HTC Aria review: The little tenor

Messaging has everything

The HTC Aria can handle all standard types of messages – SMS, MMS and email. Google Talk is in charge of instant messaging. Email support is excellent with support for Exchange out of the box and social media buffs will be pleased with the level of integration of that content as well.

The on-screen full QWERTY keyboard on the HTC Aria works in both portrait and landscape modes. The individual button size is decent and sensitivity just fine and we had no problems typing.

The on-screen QWERTY is quite good in landscape

Like on other Androids, if you have only one SMS message, a line in the notification area displays the sender and part of the message itself. If you have two or more messages, you are simply informed of the number and the SMS section is opened once you hit the icon.

The SMS and MMS department is quite straightforward and simple at first glance. There are no folders here, just a new message button. It doesn't stay like that for long - under that button is a list of all your messages organized into threads. Each thread is labeled by the names of the recipients and shows the number of messages in the thread and part of the last message.

All threads • viewing a specific thread

When viewing a thread, the most recent message is placed at the bottom, just like on the iPhone.

Composing a message is a little frustrating as the text box only takes a small part of the screen even if you hide the keyboard, which really only gives you little to work with.

To add recipients, just start typing a name or number and choose from the contacts offered. After choosing a name it’s added in a bubble under the main textbox, where you can view or remove it by single tap.

Adding recipients

A tap-and-hold on the text box gives you access to functions such as cut, copy and paste. You are free to paste the copied text across applications like email, notes, chats, etc. and vice versa.

Copy, cut and paste are here

Converting SMS into MMS is as simple as adding some multimedia content to the message. You can just add a photo or an audio file to go with the text, or you can choose to go into a full-blown MMS editor, depending on your needs.

Attaching a multimedia file turns the SMS to MMS

Two-headed mail

Gmail is one thing that you can't expect to have changed much compared to other Android handsets. There are a few HTC add-ons, but nothing major. Batch operations, which debuted on the HTC Magic, allow multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted.

Batch operations lets you nabnage multiple conversations

The user interfaces of both the Gmail and Mail apps have been slightly polished with several icons in the menus changed. The extended Gmail features include spam report and of course conversation-style email view mode.

When replying to an email you can opt for either Gmail or the generic mail client, and set one of the two options as default. The reason behind most Android handsets coming with two email clients is the added corporate Exchange ActiveSync support.

The standard HTC Mail app has been slightly tweaked up too. The general Inbox displays the last sync time, the sort order, the current email account and of course the actual messages.

At the bottom, there are five virtual buttons to filter the inbox: you can opt to display conversations, only emails with attachments, show only the unread mail or display the messages from your VIP mail groups.

The conversation view tries to mimic the original Gmail client threaded view, which is otherwise missing in the generic inbox. The option to only display emails with attached files is a good one to have on hand. Attachments are not automatically loaded by default.

The standard HTC email app

Email sorting is possible (in either ascending or descending order) by date, subject, sender and size. The chosen filter is displayed in the top right corner of the display.

The standard mail with new looks and features • Sorting email and viewing email folders

There's hardly anything the HTC Aria lacks in terms of email capabilities. What you basically have is a local copy of your Gmail account bundled with its main functionality plus a Microsoft Exchange compatible alternative client, which can manage multiple POP and IMAP accounts.