HTC Smart is a new type of smartphone that offers easy-to-use widgets, browsing and connectivity at an affordable price.

“More and more people are craving advanced mobile phone experiences with email, web browsing and social networking but the cost and complexity often represent a significant obstacle for many. The HTC Smart introduces this functionality in an intuitive phone that is affordable,” said Peter Chou, chief executive officer, HTC Corporation. “With the HTC Smart, HTC and Telefónica share a similar vision for bringing easy-to-use, affordable smartphone experience to the masses.”

HTC Sense

The HTC Smart embodies HTC Senseä, HTC’s unique design philosophy that focuses the mobile experience on people. The HTC Smart’s compact touch design integrates the pillars of HTC Sense – Make It Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected – to deliver a user-friendly user experience. People can customize their own, personal HTC Smart experience using a variety of widgets for quick access to contacts, photos, music, weather and more. People are able to follow their friend’s status updates using HTC Friend Stream, an application that seamlessly aggregates all of your social communication including Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr into one organized flow of updates. This simple aggregation makes it easier than ever to focus on what friends are doing as well as the images and links that they share.

“We believe this is a key move in our ability to bring smartphones to a far wider cross section of the population,” said Matthew Key, chief executive officer of Telefónica Europe. “The benefits of web browsing on the move and ability to experience applications like mobile social networking will now be brought to the mass market and reinforces O2’s position as the home of the smartphone.”

HTC Smart utilizes Qualcomm’s Brew Mobile PlatformT (Brew MP), a powerful and popular mobile operating system that enables HTC to deliver the HTC Sense experience on more affordable smartphones. By pioneering a new era of mass-market smartphones, Brew MP also provides the HTC Smart with a mass-market opportunity for new applications and services from software developers worldwide.

"Qualcomm’s collaborations with HTC have resulted in some of the most innovative smartphones the market has seen in recent years,” says Paul Jacobs, chief executive officer of Qualcomm Incorporated. “The HTC Smart is a budget-friendly smartphone that delivers a really exciting user experience. We are pleased to be supporting HTC’s move to bring this advanced mobile experience and HTC Sense to the widest possible audience.”

Availability

In addition to being exclusively available through O2 in Germany, Ireland and the UK in April, the HTC Smart will also be available in Italy with Telecom Italia, Norway with Netcom and across Europe through the direct channel.