Failing a Palm acquisition, there might still be justification for HTC to build out its own software platform for many of the same reasons that buying Palm would make sense -- the company's getting bigger and more important to the market by the day, after all, and being left at the mercy of Google and Microsoft to produce cohesive platforms of their own might not sit well with Chou's team ad infinitum. The HTC Smart could be regarded as its first baby step toward that goal, though the handset -- based on Qualcomm's Brew MP platform -- is actually a featurephone that won't fly with the same kinds of consumers that are cross-shopping Android and Windows Phone