Gadgetory

by an unlocked Intel fourth gen core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 total war click now to learn more welcome to my video about the HTC one max this phone review will be a little bit shorter than most of mine because it's pretty much a phone that I've reviewed before unlike the one mini with its mini size and mini specs compared to the regular one the one max is and I suppose this was self-explanatory I mean a max sized version of the one there's no massive change in the specs though it's got a 1.7 gigahertz Snapdragon 600 processor with an Adreno 320 GPU 2 gigs of ram a 5.9 inch 1080p screen that's about 373 pixels per inch with Gorilla Glass 3 Wi-Fi AC and Android 4.3 with a 4.4 kitkat update confirmed with those numbers in mind doing this review was a little weird it's the first time a one device has ever felt anything but blindingly fast to me it's still very fast but going from the Nexus 5 to the one made me appreciate the subtle all-round difference that a faster phone running a newer more lightweight OS can make it didn't bother me for the last few weeks but I definitely did notice it so we'll start with the physical on hands on HTC actually sent me a case as well as a stylus for the phone the case well I installed it used it for like two minutes and then I promptly put it down behind a barn with a shotgun no but seriously I seem to have lost it so I actually can't show it to you but I would suggest trying to find something else anyway the stylus is a stylus I guess it's aluminium and it feels nice but my issue is that unlike the note 3 there's nowhere to store it inside the phone body so unless you have amazing discipline I think you're going to be losing and buying it over and over again and at ten dollars that's a little bit tough to swallow so I decided after trying the stylus to just go bareback with no stylus for the duration of my review because I feel like that's how most people are going to be using it earlier this year when I first started using it I feel the regular one to be a bit too big for me I was coming from an iPhone 4 and a bit slippery with it's however beautiful it may be smooth anodized aluminum backing now fast forward however many months it's been and that's all changed I'm used to the one but moving up to the one max is that same learning curve all over again you've got to be extremely careful especially at first to avoid dropping it fortunately I didn't I mean for someone like me with small hands you have got to use both of them to handle this baby day-to-day if you know what I mean but well you know what they say practice makes perfect and over the last few weeks I've gotten a lot better at handling a big the front of the phone is dominated by the huge 5.9 inch screen and the boom sound speakers man I missed those speakers when I was using the Xperia z1 in the Nexus 5 it is so nice to actually be able to hear things again and have them playing at me as opposed to coming out of the bottom of the phone into my palm I mean using the one for so long I had actually started taking them for granted but now that I've been on the other side I have a new appreciation for them the last thing on the front of the phone is the dedicated buttons rather than on-screen buttons now I feel like these are a bit of a mixed bag I at first felt very strongly that on-screen buttons were a negative because they took up some of your screen real estate but particularly on a phone like this having on-screen buttons is a non-issue to me because the screen is so big actually many modern phones are like that and whereas having hard buttons those that makes the phone itself a little bit bigger which is something that doesn't really feel necessary in this case so it comes down to the individual whether you prefer on screen or not on screen I'm kind of in the middle on the right we find my single biggest gripe with this phone the volume and lock buttons are so close together and so similar feeling but even after a couple of weeks it's pretty much a 50/50 shot for me to hit what I'm aiming for a top lock button like on the one I understand why they didn't do that it would have been very difficult to to hit one handed butt so that's maybe not the solution but I think a different feel to these buttons on the side could have helped a lot here it's still not a deal-breaker and overall I actually really like the phone it's just that a couple weeks in it does continue to bother me and I wish they'd found another way to implement that moving on to the bottom of the phone we find a single micro USB charging port I feel like wireless charging is a very conspicuous absentee here especially with newer phones like the Nexus 5 having that as a headline feature in fact that's one of the biggest things I miss about the Nexus 5 wireless charging is a truly next-generation type experience shift compared to plugging in your phone all the time so there you go guys it's not here but hopefully the upcoming 1/2 or whatever they're going to call it will on the top we find an IR emitter yay universal remote and a headphone jack then on the back we find the ultra pixel camera which just like the one has strong image stabilization and is easy to get good stills with even in low-light but has a little bit of difficulty with autofocus and video mode so I'm it tends to kind of look for focus a lot but maybe we'll see a software update for that I mean you see how much the Nexus 5 camera improved just with a software update so maybe there's still hope for it on the back we also find a fingerprint scanner that I had on for about an hour before I gave up I think a big part of the issue for me was that to get a solid scan you can only really do it if you can reach it properly and consistently pull your finger across it in a repeatable manner and that required me to hold the phone with two hands now I don't mind operating the phone two-handed but being able to unlock it one-handed to quickly look at things is a must for me let's move back to the front of the phone and take some time to really talk about the screen the viewing angles are solid I can't see the touchscreen interface even on uniform backgrounds which is a personal pet peeve of mine and while it lacks some of the sharpness of the 4.7 inch 1080p screen on the one unless you're reading very small text from very close up all day I doubt you would ever even notice that I think the only plaint that I really have about it is the slight warm or yellow cast of the colors compared to the one especially which has a more cool or blue look although even that stopped bothering me after about the first day it is still obvious and a side-by-side comparison though now on to these size there are definite challenges associated with handling a six inch but I think we can all agree that having such a big clear screen is great for certain things content consumption is an example lately I've been mostly using my Nvidia shield for watching videos in bed or around the house but the one max due to its massive screen and great speakers has actually taken over that duty I also find myself zooming in less on photos that I'm viewing on the phone when I hand it to people to take a picture or a video for me they often comment that they can see really clearly and it's easy to use and and these things are great I mean but initially I didn't necessarily feel like my appreciation for those things outweighed the inconvenience of the largeness because of my of my small hands and in fact initially my review