Gadgetory

the HTC first is the first phone that ships running Facebook home is the long rumored Facebook bone worth your time and money find out in our review hey everybody I'm Chris book when it comes to Facebook home we've heard a lot of bad things and we've heard a lot of well okay it's actually mostly been bad things but we'll get to that in a bit let's kick off the review of the HTC first by taking a look at the specs the HTC firms packs in a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset with a dual-core 1.4 gigahertz Krait processor and Adreno 305 GPU for memory we're looking at one gig of ram and 16 gigs of internal storage but no microSD slot the 4.3 inch display is 720p HD we have the pixel density of around 342 pixels per inch the primary rear facing camera is 5 megapixels with 1080p video capture and the front facing camera is 1.6 megapixels providing the power is a 2000 milliamp hour battery HTC is known for build quality and while this isn't as solid as the flagship HTC One it doesn't feel cheaply built either the back and sides have a grippy feel making you less likely to drop this in the middle of a call the HTC first comes in a variety of colors from red like our review unit to white black or blue it fits well in the hand and the relatively small size of the device makes one-handed operation a breeze compared to a lot of other phones in the same class buttons feel sturdy almost to the point of viewing overly stiff unlike a lot of other mid-range Android phones the display is not a weak aspect of the HTC first the small 4.3 inch screen size in 1280 by 720 resolution leave us with a pretty sharp pixel density of around 340 pixels per inch so visuals are much clearer than other similarly SPECT phones colors are vivid without the over saturation that is clearly apparent info from some other manufacturers black levels are good with the display having very nice contrast to test the performance we ran our usual suite of tests starting with antutu benchmark a total of 10 benchmarks taken at different times left us with an average score of just over 11,500 almost exactly about what we expected from this Hardware next up was Epic Citadel in high quality mode the average frame rate was 54 point 4 frames per second while high performance mode produced 50 5.1 frames per second not too bad for 720p resolution in real world use the phone never felt slow but obviously didn't feel as blazing fast as a high-end phone would apps launched quickly and scrolling was smooth subway surfers ran smoothly though it isn't a very demanding game the software is where the HTC first takes a nosedive it runs Android 4.1.2 jelly bean but while it isn't skinned it does run Facebook home now it would be easy to call facebook home a love it or hate it piece of software but looking at the Google Play Store it doesn't seem like that many people love it at all for the purposes of this review though that isn't exactly the problem the issue is consistency now while you may not be a fan of TouchWiz or HTC Sense at least they provide a unified experience with Facebook home it's always apparent that you're running an app on top of stock jellybeans but here's the thing that may actually be a plus see you can simply turn off Facebook home and suddenly you'll find yourself greeted with a phone that is running stock Android no it's not a nexus and you probably won't see frequent updates but it is a surprising bonus in good lighting the five megapixel rear facing camera takes photos that are above average for a phone in this class in low light however images aren't nearly as good you can use the LED flash but this isn't going to lead to the nicest photos the front-facing camera has the same issue but with fewer pixels the 1080p video capture is unremarkable while it will capture whatever you pointed at the videos tend to be on the shaky side and low light performance is just as poor as it is for still images having said that for a mid-range phone it's still not that bad the two thousand milliamp hour battery isn't the biggest we've seen but is definitely more than adequate for most tasks well I did notice that heavy testing and benchmark seemed to drain it fairly quickly in general use it held up pretty well HTC claims 14 hours of talktime and if you take that to mean 14 hours of moderate day-to-day use it definitely meets or even surpasses that time unfortunately the battery isn't removable so if you're looking to carry a spare or pick up an extended battery you're out of luck do you like Facebook no well then the HTC first definitely isn't for you the hardware isn't bad but the general mess on the software side makes it hard to recommend sure you can run stock jellybean pretty easily but who knows how often it's going to be updated that said if you use Facebook more than anything else this phone might be worth picking up want to know more we have a written companion to this video at Android authority comm you can find the link in the description we have new videos going up all the time so if you want to stay up to date make sure to subscribe to our Channel I'm Chris book for Android Authority and as always thank you for watching