HTC One – The One king to rule them all
The HTC One is the phone that HTC put all its money on to revive its name as a smartphone mobile innovator. And man! the results are beautiful. This gorgeous piece of hardware has almost everything right about it. Other than being a looker its specs sheet shout out premium & powerful. So, on paper this piece of hardware seems one of the best. Does it have the onus to finish the race? Does it deliver for HTC? Let’s find out spec by spec.
All the reviews by me are late on the scene as I wanted to spend quality time with these devices & as I've not gotten time to write the same before this ;-P. Also the reviews are not ultra high tech reviews, but product experience reviews.
Product Package:
The Box pack of the HTC One is unique. It looks like a square chocolate box. Inside the box we have the standard charging adapter provided by HTC, Charging cum data transfer microUSB to USB cable & in-ear Untangling headphones. The headphones are not Beats audio but are a good change from the headphones in the regular HTC packs.
Design:
The phone is all about its beautiful & premium design. The 4.7 inch 1080p FullHD SuperLCD 2 screen is wrapped around with an aluminium unibody with a border of ceramic. From the moment you lay eyes on it, you will be amazed at how beautiful it is & then you hold it & understand it wasn’t just a trick played on your eyes. The shape design is quite similar to the HTC Butterfly with tapering edges which gives the phone a slimmer profile.
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| HTC One with the Galaxy series (Galaxy S2, S3 & S4) |
I am using my best friend’s white HTC One. The white phone with metal accents looks awesome. The phone has a great feel to it in your hand & much handier than those 5 inchers in the market.
The top part of the screen has a stereo speaker grill, with the front camera lens on the right of it and the proximity sensor to the left of it.
On both top and bottom sides of the screen on front there are speaker grills. It has a two button approach ditching the 3 buttons on most recent androids. The capacitive buttons are back on the left and the home button on the right which acts as a 3 action button. The home button acts as the home button when pressed once, acts as the search or Google now button upon long press & also acts as a task killer on two taps. The front of the phone had the HTC logo in between the 2 capacitive touch buttons at the lower side. The whole design is sometimes confusing to find which side is up sometimes especially for long time HTC phone users who are used to the logo being up on their phones & also due to the symmetry in design.
On the top side of the phone we have the power button well placed on the left side. The power button also doubles the IR blaster for the phone. The top side also has the 3.5mm standard audio jack.
The left hand side has the microSIM card slot while the bottom side has the microUSB slot for charging as well as data transfers.
The right hand side has the volume rocker which is quite responsive & easy to use.
Display:
The FullHD 1080 x 1920 pixels, 4.7 inches, 469 ppi pixel density screen of the HTC One is a pleasure to look at. The colour reproduction is natural & the screen is bright. The screen doesn’t have eye popping oversaturated colours of the SuperAMOLED’s. But the screen is bright & great for reading test or watching a HD movie as the details are accurate & a pleasure to watch with the BoomSound along with it.
User Interface & Features:
Sense 5 is a major overhaul of design from previous versions of the Sense (the android skin by HTC). The animations & graphic elements have almost been completely removed altogether. But yes this too isn’t stock android.
The first major change you observe is the lock screen which has lost the old ring unlocker to a simple pull up unlock.
Its once you unlock the screen that you actually see the real differences. The old desktop flip clock we are so familiar with is now completely replaced with a simple clock with a cartoonish weather display next to it & below it you see Tiles like in a Windows Phone.
The Tile like interface that the HTC calls Blinkfeed is a new addition & a great one at that especially for people like me who want all there news and social feed the moment you unlock their phones. You have the choice of the magazine or social feed you want to see & voila its right there for you right on the home screen.
Slide right and you have the regular home screen with icons & widgets like the other androids.
In the notification area again there are no settings controls.
There are some customization tricks in this HTC too; there are the familiar widgets with better quality as well as some lock screen choices too, to remind that this phone is indeed an HTC.
The Recent Apps viewer on this one is a grid like interface & its better than the graphical one from the previous Sense iteration as we are able to see all the open apps at once.
The phone book & Social Media integration is elaborate & is a one stop for all the details on your friends. Once you open the phonebook app, you are treated with the dialer with the last caller on display, if you swipe left then you can view the recent call log, while if you swipe right you can check your favourite contacts, All contacts or contact groups.
