Gadgetory

HTC is back with a phone that has a couple of new cameras a full screen experience that does not use a notch and is literally more sensitive than ever it's Josh of Agora what's going on everybody and this is the HTC you 12 plus the first impression that we're going to give you is based upon the translucent blue we're in an era right now where a color is actually a feature of many devices and this is the most unique of the three different colors you can get of the u12 plus the translucent blue is by far the one that we want to have because you can see some of the elements just underneath the cover due to that slightly transparent back cover all of the phones are made of glass but there's a real heft to them the glass panels are separated by a metal frame and in the hand it almost feels brick like to me it's almost like a callback to the kind of build quality you used to get in a lot of HTC phones one easily and immediately recognizable change is the lack of any buttons on the front there are no more front-facing home buttons fingerprint readers or capacitive keys now you just have a screen the fingerprint reader has been moved to the back but the screen has very little bezels on the sides and it is an 18 by 9 aspect ratio making it a little bit taller so it's pretty easy to use especially from left to right there are very minimal bezels on the top and bottom just enough to hold the dual cameras up top and then to have the bits on the bottom including the USB C port and the speaker unit no there is no headphone jack but adapters are available at HTC comm and the box will include a pair of u sonic USB C headphones just like last year the rest of the phone looks conventional but then looks can be deceiving this is where some of the fun begins much like last year the phone can be squeezed in order to trigger a couple of functions you can just squeeze it quickly or hold it in order to trigger two different shortcuts but pressure sensitivity has also been added to the area where you would normally see the power button and the volume rockers you do still see what kind of resemble buttons up there but they're just risers that you're not actually pressing down for a real click instead you get haptic feedback when pushing down on those pressure-sensitive areas to trigger the volume buttons or the power button the areas below the buttons where the squeezes are registered have also been tweaked to allow one more shortcut a double tab of one's thumb now in those areas it will be able to recognize which hand is holding the phone based upon perhaps how many fingers are on one side but in any case you are able to tap on the bottom portion of either side with your thumb and trigger yet another shortcut by default however this is the triggering of the one-handed mode one handed mode is not new but making it this easy to trigger is probably going to make it a lot easier and simpler for a lot of users out there who don't want to do all those ham gymnastics and then there's one more place that this grip actually makes a difference and it's in one real-life scenario pesky rotation pretty much every user has had that issue orden you're lying down and you want to look at your phone in portrait mode but when you lie down and go sideways so does the phone with smart rotate the you 12-plus understands that the phone is being gripped vertically and we'll keep the portrait mode while held that way it's a slight annoyance that now has a solution that we didn't realize we needed until now now as far as the other specifications go you get pretty much what you would want out of a flagship it's a quad HD panel the six inch Super LCD six that is also supporting HDR ten there's also an always-on function called smart display which can be set on at all times at the expense of some battery life or it can simply turn on when the phone knows it has been picked up kind of like HTC motion gestures HTC Sense UI looks mostly the same as last year and comes with blinkfeed as the secondary home screen there's not a whole lot that's different here but it still seems quite smooth and really clean which is something we always liked about sense every phone will be getting six gigabytes of RAM however the most premium version in the translucent blue will get 128 gigabytes of on-board storage but then again all you 12 pluses also have microSD card slots and finally that thirty-five hundred million power battery is pretty sizable and can be charged via quick charge three or four if you have a compatible adapter however there's no wireless charging involved which brings us finally to the cameras and I say cameras plural in a very literal sense you've already noticed and we've mentioned that there are two lenses for the front-facing camera together these allow the u12 plus to capture 84° selfie portraits the two lenses are identical at 8 megapixels and f 2.0 aperture but together they are able to also get depth data in order to provide the correct cut out for bouquet effects the result is not only a good looking portrait that has those bouquet background effects but you are also able to change the focus points in the gallery and then use a slider to change how much of that bouquet there is those same bouquet tweaks can be done on pictures captured on the rear shooter and it has a dual setup as well the normal lens is a 12 megapixel F 1.75 aperture while the zoom lens has 16 megapixels and F 2.6 aperture obviously the main draw here is zoom capability which also adds to the portrait mode where you get a tighter frame phase detection and laser focus are both used on the rear shooter to ensure fast focusing and there's both osne is used to make sure that especially videos are as stable as possible while we are talking about video HTC has also added in good slo-mo 1080p capture can be done with 240 frames per second while 4k videos have 60 frames per second capabilities and with the 4 microphone setup the audio should sound pretty great on here including high-res capture overall there's a lot that this phone is bringing to the table and we're really excited to put the camera through its paces to see where it stands against the competition after all HTC also announced that the DxO mark score it puts it just below the current top contender on that list and so there you have it it seems HTC is putting just as much effort into the basics as they are in the extras and there's plenty outside of the core experience that makes this phone exciting the u12 plus will be available on HTC's official website and via Amazon for 799 dollars while the 128 gigabyte translucent blue model will go for 849 you can get it right now or wait a little bit for our final verdict as our full review will be coming very soon here at Android authority stay tuned to see what we think about HTC's latest and greatest because we are of course your source for all things Android