Smartphone Thoughts: The HTC Star Trek: Thin is In

Wireless Functionality
The HTC Star Trek is a quad-band GSM phone, meaning it supports 1800, 1900, 900 and 850 bands, making it a true world-phone. The 850 band is particularly important to North American users, as our carrier networks are building out the 850 band to enhance coverage inside buildings, in tunnels, etc. It has an EDGE radio for data, and while EDGE is faster than GPRS, it's still painfully slow. I did a bandwidth test from my laptop (connected over Bluetooth at 115.2 kbps) and according to the test it was 137 kbps downstream and 21 kbps upstream (strange that it benchmarked faster than the Bluetooth connection). That's almost triple the speed of the GPRS connections I normally get, but with the latency factor, it still feels extremely sluggish. That said, it's better than having no connection at all, and when I'm in locations that have no WiFi access (like my local public library, where I wrote this review), having any sort of connectivity is awesome. Even after using the phone for several hours of constant connections, the battery didn't seem to take much of a hit. Bluetooth 2.0 would have been nice to see as it's now being offered on more and more laptops. A2DP is supported, which is important for those with stereo headphones.

What this phone lacks is WiFi, and for some that's a deal breaker. It was a watershed moment for Smartphone enthusiasts when the first Windows Mobile phones started shipping in 2005 with 802.11b WiFi, because it was always the one thing that Smartphones lacked from their bigger Pocket PC cousins. If you find yourself using WiFi on a daily basis with your current Smartphone, the HTC Star Trek is not for you. Myself, even though I had an SP5m with WiFi that I was using regularly for several months, I turned on the WiFi exactly once to test it out. And the other time it turned on by itself and drained my battery. So for me, the lack of WiFi is fine. For some, it will keep them away from this phone completely.

The other form of wireless missing from this phone is infrared � it's becoming more common for phones to drop IR now that Bluetooth is more common, and to get the phone to this size I'm sure they had to drop everything that wasn't absolutely necessary. IR seems to have fallen into that category.