Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware our box today we'll be taking a look at the HTC u ultra now I've been a big fan of HTC for several years now ever since they showed off the One m7 prior to that point HTC was mostly known for their budget devices but with the One m7 they really showed that they could make a high-quality flagship handset but since then the company has been struggling they've had a number of poor product launches and unfortunately for the HTC u ultra and HTC as a company this device is well I don't think it really lives up to the standard that we knew of HTC in the past some of you are probably wondering what on earth is the HTC u ultra well it's a flagship large screen device it's got a 5.7 inch 1440p display on the front it's powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 1 SOC and it has a 12 megapixel camera on the back it's meant to compete with phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 which I guess doesn't exist anymore cuz it exploded too often and other products like the LG v 20 but to be asked the quality there well probably doesn't live up to what you can get from either of those offerings and that's something that we'll be exploring a little bit in this review this phone definitely feels like a premium device in your hand it's got glass on the front and the back as well as metal around the sides this does mean that it's quite a significant fingerprint magnet the glossy back which reflects so much light also traps a ton of fingerprints and for those that want to keep their device looking nice and clean you'll have a lot of problems keeping the HTC u ultra fingerprint free it's also reasonably slippery thanks to that glass back and it's quite a large phone as well so for those of you who are a little bit clumsy and tend to drop your phones you might prefer something with a metal back and for me personally as well I feel like metal bat phones tend to be a little bit better to use and look a little bit better but as far as the HTC ultras design goes there's not a whole lot of problems with the materials that they've used the main problems that come with this phone and this is something that Marcus Brownlee covered quite well in his video review of this device it's a really massive phone it's only got a 5 seven inch display on the front but the bezels around the display are enormous especially on the bottom of this handset it's got a huge chin and that's where you'll find some of those navigation buttons some of these navigation buttons are actually reasonably difficult to hit thanks to the size of the phone you're trying to manage that 5.7 inch display and hit something like the back button while using the phone one-handed that can be a difficult task and I wish that HTC spent more time slimming down the front of this handset there are some aspects the HTC u ultras design that I like I enjoy the fingerprint sensor on the front I think that's a great way to secure your device and I appreciate the inclusion of a micro SD card slot to expand on the 64 gigabytes of storage you'll find inside this device something that is not acceptable though in any smartphone of this era is a lack of a headphone jack this is something that started with Apple I know some people say oh you know wireless headphones are better or you know the digital audio from the USB C port on this phone is supposedly better but for people who have wired headphones that use a 3.5 mm audio jack and that's the majority of you guys out there you will not be able to use your headphones with the HTC u ultra and for someone like me who has a pair of wide headphones that I wanted to use with this device I simply couldn't use it with the u ultra and that is a deal-breaker there's no USB C 2 3.5 mm audio jack included with this handset admittedly I wasn't given retail packaging but I would expect in a phone like this that you really should include that sort of adapter and even when I tried to plug in an on HTC adapter into this device at USB C the 3.5 mm audio jack adapter it told me it was incompatible with this device and requested that I use the headphones included in the Box this is not acceptable behavior HTC I want to reiterate that so clearly to you you should be allowing consumers to use the headphones that they want to use with their handset even if that means using adapter and you shouldn't force people to use the headphones that are included in the box this is a big no-no for the HTC u ultra and a massive downside to purchasing this device one thing you may have noticed the you ultra already is its secondary display above the 5.7 inch 1440p LCD is a 160 by 1040 additional display and in here you'll find things like shortcuts to apps weather notifications some music controls and also contact shortcuts but to be honest this doesn't add a whole lot to the experience and a lot of the things that the secondary display can do could very easily be done just on the regular display things like app shortcuts contact shortcuts are all possible on the regular home screen and only adds a little bit to be able to see things like additional notification info in that additional part of the display it also works when the display is off you can simply pick up this phone from your desk or tap on the top of the phone to receive say the time and some notification information but again this is something that competitors have been doing with a more LED and LCD displays through always-on displays in the past and HTC isn't really adding a lot through this additional display to be honest like I was mentioning before if they didn't include this and slim down the bezels I think the design of the