Why The HTC ONE Deserves More Recognition | HTC ONE REVIEW

Key Takeaways

[Music] welcome to a cold fuson review the HTC1 is just a regular phone right wrong it's the last chance to rewrite the wrongs of high-tech computer Corporation or HTC HTC were once Kings leaders and innovator they were the first to create a touch and wireless handheld device back in 1998 they were also the first to manufacture an Android phone in 2008 and they made the world's first 4G Android phone in 2010 but things went downhill from [Music] there they lost Direction and focus and released way too many phones way too quickly this confused an annoy customers in the same stride over the the past 3 years HTC has been struggling against the likes of Samsung and Apple many said it was over until the HTC 1 was announced since the HTC 1's release it has been praised with critical Acclaim by some of the biggest Tech reviewers as well as regular customers alike what's all the fuss about is the phone really that good what about some of the problems that we've been hearing about could HTC's One Last Chance be enough to save the company so now that you have a clear picture of what this product represents let's get on with the review the first thing you'll notice when you pick up the HTC1 is the build quality the first thing you'll probably say is wow this feels great it feels slightly heavy for its size but that's actually a positive point because it makes the phone feel sturdy it feels very nice to hold in the hand and the back casing has a nice finish you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that HTC has put a lot of time and effort into this design the 193 G 9.3 mm thin HTC1 features a third generation Snapdragon 600 crate processor plucked at 1.7 GHz this processor Powers a full 1080 by1 1920 4.7 in Gorilla Glass two screen with a 469 PPI pixel density a company this is the adreno 320 GPU with 2 GB of ddr2 RAM there's a 2.1 megap camera on the front and a 4 map Ultra pixel camera with 2 microm pixel size and Optical image stabilization on the back it also has 1080p 30 frames per second video recording and another mode with 720p at 60 frames per second so what about the screen quality well these days screen density is pretty much maxed out you can't really get any higher after this generation of phones it'd really just be a waste of process or resources unless hooked up to an external monitor the screen is extremely sharp let me tell you that that's pretty much the first thing you'll notice about it and what everyone else noticed about it when I showed them the phone text even when zoomed out to the extreme stays perfectly readable this screen may just be the best screen I've ever seen period the colors are very well balanced and don't really have an overshadowing tinge outdoor visibility is great there's less refraction happening between the screen itself and the glass because the display is so close to the glass surface since we're on the topic of Hardware let's talk about the button placement normally I wouldn't waste time telling you where the buttons are located but there's two important things to note on this particular device the first one would be the power button on the top left hand corner that doubles as an infrared blaster for your television now this is pretty interesting to control your TV like that but that's not what I'm talking about here I'm actually talking about the location of the button itself because the HTC1 is a kind of long and skinny device it becomes fairly awkward to keep reaching all the way up there to turn on and off your [Music] device I only mentioned this because there's no other way of waking the phone you can only wake it using the power button it's not really a big deal but it's just worth noting likewise the second Hardware thing to note about this device would be the volume button the volume button is rather flush against the side of the device so it may be hard to feel in the average pocket obviously both of these things are not deal breakers they're just little nitpicking facts it's just what I [Music] noticed another thing you'll notice about this phone is the two front speakers that's right two front speakers so that means stereo there has been a lot of fuss about these speakers but I can say I am a fan we'll get to this a little bit later in the review okay so let's move on to the software well there's a few things to say here hdc's marketing campaign has pushed two unique software features Zoe and blink feed we'll get to both of those shortly but first the basics upon release the HTC1 was powered by Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean with sense 5.0 UI on top since UI is both loved and hated by many in my personal opinion it looks in order of magnitude better than something like Samsung's TouchWiz but unfortunately it's just not as practical the first thing that really bugged me was the lack of quick access settings the word out is that when the HTC1 gets upgraded to Android 4.2 the sensui 5.1 upgrade should fix this issue moving on one thing that I did find surprisingly cool was blink feed blink feed by its simplest description is a scrollable news feed that can be personalized to individual sources I can definitely see how it can can be of no use to some people but for me personally I like keeping up to date with different things in the world and the quick add a glance interface was