notes about the phone's ludicrous eyes included only stories like my wife's cousin laughing at me when I was talking on it just because it's so big and I had some negative stuff about little places where since 5.5 didn't make use of the additional screen size for general productivity like for example in the app tray and things we're going to come out a bit negative although in HTC's defense while the app tray displays exactly as many icons in the grid as the one and even the one mini most stuff is is adapted reasonably well like the launcher supports a full additional row and column of icons and stuff like that so so that was a very minor complaint but anyway that's the direction I was headed then about three days into my evaluation of the phone something happened I was standing in an office texting someone and a middle-aged lady behind the desk nearby said to me wow what phone is that I showed it to her and she proceeded to play around with it and tell a story about how her kids made her get an iPhone and she hates it because she can't see anything on it or type anything on it because it's just too small for her to press the buttons and I realized she's right typing even though it does require two hands for me to grip the phone and use it at the same time is an absolute dream on the one max without thinking about it I had forgotten to install Swift key because even with my small hands and HTC's unexceptional stock keyboard I was faster with less reliance on autocorrect and I'm a reasonably good touchscreen typist so I think that's my new summary about the size while I can use this phone and there are things I do like about it that trade-off of screen size - phone size wasn't necessarily designed for people like me who want information density and compactness it was made for people who might legitimately need a big screen for ease of use where large display elements will be perfect and I can I can think of a lot of people like that software wise I've used sense for months so there weren't really any surprises here but I'll summarize some of the things I do and don't like about it swiping down from the top with one or two fingers for your notifications or for your quick toggles is good I like HTC's quick toggles implementation it doesn't have 3,000 things in it like Samsung's but it doesn't just lock you into half a dozen basic things at once you will not use anything else like stock Android however I do still use power toggles just because I particularly with a large phone like this have trouble getting two fingers up there one-handed when if I just want to turn on my flashlight and I'm kind of scrambling it's nice to be able to just scroll down with one and activate the flashlight with one hand just like that HTC's phone migration wizard is wireless and easy to use something I wouldn't have even mentioned and would take for granted if I hadn't tried Sony's terrible ones so recently I also love senses multitasking compared to other implementations like the stock Google one that only shows a few recently opened applications or requires scrolling blinkfeed is something that people either use or don't use I don't use it but I can recognize it as an efficient way to look at all your social media feeds and stuff like that it's just not for me those are another thing that I don't really use because to me they're kind of like vines without even a button to cut pause recording they're just little time limited video clips for those of you who don't know what a zou is and the one Max can record regular videos so I'd like to just have the option to keep it short just a few seconds or keep it rolling highlight reel another software feature one that I actually do use from time to time lets you put together quick videos and it does automatic cuts and filters and stuff like that set to music and that works with those or regular videos so those feel a little bit unnecessary and and like you're limiting yourself a little bit now one other thing and I've already been informed that this isn't a big deal and lots of phones do it but whatever this is my first time noticing it is that even if your phone battery is dead the one and the one acts for that matter will turn on for a long enough to trigger your alarm in the morning this is great if you're like me and occasionally forget to plug in your phone before going to sleep when it's really really low this feature actually saved my butt one day during this review and I would have otherwise slept in so that's something that I did want to mention overall I like the software maybe it's partly because my first Android experience is with since 5.5 so it's very familiar to me but there was one thing that I really missed from the Moto X and the Nexus 5 okay Google you've won me over on the whole voice thing Google now integration with 4.3 and the one is just not as good or as intuitive as those other phones and even though at the time I didn't feel like I was using it much even just trying to use maps for navigation on the one I really really missed it so the summary is I guess I'll write my obligatory the voice quality on the one max is excellent I guess like the speaker's it's a side effect of having more space inside the device and the fact that the microphone can actually be quite close to your mouth so I felt like I should mention that but other than that the conclusion of this video is quite simple if you liked the one but you felt like it needed to have a bigger battery in screen then this is pretty much your dream phone okay no it has some other differences upgradable story just one of them I like the implementation of the removable back there is a very slight gap but it doesn't detract from the overall fit and finish to me that's a trade-off I'm willing to make moving on to the summary and conclusion are always sorry hold on voice quality on the one max I guess it is it is a phone is excellent I guess like the speakers being better because you know it's just like bigger and easier to build good sound devices and a bigger space off I guess it's a side effect of the phone just being larger but it was definitely a strong point for the phone okay there sorry now now conclusion time so other than that the conclusion for this video is quite simple if you liked the one but you felt like it needed to have a bigger battery and screen then this is pretty much your dream phone okay no it has some other differences as well I mean the upgradable storage is one big one and I actually like the implementation of the removable back there is a slight gap here but I don't feel like it detracts from the overall fit and finish that much they've added a very very small lip like on the one mini to I guess help prevent screen scratching if you put it face down but it really is very small and I still wouldn't put it face down on things either way it's a welcome addition both the haptic feedback and the vibrate ringtone feel less high-pitched and obnoxious to me so yeah there are some definite improvements and with that in mind I would say the one max is a better phone than the one but to me it doesn't come down to those little changes it comes down to whether you feel like you can handle all five point nine inches of its strong sculpted anyway guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting me know if you think tablets like the one Mac's are great or if you think that they're stupid I'm you know let the debate rage on in the YouTube comments and as always guys don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos