Gadgetory

what's up everyone John render from TechnoBuffalo here's a full review for you of the HTC One this is the latest flagship from HTC they've put a lot of hopes and R&D dollars into making this phone a reality let's go ahead and put it through its paces and see if deserves a spot in your pocket for the next two years alright so let's go ahead and get started we've got a lot to talk about here with the HTC One we're going to talk about specs call quality build quality screen a lot about Sense 5 the camera boom sound performance battery what I don't like about the phone and give it a full conclusion so let me give a disclaimer I'm gonna start doing this on all my phone reviews this device was used for nine days as my daily driver the first five were tested using a pre-production unit and the last four were tested using a full production model this is not support LTE in the US but it was tested on AT&T HSPA+ network aspects let's go and run through what this guy's packing its got a lot what you're looking at here is a gorgeous 4.7 inch full HD screen so it's 1920 by 1080 giving it a crazy 469 pixels per inch which I believe is the highest of any phone currently on the market it's running Android 4.1.2 at launch powering it is a pretty beastly 1.7 gigahertz Qualcomm Snapdragon quad-core chip it's a Snapdragon 600 it's got two gigs of RAM be available in two different storage sizes either 32 or 64 no room for external storage card so leave those microSD cards at home a lot of talk has been about the camera the back has a four ultrapixel camera we'll talk plenty about that the front is a two megapixel affair it's got Wi-Fi all the ones you'd expect 802 11 ABG nn but also something new here 802 11 AC on up anything even test AC with but this does make it a little more future-proof over the next 12 or 24 months bluetooth 400 all the rest of stuff you'd expect giving this guide to juice is a 2300 million power battery which we will talk plenty about and it weighs 143 grams or 5.0 4 ounces all right so call quality works pretty well I didn't have any drop calls on it during my usual round of tests I did have several drop calls though my nine days with it but nothing more or less than the other phone any other network it worked very well call quality was pretty solid alright so let's go ahead and jump right into build quality that's a big part of the story with the HTC One this phone feels absolutely incredible in the hand this is one of the best if not the best feeling phone I have ever used every inch every nook every line of this phone you can tell was given a crazy attention to detail HTC absolutely hit this one out of the park the phone feels incredible we pick it up in the morning it's got that cold feel through the full aluminum body HTC clearly learned phone by phone by phone you can see the evolution look at their previous Evo models all the way back to the first Nexus they got better and better in each phone this is a culmination of years of knowledge and they nailed this one absolutely this is one of the best built devices I've ever tested this is one of those phones actually enjoyed picking up that's such a weird thing to say but the way it feels in the hand and the cold feeling on it just absolutely outstanding I can't say enough about how well this phone is built everything about it just screams quality next let's jump to the screen this thing is an absolute beauty I thought the screen on the DNA looks good but Wow 469 PPI is absolutely incredible and it's a little bit higher than the DNA code it's only a 4.7 inch screen and not a 5 inch screen this is the best screen I've ever seen on a phone including my limited testing with the galaxy s4 and a full battery of tests the Xperia Z iPhone 5 and including the Droid DNA so screens are important to you if you want beautiful pictures you want beautiful video this is really the phone to look at and saying it's incredible doesn't really do it justice pictures and text all just pop out of the screen now looking forward to comparing this to of course the galaxy s4 more detail when we get it but if screen is important to you you're gonna have a very hard time finding anything that's better than this alright so next let's talk about Sense 5 HTC Sense 5 really gets out of its own way of just recruitment really nice I liked a new lock screen you can personalize a little bit and they have different themes you could pick from to find the best one for you they really did a nice job with it it's not as heavy as Sense foreign previous versions used to be some few nice things do we organize apps is kind of nice you can see the weather widget right on top you pull down a little bit you can pick either alphabetical custom or most recent you control the grid size here if you want to however you want to have it shown if you want 3 by 4 or 4 by 5 I like showing more per screen so I've selected 4 by 5 but you can customize that very easily a blinkfeed is also a nice addition I've got mine set to tech but you can show it to pull in all kinds of other information you want I think of it as like Flipboard for your homescreen I did not choose to set it as my default home screen my main when I moved it two screens off to the side you cannot turn blinkfeed off HTC said it's essential to Sense 5 but if you choose not to use it you can move it off to one screen and deactivate all the feet so you can see what it looks like right here I'm you click an article that you want to read doesn't launch a web browser per se it launches a sort of a mini browser where you can see the content right there so it's nice you have to wait for it to really queue up ITC did a very nice job with that so since five doesn't really add anything you couldn't get from third-party apps or launchers but for the first time really doesn't detract from the overall Android experience it's really the biggest compliment I can give to an Android skinned HTC also nails their email client here I love the way it looks the way it performs performance right similar it's the native Gmail app but with a unified inbox which for me is really huge they also have a new backup system which is pretty cool actually will do full backups of your phone which you can download from another HTC device you can log in either via HTC zone portal or via your Facebook Ranchos and I got a test this when I switch from my pre-production unit over the production model and it worked very very well you can also move from other phones and made it very easy from an iPhone or a Samsung device or any other manufacturer they made it really simple to transfer everything over so if you've been worried about how to kill your contacts don't want have to deal with Google syncing HTC has you covered here another thing that I really liked was since five is multitasking if you double tap the home button here we'll talk about that a little in a little bit I love the way the multitasking window looks you can see nine icons here and you can pick which one you want to use previously and sense for you can only see one maybe two off on the side you can close things here if you want by just swiping it right off the screen and it works pretty well swipe off and you are good in close applications that way as well so a really nice addition here to sense five right so let's next talk about the camera there's been a lot of talk about ultrapixels whether that's a marketing term or what it means