Click on a contact & all the info about that person from all the social media networks you know them from.
Google Now one of the Jelly Bean features is extremely useful & the Google navigation is spot on regardless of where you are (at least it was for the places I've travelled).
Connectivity:
This phone has the complete set of all the connectivity options including NFC that the HTC Butterfly was missing.
The IR Blaster on the phone can be used as a Universal remote control for various electronic devices out of the box. But, sadly the feature is not available in India. The IR Blaster hence had to be used with a 3rd party remote control app & it works brilliantly to control my friends LG TV and TATA Sky Set top box to my Sony TV and Airtel DTH Set top box. Its simply brilliant.
Camera & Gallery:
Camera is another feature that HTC calls as one of the USP’s of HTC One.The camera image quality is good for a 4 MP camera, but lacks the image scalability of a higher megapixel camera. Especially in well-lit conditions I thought that other camera phones in the market could do better.
But as soon as the low light scenarios are introduced the story is completely different. The camera with its 1/3” diagonal sensor mounted behind an F/2.0 5-element lens which take in more light & give a better photo illumination. The situation is further improved with the phone being only the second to introduce Optical image Stabilization (OIS). The OIS helps reduce the image noise & in return give good quality clicks even in low light scenarios. I’ll be posting an image quality test later with photo samples where you can see the difference for yourself.
The camera interface is quite simple with both camera as well as the video options on click of a button. There are various filters for the pics as well as videos. The settings are easy to access as well
The real feature here though is HTC Zoe; Zoe is basically the ability of the camera to capture a moment in its whole when you click a pic. What it means is that it clicks a small clipping of the motion when a photo is taken in HTC Zoe mode. This is a cool feature as sometimes we miss moments when we click a pic & this allows us not to miss any.
There is direct access to the gallery right from the camera interface itself. The gallery gives you at an overview of all the pics that you have stored on the phone, photos by your friends, social media photos & your camera clicks. The gallery acts as a live tile like interface to the albums. The effect of HTC Zoe is best seen in the gallery where it seems like a lot of moments are captured instead of just dull still photographs & that’s really a great feeling.
Sound & Music Player:
HTC BoomSound is what HTC calls its twin front facing stereo speaker arrangement on the HTC One. Its not a gimmick, its simply loud & clear & makes you wonder how a device so thin can be so loud.
The Music Player is also a simple affair; it lets you arrange your Music as per your requirement of artists, albums, playlist, genre, podcasts & even folders where the music is stored on the phone.
Once the music starts playing, the interface is as simple as it can get. It gives the same interface in a reduced format on the lock screen too. There is an option to check the list of songs as well as the playlist right from the lock screen which is a good feature.
There is also a Radio app in the HTC One which makes it a complete pack.
Battery Life:
Having a 2300 mAh battery, the HTC one was expected to do better on the battery life front. But it has only a good and not great battery life which lasts almost a day when used with a Wi-Fi connection at home & office with only the commute using up 3G connections with a considerable amount of browsing & playing games. But, take the phone into 3G connections the whole day and the story is entirely different & the battery doesn’t even last 9-10 hours with medium usage.The battery life could have been better.
Performance:
The phone is one of the best performers I have had the privilege to get my hands on with no lags at all even running the heavy games from the play store. The results of a few benchmarks run on the phone are as given below:
Pros:
· 4.7" 16M-color 1080p Super LCD3 display with 469ppi pixel density.· Aluminium Unibody
· BlinkFeed Interface is the most fun experience on any phone for social media & magazines out of the box.
· HTC Zoe is a magical experience of viewing day to day photos & moments in life.
· Loudest and clearest stereo sound on a phone.
· Good low light camera performance.
· Loud & clear Call quality
· NFC
· Deep SNS integration.
· Nice customizations.
Cons:
· No shortcuts or connectivity toggles in notification area· 4MP camera gives photos with less scalability
· Universal Remote control app for TV not supported for India
· Non-expandable storage
Verdict:
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| 4 out of 5 Stars |
TechMOZART Logo made by +Surya Murali
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