In wireless communications, a smart antenna system utilizes an antenna array to acquire the spatial signatures of transmitted signals. This system uses the difference in the spatial signatures or the direction of arrival (DOA) of signals to correctly obtain the desired signal. This can reduce co-channel interference, mitigate the fading phenomenon caused by multipath transmissions, improve the communication quality and increase the system capacity. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of smart antennas using four beamforming algorithms applied to a wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) system. The simulation results show that, based on the same power consumption at the transceiver and using a Rake receiver, a W-CDMA system with a smart antenna can operate at a lower bit error rate at the specific signal to noise ratio (SNR). Moreover, the smart antenna system accommodates more users at the specific signal to interference ratio (SIR), even though a certain angle difference exists between the actual DOAs and the estimated DOAs.