phone would be quite a lot better but oh I guess HTC didn't do this with the new ultra as far as display quality is concerned unfortunately I couldn't run my usual color accuracy test because the app crashes on the Ultra for some reason but I can tell you the maximum brightness is 415 it's on this handset which is a little low for modern smartphone LCDs but it's still reasonably visible outdoors contrast ratio is great at 1500 to 1 and black levels also very good but in general at least default calibration color temperature is a little bit too cool though this is something that you can modify slightly through the display settings moving on to the performance now and the HTC u ultra includes a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 1 SOC which we've seen in smartphones effectively since the beginning of 2016 and it may feel a little dated when phones with the Snapdragon 835 come out in the next couple of months as far as performance for today's smartphones is concerned though the Snapdragon 820 one still holds its own in the HTC u ultra it performs effectively the same as other 821 smart phones that I've reviewed like the Google pixel XL which you can see in some of these benchmark that we're showing here compared to some handsets that include more powerful CPUs in the SOC s like the Kiran 960 in the mate 9 it's around 8 to 12 percent slower the 821 compared to the Kiran 960 so that's just something to keep in mind and actually reflects all of the performers will expect from more modern associate the year GPU performance was a bit surprising from the new ultra it seems like HTC is down clocking the audrina at 5:30 in the Snapdragon 820 1 and other Snapdragon 820 one devices produce performance even 30 to 40% better in some GPU intensive off screen benchmarks something like the pixel excel for example in a you know 3dmark sling shot test let's just say performs about 30 percent better than the HTC ultra and it seems like you know for battery life and thermal reasons that HTC has decided to reduce the performance of the GPU somewhat that said in modern games on Android I don't think you'll find any performance issues with the GPU on this device but it's just something to keep in mind that some other Snapdragon 820 one phones will be faster in a GPU perspective as far as storage performance goes this device has 64 gigabytes of NAND insight and performance is really excellent across the board actually really surprised me here is some of the things like sequential write performance which is outstanding and also the Aranda performance holds its own and that leads to very fast app loading times and general app usage on this phone it feels like a snappy handset to use in that I think is reflected in some of these benchmarks here it's time to talk about the battery life though and that's one of the major disappointments to the HTC u ultra for some reason HTC was only able to cram a 3000 milliamp hour battery into this handset when another 5.7 inch devices are pushing more like 3500 or even 4 thousand milliamp hour batteries it's a massive disappointment here and really hurts The Bachelor of this device in fact I'd go as far to say as The Bachelor life is actually inadequate in this device for general day-to-day usage in the PC market battery test for example the Google pixel XL whilst nearly 4 hours longer than the HTC u ultra and this is a massive discrepancy the pixel XL performs quite well in terms of battery life but you can see quite clearly here that the HTC Ultra falls well behind a lot of modern smartphones in fact to be honest it's almost galaxy s6 level battery life and that was not a good device in any means as far as battery life was concerned as we move here to our web browsing test as well you can see a big discrepancy from the HTC u ultra to the pixel XL as well and even a large screen phone like the why away mate 9 absolutely obliterates the HTC you hole true as far as battery life is concerned so if you a big battery life user you like having a large battery and a phone that lasts all day you definitely won't want to buy the HTC u ultra because The Bachelor life simply isn't up to scratch the camera is a really important aspect of smartphones these days and the HTC ultra is a decent performer here it's not as good as the Google pixel XL the galaxy s7 or the iPhone 7 but you still get a fairly okay camera experience it's a 12 megapixel sensor with 1.5 5 micron pixels so it's good in low-light here it's got an F 1.8 lens optical image stabilization and both face detection and laser autofocus as we bring up some of the images here from this camera we'll just talk a little bit about some of the good things there's a fast shutter and good focus times we're not using HDR that leads to a quite snappy camera experience here there's excellent image detail even at 100% crops from these 12 megapixel images which shows that HTC's image processing isn't affecting the detail of this image significantly which can be an issue on some competing devices there's accurate color reproduction and metering there's low noise in most situations and great low-light performance with solid noise reduction that doesn't lead to you know that oil painting effect that you can get from some competitors there's some blur in images that you take in the darkest situations but this is pretty typical for smartphones and when you're looking at macro photography there's reasonable bokeh and background blur that you can see here but nothing too outstanding there's also a good front-facing camera it's 16 megapixels includes autofocus you can get some great selfies here and there's reasonable 4k video recording also included