the cherry on the cake for me at first I just pushed blink feed out of the way but then because it was so personalized towards my taste I began to see and read stories that caught my eye and it started to grow on me and now I like BlinkFeed well is it a killer application not really and there are other applications that can do similar things but having it as stock was a nice touch if you don't care for blink feed or the sense UI there's good news Android is an open operating system so you can scrap them both if you wish and that's what I [Music] did okay so let's move on to the the performance if you haven't had a chance to play with the HTC1 the first thing you'll notice is its speed not only is the animation speed very rapid by default but the actual time in opening the apps is almost instant yes it even outperforms the S4 even though the CPU has clocked 200 MHz below its Samsung competitor when I was at the phone store with both an HTC1 and S4 side by side I noticed this and I'm not the only one curse forever report this is the octacore variant despite having a faster processor and faster Ram the Galaxy S4 has a tendency uh to lag at times I've been using the HTC1 as my daily driver for the past 1 and 1/2 months and I'm very happy to announce that this phone is definitely no slouch and of course with 2 GB of RAM apps stay open and launch quickly if they've ever gone to sleep well that's great you may say but how does this all help me in my everyday life well it adds a bit of satisfaction to your user experience that extra tenth of a second or so of speed it helps break down the human technology barrier in other words when you're trying to do something the phone gets out of your way so you can freely do whatever you want to do without it feeling like a task or a chore or something like that blah blah blah who cares let's move on to something else something that really tests performance gaming let's load up some high-intensity games and see how the HTC1 one of the most powerful phones of 2013 handles them for gaming on the HTC1 is largely a pleasant experience this can be attributed to the most densely packed screen in the entire industry and also just the raw performance of the phone the adreno 320 has roughly twice the power of the adreno 225 using the HTC1 X and just about every other highend leading qualcom based smartphone just last year that's unbelievable combine this with the two front-facing stereo speakers the weight at your next bus stop becomes pretty fun some downsides to note would probably be the smaller screen size now small by today standards but not in general so if you're coming from a phone with a bigger screen you might be a little bit uh squinty and the phone gets quite hot because of it's all aluminium or aluminum if you're American Construction so it's a point to take note of while you're gaming for long periods of time let's move on to web browsing web browsing is delicious for a lack of a better word it seems that HTC has devoted some special attention into the way that the web browser moves when your fingers swipe or scroll everything seems to move around with exceptional Grace more fluid than anything I've actually seen before Pages low quickly and the pinch to zoom is extremely responsive text reflow is also native to HTC and is also a very nice touch in this case for me personally I would have liked a larger screen but I guess that's just the way the cookie ceases to be a single unit so we've learned that performance is great but when it comes to some implementations of the software HTC have done some puzzling things and it turns out it's not all roses for the HTC1 let's move on to some of the software aspects that I didn't like first up multitasking multitasking I found to be a bit fiddly let me show you what I mean so to start multitasking all you have to do is double tap the home button it's pretty easy to miss if you're not looking directly at the phone anyway once you do tap the home button twice you'll be greeted with an interface of nine of your most recent applications the thing that annoys me there's no extra settings here and the notification bar is Out Of Reach I find that this slightly fragments the user experience by throwing them out of what they were doing before and sticking them in a black page with little Choice again not a deal breaker but just something I noticed if you're a subscriber you know that I've come from the Galaxy Note 2 as my daily driver now if there's one thing that I really miss it's real multitasking but this is all about the HTC1 so let's leave that for now I've done the best I could by installing couple of applications to ease the pain such as relaunch and floating [Music] browser okay so let's move on to the audio section here HTC have strongly marketed boom sound in relation to the two front-facing speakers it's the first time this has ever been implemented on a smartphone it's about time I think it's a terrible name but it has great sound regarding that it's a SmartPhone speaker it has more definition than other phones and has an integrated amplifier you can tell that the algorithm is dynamic for example if you're playing a song you'll notice that if you edge past the three4 volume Mark the base levels will stay the same and only the high mids and trebles get boosted I assume this is to avoid base clipping so in summary if you want the optimum sound quality and