Gadgetory

hi this is Brian Bennett for cnet.com and right now we're taking a first look at the HTC One smartphone for sprint this 32 gigabyte version will be sold by Sprint beginning april 19th for 1 99 99 now a lot of people have been waiting for the HTC one to start hitting US carriers honestly I can understand why this handset is downright gorgeous its chassis is carved from a single piece of aluminum using what HTC calls a zero gap construction method the phone is available in hues of both black and a silver model that you see here measuring just 0.3 7 inch thick the one is extremely thin tipping the scales at 5.1 ounces the device is light too considering its metal build materials a big bright 4.7 inch LCD screen offers a sharp 1080p resolution and a pixel density of 468 PPI that's more than both the droid DNA and samsung galaxy s4 above the display sits a 2.1 megapixel front-facing camera and notification light below are just two capacitive android buttons to massive speakers sit on either side of the screen which enable what HTC calls boom sound really a flamboyant phrase describing the ones stereo sound plus that it produces a lot more volume than typical phone speakers what's really interesting is how the power button also doubles as an IR blaster to control home theater equipment a volume rocker is placed on the right side while I sim card slot holds court on the left on the bottom edge sits the phones microUSB port around back is the 4 megapixel main camera and LED flash which also uses HTC's ultra pixel sensor positively packed with advanced software components and features the HTC One runs Android jelly bean with the company's latest iteration of sense UI on top of it what's really new here though is the blinkfeed feature which acts similarly to flip board and other news aggregators to pull in updates from a curated group of sources you can push blinkfeed to the side and use another more traditional home screen as your main default view you can't however get rid of glint feed completely blinkfeed also the weather and time plus slick animations to indicate current weather conditions all this is powered by a 1.7 gigahertz quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor backed up by two gigabytes of RAM and 32 gigabytes of internal storage one bummers at the phone lacks an SD card slot for memory expansion and its battery is embedded at first glance this is the most beautiful smartphone I've held in my hands hopefully it will also deliver on performance features and usability I'm Brian Bennett for cnet.com and this has been a first look at the sprint HTC One be sure to check back soon for a full review