HTC One Review

HTC has had a series of quite well-designed phones that for some reason did not sell well.  Now, HTC adopted the all-or-nothing approach for their flagship, the HTC One.  Check out our review of the HTC One.

Build Quality and Design

• The HTC One has an aluminum battery and is built along sleek and clean lines.
• It weighs 143 grams. Some might find that a bit heavy but it gives a nice solid feel to what is a rather thin device so the HTC One fits nicely in the hand.
• This phone is easy to use one-handed.
• The home button is placed rather strangely, on top and on the left side of the phone.

Display

• The display on the HTC One is the best we’ve ever seen on an HTC device so far.
• The HTC One has a 4.7-inch display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 for a pixel density of 468 ppm.
• The display is very sharp and unless what you’re looking at is a source that is low resolution or of low quality, whatever is on this screen looks great.

• Colors are sharp and vivid and text and icons show up sharply.
• However, the brightness of the screen isn’t really able to stand up to glare such as might happen when you’re looking at the display under sunlight or a bright light source.

Sound System

• The HTC One uses BoomSound HTC to be quite an impressive sounding phone.
• Moreover, Beats Audio ensures that you get a rich and substantial sound from the speakers of the HTC One.
• While you will still want to use headphones to listen to music, if you are going to be playing games or watching movies, then the sound of the speakers will serve you well.

Performance

• The HTC One uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor which clocks at 1.7 GHz.
• The processing package of the HTC One is backed by an Adreno 320 GPU with 2 GB of RAM.
• We ran AnTuTu tests on the HTC One. We used an average of three runs and got a score of 24,258.
• We also ran tests using Epic Citadel and got nice scores.
  • High-Quality mode: 56.7 frames per second
  • High-Performance mode: 57.9 frames per second
• Real world performance was also quite smooth and speedy.
• Apps in the HRC One launch very fast and games ran well.

Software

• The phone runs on Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean.
• Moreover, the HTC One uses HTC’s Sense 5 user interface.
• Sense 5 is said to be the least obtrusive version of HTC’s Sense yet. Much effort has been made up to clean up the interface and add several useful tweaks.
• Some of these useful tweaks are a custom app drawer layout where you can even group apps in folders.
• The Sense 5 has a new feature known as BlinkFeed. BlinkFeed functions like a home screen replacement and does away with standard icons and widgets in favor of news items and social media updates.
• BlinkFeed actually resembles Windows Live Tiles or Flipboard in the sense that it tries to pull together a large amount of info into just one, easily accessible space.
• Currently, the sources available to use on BlinkFeed is limited, but, as this app becomes a common HTC feature, these are bound to increase.
• Other useful apps are Flashlight and Voice Recorder.
• HTC One has a TV app which is a combination of channel guide and remote control.

Camera

• HTC One has a front facing and a rear facing camera
• The rear facing camera is a 4 MP UltraPixel
• While, the front-facing camera is a 2.1 MP
• With UltraPixel, HTC basically reasons that it’s not the number of megapixels but rather what you do with those pixels. They cut a number of pixels in the photo but have included a sensor to capture more light with each pixel.  In theory, this should improve low-light performance.
• The low-light performance of the cameras is indeed quite nice.
• While you get nice photos with the HTC One’s camera, in all honesty, they’re not much nicer than those taken with several other similar phones and those often have higher megapixel counts.

• You can take 1080p videos using both the rear facing camera and the front facing camera.
• This phone also allows for HDR recording and 60 FPS recording.
• All in all, the video capture of the HTC One is of very good quality.
• The camera app has a new feature called HTC Zoe.
• HTC Zoe is a new capture tool. Using the HTC Zoe, you can take short videos and multiple images simultaneously.
• Another fun mode included in the HTC One’s camera app is Sequence Shots. Sequence Shots uses Burst Mode to superimpose several images of a subject in motion for a single background.
• There is also a feature that allows you to remove unwanted persons from the photo.

Battery

• HTC One uses a 2,300 mAh battery.
• Unfortunately, the battery is not replaceable. The battery life was about 5 hours under heavy testing.
• We ran the AnTuTu Tester battery test and the HTC One scored 472 and reported a capacity of 18 percent at 5:55.
• Moreover, HTC One just doesn’t have that impressive a battery life under heavy strain.
• However, under normal use circumstances, we found that this phone still had 30 percent of its battery left after a day.

With the HTC One, HTC has really come up with a well-designed and well-built phone.  This is a solid and well-performing mode that does plenty of things well, even if it occasionally misses the mark.

The HTC has already received a lot of pre-orders for this phone, which indicates that this will be an in-demand phone.  What do you think?  Would you consider it?

JR

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