the HEC really proved at least for me that it's not about the megapixels we did a huge camera comparison post we compare this to really pretty much every other major carrier release smartphone so the major phones that are out on the carriers in the US we compared the cameras the agency once camera really did a nice job even so far as to say it's amongst the best cameras on a carrier phone now really on par with the Lumia 920 it did an incredible job in low-light the ultra pixels means it's got a bigger sensor it's able to pull in much more light those images looked great in places where other phones sort of showed pixelation or darker this camera really did a wonderful job HD video also looked great we did a few video comparisons I will say though on the video comparison we did there was a bit of popping noise in the audio and that was done using the pre-production model when we switched to the production version that popping noise was gone but it looked great that we would expect with a 1080p camera one of the downsides though digitally zoomed image and start to show the lack of megapixels oh so you plan on doing a lot of digital zooming or if you want to blow this up to giant sizes you may want to test it before you that but if you just want to print out normal size images you want upload to Facebook or Instagram this is going to be a great camera for you one of the other really cool features on the HTC One is right down here it's called boom sound is incredible speaker and when compared to other phones it's not just front-facing speakers and make it sound so good HTC said there's a lot of proprietary technology that went into there including of course Beats Audio but algorithms and how it interprets sounds but if you compare it to another phone you can really hear a difference we compare it to the iPhone 5 for example you can definitely hear how well the sounds you're a big speakerphone user as well I really gonna appreciate having that speaker built-in oftentimes I heard some jokes on Twitter for other reviewers that were saying neighbors call to complain the music was too loud and they were playing music three years and its really does incredible job obviously that's an exaggeration but these are the best speakers I've ever heard on a phone alright so next let's talk about performance it's pretty much what you'd expect without any lag repeats you see sense just quite nice this guy's got a beastly quad-core Snapdragon processor most applications don't even take advantage of quad-core yet at all but this thing is an absolute beast and it screams everything moves quickly there's no scroll lag when you're using a browser whether using Chrome or the built-in browser that comes with it everything about this phone is fast from games floating applications to scrolling things just come along very quickly did get a quadrant score of 11850 it's not the most scientific test but I do use that as a benchmark for other phones so certainly scored very high there as well so do not worry about performance we're getting incredible performance out of this phone all right so let's talk about battery life using this phone for nine days I feel I'm very well educated on battery performance and how well it works so again it's got a 2300 million power battery let me run you through my daily usage so you at least get some appreciation for what my numbers mean usually comes off the charger around 7:00 a.m. usually about two to three hours of talktime I have two emails being pulled down checking every five minutes brightness I don't have auto brightness set I like a bright screen so I've got it sent to generally around 80% the amount of internet I do varies on the day but there's internet Twitter Facebook text and Instagram all kinds of other stuff going on blink feed is running the background and usually I'll put it on the charger around midnight ish and usually I've got right around 35% of battery life left when I put on the charger and for me if I can get through a full day with 20% plus I consider the dialog to be pretty decent the moral is it's on par with really anything else out there if you were worried about battery life from nature you see one don't really worry you can get through a full day I use my phone pretty heavily and those include some gaming time in there as well if you want to play games for three or four hours you're not gonna be able to get through a full day I did watch youtube videos on here and really had no issue at all getting through a full day but definitely note this does not have a replaceable battery on at least one that's easily user replaceable so your Argan app - either carry an extra charge around or monitor your battery use alright so I've been very positive with HTC One I really like most things about the phone but it's far from perfect there are some things that I don't like about it first I really don't like the button layout here I had to keep reminding myself about the first days that HTC logo is not a button that is just a logo having only a back and a home button the home button scoot off to the right took a while to get used to I really would have liked a dedicated multitask button I found having to double tap to get to the home button get the multitasking a little bit on the annoying side to go ahead and access it by doing that um another negative GPS had a hard time locating me when I went to New York back home I definitely took much longer than expected for to realize I was in another state almost a full 12 hours I could do it manually and I could let it know but doing Auto updates it should have picked my location out a little bit quicker than that also another negative here it doesn't have room for expandable storage so if you want more than the 32 or 64 gigabyte size you're going to get you're going to be out of luck I can forgive though not removable battery for design but for some that could definitely be a negative so keep that in mind depending on your usage you figure out which phone is right for you so what's the conclusion on the HTC One if you couldn't guess already I really like this phone and is getting one of the highest reviews and highest compliments I've ever given a phone it gets a really solid nine point five on the TechnoBuffalo reviewing scale this is one of the few phones I've really been excited to use every day and that says a lot we test a ton of phones here it could be a bit of phone fatigue this one really got me excited about the future of the mobile industry again after saying phones released to the past few years it weren't anything flack tricked to get excited about it's really refreshing to see the HTC One here the best compliment I can give it is it's the first phone that I would be willing to sign a two-year deal on my own with since the iPhone 4 so if you're worried about getting a phone or you want one that's really going to be an outstanding to use this is the one to get HTC slogan is quietly brilliant and with this phone they should be a little louder about it everything about this phone is incredible HTC hit this one out of the park I can say unequivocally the HTC one is the best Android phone I have ever tested and it may be the best phone I have ever tested period if you want to get something that's going to work for you for the next two years you want build quality you want a gorgeous screen and you want cutting-edge specs the HTC One is an incredible choice you