HTC Gratia review

HTC Gratia review: Battery

Battery life isn't one of the Gratia's strong points, and could be a deal breaker for some – particularly those who are often away from a charge point and make heavy use of the web while on the go.

We found that a day of moderate use was enough to drain the 1200mAh battery to around half capacity. It should be noted that this included under an hour of Wi-Fi use, but we did leave the 3G connection that's essential to most of the phone's information-fetching widgets active all the time.

Make reasonable use of the camera, surf the net a bit and watch a few videos online in a day, and you'll certainly have to think about charging up before you head out into the wider world once more.

Helpfully, however, Android does have a handy battery status page hidden away in the settings that can break down your power usage and help you identify where you can save some juice. There's also a power management widget that can make controlling your connectivity options a simple affair, thus helping you turn off whatever you're not currently using to save some charge.

Connectivity

Talking of connectivity, the Gratia is bristling with ways to hook up to the cloud and other devices. There's 802.11b/g Wi-Fi for getting online, which we found was respectably fast over a decent Wi-Fi connection, but can't make the most of a speedy wireless n hub (such as the new BT Home Hub).

The phone's 3G connection proved reasonably capable too, and is stated to max out at 7.2Mbps downloading and 2Mbps uploading. In practice, we found we could watch a YouTube video if we left it for a few minutes before hitting play, but obviously you're better off with Wi-Fi wherever you can get it.

There's Bluetooth 2.1 functionality here too, with Enhanced Data Rate, A2DP for wireless headsets and a smattering of other profiles with three to five letter acronyms.

Elsewhere, there's a GPS chip for use with Google's Maps app, but while fairly accurate, it's hardly been blisteringly fast in our tests. It also chews through battery at an aggressive rate, so we'd only turn to it when lost, and then only to briefly ask for directions.

Connect the handset up to a PC and you're offered a handy span of options from a menu that pops up on the handset's screen. You can opt to sync up your calendars and more with the HTC Sync program (Windows users only), set up tethering to use your handset to provide an internet connection, mount your device as a disk drive or simply charge it.