Android has created a real stir during this year. Devices running the operating system have caught the imagination, and Android has come from nowhere to a leading position really quickly.

But Android-toting smartphones tend to be expensive. T-Mobile broke that mould with its Pay As You Go HTC Pulse, and now HTC claims to be doing the same thing with its Tattoo, which is designed to bring SIM-free Android goodness to those looking to spend a bit less on their smartphone.

The savings are significant. We found the Tattoo online for £287.50, for example, while the high end HTC Hero costs nearly £100 more at the same site.

The Tattoo is a fairly staid looking handset. Its touchscreen is quite small by today’s standards at 2.8-inches.

Its 320x240 pixel resolution is on the low side too. If you’ve been used to anything at three inches or larger you’ll notice the cramping right from the start. The small screen does make for tidy hardware, though, and at 106x55.2x14mm and 113g the Tattoo is comfy to carry around and hold in the palm.

The somewhat same-old, same-old silver grey fascia has the Android logo on the back to give it a little lift, but you can raise it higher by ordering customised casing for a really personalised look.

Noticeably absent is the trackball that characterises the Hero and Magic. Instead there is a more familiar large D-pad which feels comfortable enough under the thumb. Call and End buttons are also here and there are two longer buttons offering the usual Android functions: Home, menu, back and search.

Side buttons and connectors are kept to a minimum. There’s a mini USB connector on the bottom for mains power and PC connection, volume rocker on the left edge, and on the top a 3.5mm headset connector. You get a rather average headset in the box, and as it is one piece you are stuck with it if you require handsfree calling.

One of the most attractive things about the Tattoo comes in the fact that HTC has decided to skin it with its Sense user interface, making it look and feel very like the Hero. You get the same seven homescreens which you move between with a finger sweep and which you can populate with a wide range of widgets both Android specific and HTC’s own.

So you can drop a weather bar on the main screen, your calendar, shortcuts to music, your favourite contacts, or a range of other stuff. You could theme the seven home screens populating one with games, one with connection shortcuts, one with favourite contacts shortcuts, and so on.

You can even go further and set up several different sets of screens, which HTC calls Scenes, switching between variants for Social, Work, Play and Travel. They are pre-populated, as is an HTC scene, though you can edit them. The Clean Slate scene is, as you might expect, blank and ready for you to fill as you wish.

As the Tattoo, like other Android-based smartphones, is designed to be used without a stylus, it goes without saying that it has to be usable at all times with fingertips. Where this can fall down is entering text. Fortunately there is an accelerometer which pushes the screen into wide mode and this is very useful when typing text.

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