in the HTC u ultra as far as the less than good things about this camera when you're using the auto HDR mode which thankfully is included it can be it's slow to take HDR shots and the actual quality of the dynamic range in these photos isn't particularly amazing especially compared to something like the pixel excel which has a fantastic HDR mode and great dynamic range there's also less vibrance and you know that pop that you can get from a really top quality camera like the galaxy s7 or pixel excel and while images are very accurate as I mentioned earlier the lack of vibrance and saturation that might go a bit beyond what you consider necessarily accurate makes them less shareable for social media without some editing you will want to put this in Instagram maybe add some filters or some effects here to really make those photos as vibrant as you usually see on those social platforms in general it's also not as fast to take images as the galaxy s7 or pixel excel across the board and there's no secondary rear camera or other amazing features as part of this device zoom the single rear camera and the single front camera where some other competitors like the LG G 6 for example have that additional wide-angle lens on the back and now for the final section of the review where we talked a little bit about the software it's running Android 7.0 out of the box with the January security updates as well as HTC Sense UI now I definitely wouldn't be purchasing the HTC u ultra if you're after a fast software updates like from the pixel line HTC's track record for updates it isn't terrible but it's not fantastic either and the fact that this device is still on the January security patches is a little bit of a concern for me so if you're after fire software updates stick to something like the pixel as far as the actual quality of the software is concerned I'm generally a fan of stock Android but HTC Sense UI isn't too bad these days they're definitely improved it significantly in recent years to rely less on custom elements and they've included a design here that fits in quite well with most of the other Android elements that we usually see across the operating system there's no duplicate apps on this phone which is a big plus there's only one Photos app one browser and one music player which really cuts down on the bloat where there are some unnecessary apps included here but I prefer including unnecessary apps as opposed to including duplicate apps because you won't get any of those annoying pop-ups and in general some of the features that they've are simply stock Android features like the notification pane which is essentially the same as what you will see on vanilla Android devices and you get quick access to some of those settings and things here with that HTC messing around too much which is great to see as far as other features are concerned there's not too much else to be found in the U ultras software and that could be considered a definite positive there are things like blink feed to the left of the home screens which it's actually a decent news aggregator but I know some people have their own apps that they use for that and you can disable it on the U or if you don't want it and that's like the boost plus feature do include some handy features like optimizing battery life and app performance as well as the ability to clean out some of the junk files to free up space in your handset those are all handy features and additions that don't add bloatware or unnecessary junk into the software I think HTC has been really improving their software over the recent years and it's generally a fairly decent experience provided by the U ultra not necessarily as good as stock Android on the pixel but good nonetheless that said this phone does lack support for some of Google's latest software initiatives that you will find on competing devices there's no Google assistant included on the U ultra at least just yet this feature is supposed to be coming to a whole range of Android smartphones in the near future there's also no support for Google's daydream virtual reality assistant if you were interested in using that feature so as you might have been able to tell throughout this review I haven't been too impressed with a number of aspects to the HTC u ultra this phone is too large for a 5.7 inch device and the additional display really adds nothing to the experience the battery life is very very disappointing for a 5.7 inch handset and it's obliterated by phones like the pixel XL and the huawei mate 9 the camera and performance are decent but again I worried that they're not going to compete with the latest smartphones and even things like the camera at the moment aren't as good as you're finding the pixel XL and the biggest kicker here the main reason why I can't recommend the HTC u ultra to anyone is its price this device costs 749 US dollars or 1199 Australian dollars putting it at the upper end of smartphone pricing this is the price you would expect to pay for an iPhone or a Google pixel XL or something like that it's a very expensive handset and to be honest there's no reason to buy it over a better phone like the pixel XL a better phone like what we expect to see in the LG G 6 and galaxy s 8 and a better phone like the iPhone it's just not worth it if it was a bit cheaper maybe if they cut the price by 2 or $300 I could potentially recommend the HTC u ultra but at its current price it's simply a no-go whatsoever and that's it for this review of the HTC u ultra hope you guys enjoyed it you can check out a written review on Tech's bottom where you can pour over all of the benchmarks and we will catch you in the next one