loudness leave the volume two notches away from the top and on that note if you get the joke the headphones packaged with the HTC1 sound superb they are far superior to anything packaged with anything ever the build quality is pretty horrendous but the sound is great when plugged into anything not just the HTC1 here's a small audio excerpt of the Galaxy Note 2 speakers versus the HTC 1's boom [Applause] [Applause] sound to try and all W will be free [Music] cool so let's move on to the camera if you're a subscriber once again you'll know that I've been very extremely unlucky with all the phones that I ever get so of course this particular unit of the HTC1 has a faulty camera so it does not focus on anything so unfortunately it's going to be extremely hard for me to review a camera without taking photos this is probably going to have to be postponed to a separate video of the blurry Natures the that I did see I did manage to notice that low light performance wasn't actually as good as advertised but I did notice that the pictures were a bit brighter but still quite noisy I'm really sorry guys um but HTC Zoe must have to wait this one was completely out of my control I can say that the front camera is really good and you can definitely tell that they put a wide angle lens on there speaking of which you do actually get a wider field of view with the rear camera as well all right so we're almost there but let's run through some additional points call Quality was decent but unfortunately the volume was a bit on the low end which was surprising to me but people said they could hear me loud and clear on the other end and of course navigation is a breeze with Google's integrated software HTC holds true with their great contact integration and good syncing options there's a pretty decent car mode and also a kid mode if you want your kids to use your phone there's a built-in TV guide and as I mentioned earlier you can control your TV using this phone if you wish you can output your phone wirelessly using the HTC Media Link HTC has also made it very easy to transfer your content from your old phone to this new HTC1 and some other little clever things that people don't really care to mention most of the time like in messaging you can pinch to zoom to Reflow the text to your personal preferences and you can even search for individual keywords in all of your message [Applause] [Music] threads I'm also happy to see native support here but there are a few snags that we should go over there's no native USB support which wouldn't matter for most people but for me that's a bit of an issue charging is painfully slow if you have another charger with a higher output try using that instead if you're a musician and find yourself constantly taking quick audio notes for your future reference the HTC1 is a disaster audio recording is just terrible it sounds like a phone from 2003 and the very last thing is the button layout now this is my biggest gripe with the HTC One someone at HTC has been smoking too much of something and has made a terrible mistake the button layout is really just chaos it really doesn't make any sense I can't understand for the life of me why HTC couldn't just go with the normal home button menu menu menu button and back button this standard layout would have been fine but not for HTC this time time around for some reason they wanted to simplify things or so they say by taking away the menu button and putting it on screen now the strange thing about this is the HTC logo actually has a capacitor strip under it so this means that it's an actual button but it's just not being utilized now just go figure I got no idea and to rub it all in in some applications you actually lose more screen real estate by having a menu bar at the bottom or wherever on the screen now we can just hope that a soft software update comes along to fix all of this so it's not the end of the world but it's still quite annoying but it doesn't really take that much away from the positive aspects of this phone which there are many of and that my friends brings us to the conclusion of this video what do we make of the HTC1 leaving the camera out of the equation we can weigh up the major pros and cons let's start with the cons the button Arrangement could have been better battery life was okay it will get you through a full day but it still could have been better charging was quite slow and there's no removable back for external storage and the like the pros everything else build quality and design are arguably the best of any device we've seen to date screen Clarity and visibility was a great plus solid performance all around not to mention the great speakers and something I didn't mention the price in my region it was almost $100 cheaper than the Galaxy S4 if you have this phone you've made a good choice and if you're in the market for a new phone I recommend you go out to your nearest dealer and have a play with the HTC1 it's definitely one of the best smartphones of the year and you really should be considering it with iOS 7 causing a semi- threat and the Galaxy S4 causing a stir has HTC done enough here I say yes all my complains about the phone were all about minute details and overall HTC seems to have played their cards right here anyway thanks for watching guys and as usual don't forget to rate comment and subscribe and I'll leave you with [Music] [Music] this [Music]