The HTC One serves as HTC's newest entry in the smartphone market. Designed to match up against the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the iPhone 5, the HTC One is an intelligent reimaging HTC's prior flagship smartphone, the HTC One X. The smartphone features a zero gap full metal unibody design that is quite frankly stunning.
The HTC One features an aluminum frame with the antenna built into the back of the chassis. As for processing speed, the phone is powered by a 1.7 GHz quad core Snapdragon processor. Memory is available in both 32 and 64 gig variants, though international models come with a micro SD port for memory expansion. The display on the HTC One is a full 1080p, 4.7 inch screen that features a pixel density of 468 ppi. The screen in real life use is gorgeous. Sound is provided by a combination of Beats Audio and a proprietary speaker configuration known as BoomSound.
This phone utilizes a four Ultrapixel camera. While this is notably lower than comparable smartphone cameras, the pixel size on the HTC One is almost twice the size of those higher megapixel cameras. This allows the camera to capture over 300% more light than a standard 13 megapixel phone camera. In addition, HTC developed the ImageChip 2, which is dedicated to the processing of pictures. When combined with an aperture of f/2.0 and built in image stabilization, you end up with a camera that does a pretty darn good job of capturing your memories.
HTC's new phone ships with Android Jelly Bean v4.1.2 as the operating system. Those familiar with HTC's previous phones will notice the famous flip clock is gone, and is instead replaced by a standard digital clock interface. The phone's home screen, called BlinkFeed, features news made up of all of the user's social network content combined with traditional news sources. All of these feed can be customized, so if you are interested in say cars, you can let BlinkFeed know that and your home screen will include all of the latest and greatest news about automobiles.
The HTC One features stereo speakers on the front of the phone. To deliver the sound, HTC utilizes Beats Audio and BoomSound. The result? The loudest, clearest phone that I have ever used. For recording and phone calls, HTC built the One with dual microphones featuring HDR technology. What does this mean? It means that when you are on a call and the ambient noise around you increases, the phone senses the change and adjusts things so that you and your caller can hear one another. It also means that if you are say recording some live music, the phone is capable of capuring a high dynamic range…and then it will remove distortions…cool.
Did I mention that you can use this thing as a remote control? There are also a number of television features embedded with the HTC One's software. This includes the ability to control both television and DVR functions from the phone. Also, viewing recommendations and notifications allow the user to customize their television experience….from the phone.
For music purposes, there is the capability to allow for onscreen lyric display and a visualizer for graphical content that enhances listening. In practice I found that the remote worked quite well and was very easy to set up. My one gripe with the software is that the remote is lacking a page up/page down button…which I missed.
Throw the specs out the window..bottom line time. Could I use this phone daily? Would I recommend the One to others? That would be a Yes and Yes. The HTC One just plain works. I didn’t encounter any bugs or broken features while using the One for a couple of weeks. The phone felt good in my hand, and the battery made it through the day without the need to be tethered to an outlet at every opportunity.
The sound quality was awesome; you could even notice a difference when streaming from Google Music to my car stereo. There was no lag when switching screens..this phone is fast. I really didn’t want to give the phone back to HTC, and I am seriously considering just going out and buying the thing even though I’m not up for an upgrade for another year. So yeah…If you want a very solidly built beast of a phone, check out the HTC One.
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