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- Dubai 04:31 05:49 12:21 15:48 18:47 20:05
Call it the silent crusader. True to its parent company’s tagline (quietly brilliant), HTC’s brilliant new smartphone is quietly giving the big boys some serious competition with its elegant design, excellent built-quality, superb hardware and a set of some seriously cool features and specs. In a nutshell, it’s Android at its best.
With the new HTC One, the Taiwanese firm has definitely sounded the warning bells for the Apples and the Samsungs of the smartphonesville, letting them know that it’s not only back in the game, but hungrier than ever to wrestle its way towards the top of the mobile phones ladder.
In fact, we’re sure you must have, by now, heard rumours about Samsung getting jittery and hiring students to post fake negative reviews of the HTC One. We’re not commenting on that (for now) because, one, nothing’s been proven so far and two, we don’t really think that (and this is a personal opinion) Samsung would be so stupid to get hired juveniles to do their dirty job.
And last but not the least, even if (if) Samsung did it, the Korean giant might have done so because it got riled by HTC’s comments and actions during the launch of the Galaxy S4. The Taiwanese firm apparently hired a street marketing team to pass out free snacks plus some coupons for its HTC One to people waiting in line outside the Galaxy S4 launch event in New York.
In fact, a day after the S4 launch, Mike Woodward, President of HTC North America, went on record to say HTC was happy that Samsung’s new phone wasn’t much different from its previous edition. “[The S4] feels very iterative. It looks a lot like the Galaxy S3,” Woodward reportedly said. “We were pleased to see no innovation in the design itself.”
No, we’re not justifying Samsung’s alleged approach – just speculating on the possible motives in case the rumours turn out to be true. For now, though, let’s move on from gossiping about corporate rivalry to the job at hand.
As soon as we got to lay our mittens on HTC’s new handy candy (after we stopped salivating), we got down to business – of reviewing it and bringing you an unbiased (largely) assessment of the device. So, without further ado, here goes:
Look & Feel: If looks could kill
The looks of the new HTC One smartphone are to kill for. Seriously. If you’re the kind who falls for a, ehmmm, car because of its looks, there’s no way you can ignore the HTC One – or not want to fondle its sleek metal + glass body.
Its all-aluminium casing is both sophisticated and smooth, with an unencumbered, minimalist design that is soothing to the eyes. The screen is, as one would expect, made of Gorilla Glass, and despite the metal/glass combination, the phone isn’t as heavy (143g) as we’d imagined it to be.
And while it isn’t as lightweight as, say, the iPhone 5 (112g) and is even heavier than the Galaxy S4 (130g), it feels considerably more sturdy than the iPhone and the Galaxy S4, as if it’s ready to weather the wear-and-tear of our jeans pocket where it will have to battle for space with keys, coins and other projectiles.
A sealed unibody design means that you don’t have to bother about the battery anymore (it’s in-built) and you won’t have to open and close the brushed-metal back cover to insert the SIM card (goes on the side) or a microSD card (sorry, there is no option for expanding the available 32GB or 64GB memory of the phone).
This last bit actually bothers us a tad – we’d have loved (who wouldn’t?) for the phone to have expandable memory, but that’s not a choice that the HTC One offers. It’s got a microUSB port, though, for mundane chores like battery-charging and file transfer.
Back to the looks, and a glossy chrome-like finish for the front and back gives it all the good looks it needs to wow us and make us fall in love with it over and over again. According to HTC, it takes about 200 minutes to carve out the One’s frame from a single block of aluminium - and we’d say that every minute of that is well-spent.
A zero-gap body with rounded edges adds to the overall superb design of the phone, and the curved back is a master-stroke that makes the device fit snugly into our hands.
Verdict: The exteriors are, in one word, stunning.
Screen & Display: Show me the pixels
The HTC One boasts of a display size is 4.7 inches and, frankly, in our humble opinion, they don’t need to make smartphone screens any bigger than this. But then, having recently launched a 4.9-inch display for the Galaxy S4, the Samsungs of this world have forgotten much more about smartphones than we will ever know.
Now, the One’s super LCD 3 panel has, arguably, the best display in a smartphone, with a monstrous pixel density of about 470 pixels per inch. For those who don’t understand the numbo-jumbo, it should suffice to say that the display is sharp and crystal clear – better than most other smartphones in this category. Hi-res images are vivid yet accurate, and text comes across razor-sharp on the 1080p display.
