David Flynn03 August 2009, 5:48 PM
HTC’s Snap boasts familiar Berry-esque design and features but starts at $100/month when paired with Telstra’s push email service.
Telstra has stitched up a three-month exclusivity deal on the appealing HTC Snap, landing the Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone for its Next G network alone until November.
The Snap is the sort of phone which unimaginative journalists will probably tag as a “BlackBerry killer”. It’s got that familiar form factor of a squared-off (2.4 inch 320 x 240 QVGA) screen atop a control strip atop a QWERTY keypad, but with a super slim 1.2 cm profile.
And it’s got a similar roll call of features: HSDPA (in this case, redlining at 7.2Mbps in those areas where the local Next G cells have been upgraded to suit), 802.11g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, a GPS receiver, 2.0 megapixel camera plus support for the most common audio and video file formats.
However, much of the BlackBerry’s mojo comes not from the device but from the back-end data gateway which makes for fast and efficient delivery of push email.
For accessing this service carriers pay a monthly fee to BlackBerry maker RIM (Research In Motion). It’s called the ‘BlackBerry tax’.
It seems Telstra and Microsoft have copied this page from the BlackBerry playbook, too, with the duo offering the Microsoft Mobile Enterprise Solution bundle for $40 per month on top of the $60 per month plan for the Snap handset itself.
Designed for use with a Microsoft Exchange Server, this gives you a push email account (using ActiveSync) with a monthly allowance of 100MB for email; excess usage is charged at Telstra’s casual ‘pay as you go’ data rates of $2 per MB, charged on a per kilobyte basis.
In addition, that 100MB doesn’t include emails sent and received through POP/IMAP accounts – only the designated Exchange ActiveSync account.