In fact, that ‘accurate’ above should be highlighted, because that is something that is sorely lacking in the pumped-up Super AMOLED displays today, as if they’ve been overfed on a diet of megapixels. The vibrancy in colours is life-like, no accentuated.
Of course, there are occasions when you want your images to look brighter than reality, but over-saturation does appear to be a common accusation against some of the most recent smartphone cameras – and the HTC One can be acquitted on that count.
Then there is the 360˚ View, which means that the HTC One can be viewed from virtually any angle or tilted and the viewing experience will still be crystal as ever. In addition, the HTC One voluntarily ditches the megapixels rat-race, and seems to have created a racing track of its own – that of ‘ultrapixels’. HTC maintains ultrapixels are similar to megapixels, only bigger.
Its rear-facing camera boasts a 4 ultrapixel density (compare it with the Galaxy S4’s 13MP rear camera), but before you brush that off as too low, the image quality is definitely comparable to the Galaxy S4 although images aren’t the best if you’re planning to take large prints.
For everything else, like digital sharing or smaller prints, it’s good enough. Just don’t zoom it up too much, or you’ll lose any and all details that you intend to capture. On the other hand, it is better than most others when taking close-up shots.
In addition, HTC has added bells-and-whistles to the camera, such as the HTC Zoe, which offers some super-cool tricks and software capabilities on top of a better-than-decent camera.
Once the shutter is pressed, the HTC One automatically captures up to 20 photos and a 3-second video (from which stills can be picked and chosen at any stage) – a living picture if you will. In addition, the Zoe offers tricks such as sequence shots, light enhancements for low-light images, and a zero-effort ability to create 30-second videos (complete with background music) out of mundane images of an event.
Verdict: The screen and display is easily best-in-class. Sadly, the same can’t be said about image quality and resolution.
Sense & Sound: Music to the ears
When it comes to sound, quality, the HTC One calls the beats – literally. The BoomSound speakers produce arguably the best sound quality on any – yes, any – smartphone in the market today. We tested out, and found that at full-blooded volume, you can clearly hear even a phone conversation – and not just music – from as far as six feet away. It’s loud enough to attract a crowd, claims HTC – and we agree.
The multimedia experience is perfected by two front-facing speaker grills, one on the top and the other at the base of the screen. The placement on the front is divine, and the stereo sound quality is both loud and impressive. Has to be – it’s Beats Audio, after all. But the experience is amplified (pun intended) when you plug in the pair of included headsets – they’ll indeed make music, video, and game audio sound like music to the ears.
Plus in-built noise-cancellation makes conversations in a noisy situation tolerable. HTC calls it Sense Voice, and it uses dual mics (both with dual diaphragm), front and rear to detect what should be captured and what shouldn’t, and cutting down on unwanted vibration for better quality audio capture.
Cut to the chase, and we decided to put it to test. We tried calling up from a primary school just after the end-of-school-day-bell, and managed to get the message across. Anyone who’s been at a primary school in Dubai during the school’s end should know what we are talking about – and be impressed.
Apart from great sound, the HTC One boasts of good sense too. HTC Sense 5, that is. The new edition sports a refreshed look and feel to HTC’s user interface, and offers the ability to personalise your phone (starting point, wallpapers, sounds, apps, and bookmarks, etc.) from your desktop or laptop/tablet.
But the biggest difference is the new BlinkFeed, which allows you to select a bunch of feeds and apps that will be displayed in a random-yet-neat fashion on your home screen, constantly keeping you abreast with your Twitter feed, Facebook messages, news/entertainment feeds, music, technology… the list is long.
All this and more is streamed live to your home screen so you don’t have to check the feeds individually. It does make the screen rather busy, especially if you choose more than a few feeds, but cuts down on the time/effort required to constantly check these feeds individually. Mind the drain you might put on your mobile data as well as the battery, though.
Verdict: Cool sound, supercool Sense.
The Good
The Bad
The Snugly
In conclusion, it is amply clear that HTC has staged a coup in the sultanate of smartphones with its HTC One device, which has the best of both the worlds. It’s got the build quality and design sense of an Apple iPhone while sporting the features and traction of the Samsung Galaxy range of phones.
With the HTC One announcing its arrival in a quiet but convincing manner, the current leaders in the smartphones sweepstakes can no longer afford to ignore HTC as a genuine contender for the top slot. They’ll do well to treat the HTC One’s BeatsAudio ring-tone as a clarion call.
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