Gadgetory

you guys probably thought I forgot about this one hey what is up guys MTV HD here and this is the HTC u12 plus so HTC has had a couple really interesting years leading up to this new phone and this turns out to be one of the only flagships available in 2018 with no knotch and a couple super unique features and the other thing is in the US or anywhere really this phones not going to be in stores that may explain why you or someone you know hasn't really heard of this or you're hearing about it for the first time not as much hype around the sky but it will be available online for 849 bucks so that's definitely high-end it's a premium flagship so is it worth your money well first of all just as far as design this is the translucent blue color it's the only color of this phone I consider buying it in as you can see that the glass is a little bit see-through in the top half which I love it's not quite jerry-rigged everything fully seeing all the components see-through but it's still pretty unique and I'm a fan of this I'd love to see other phones offer something similar to this too there are some other colors available for this phone as well but they aren't see-through so who cares about them but this is the glass back enabling this of course so the whole back of the phone is now this glass it's much slipperier but there's no wireless charging so if you hated one plus we're going glass back but no wireless charging then you have to paint this one too but bottom line I am a big fan of the way this one looks even though it does catch plenty of finger prints I think it is one of those where I would just not ever put a case or a skin on it just leave it the way it is the rest of this phone looks pretty normal though for 2018 you know pretty simple design lots of HTC cues and shape but you wouldn't suspect anything to stand out crazy just looking at it but there are actually a lot of really interesting things about this phone first of all the squeeze is back and it's like leveled up it still has the side squeeze sensitivity from the U 11 so you can set a shortcut to launch something when you squeeze the phone but also have different types of squeezes so a quick squeeze is one thing and a long squeeze is a different shortcut and on top of that you have pressure sensitivity all the way up the side the phone so while you're holding it if you double tap the side of the phone with your thumb it acts as a shortcut to one handed mode and if you switch hands and DoubleTap with the other thumb that's the other side shrinking to one-handed mode so a lot of hand gymnastics but it's being really smart about what it does with that pressure sensitivity so that's pretty impressive when it works it's not always perfect it can get pretty finicky and sometimes I tried an outright doesn't work and there's a lot of ghost taps and it can fix itself after a while but basically the only downside has been that it doesn't always sense the tap but then on top of all of that the most interesting part about this phone might not be the color might not be the pressure-sensitive squeezed feature it's that this phone doesn't actually have any real buttons the power button and volume button on the side of this phone aren't normal clicky actuating buttons there are even more pressure sensitive areas on the side of the phone so when the phone is often you press the volume buttons they don't move you know kind of like apple's solid-state touch ID home button it's not an actual button until the phone turns on and when it is on there's a vibration motor that kicks in and simulates the feel of pressing a button when you squeeze or put pressure on that area so okay how have these fake buttons played out in real-world use well like I said the best version of this would be Apple's haptic engine where have you pressed the home button on an iphone eight you're fully convinced usually that you're clicking an actual button it still feels like you're pressing something that clicks this is a decidedly average vibration motor inside so it's not nearly as convincing I've gotten used to it I expect it now when I press the button to have that feeling but it's it's it's way worse there's definitely a slight delay like when I press the home button versus when I actually feel the vibration that is supposed to simulate a click there's a slight delay that makes it feel software driven rather than like the haptic engine being exactly when I click it that's the difference it doesn't feel as real and it becomes really obvious when you try to double press any of these buttons like double tapping the power button doesn't do anything double tapping the volume buttons doesn't raise the volume twice you have to really press it slowly to actually get it to work and this is not fun at all this is not a good experience I think for some people this can be a deal-breaker in this phone I personally still do prefer really good clicky buttons and I think I'll continue to praise them until haptic engines get way better but this is probably the biggest downside of this phone okay another unique thing about this phone you may have already noticed the dual cameras on the back but you also get two cameras up top here at the front - selfie cameras and these are just for portrait mode selfies and I was hoping I was hoping one of them would be a regular camera and one of them would be a super wide-angle selfie camera so you could take super wide angle selfies without having to do some corny stitching effect but no this is just the same focal length slightly separate from each other to do better blur and bokeh for portrait mode the actual bokeh effect isn't actually any better than average I don't think something like a pixel or a galaxy s 9 or an iPhone are still hit or missed the same way this one is with hair and faces but it does a decent job the main advantage which we also see with Samsung with a single camera but the main advantage is you can control the amount of background blur after you take the photo so that's nice plus all the other interesting stuff HTC usually throws in the selfie camera they're kind of like Samsung they feel they need to go crazy with beauty mode there are many different things you can do to your face in beauty mode but you may or may not ever use those but yeah those are the main unique things about the zone that may not be obvious from the second you pick it up I'd say the rest of this phone is normal for 2018 it's a flagship that checks a lot of boxes it has high-end specs and a pretty conservative but likable design its IP 68 water-resistant which is great the fingerprint reader is on the back in the middle again right where it should be excellent use of space high it has a micro SD card expansion slot and it really has a lot of what people have been asking for no notch thin side bezels great build great display high-end specs quality camera etc the only thing that's really missing is the headphone jack even the dual speakers are a nice upgrade that's not boom sound or anything but it's the one at the bottom plus the earpiece doubles as a front-facing channel so you're not gonna accidentally block your audio very easily with this setup and they do get loud and sound full and then it has a thirty five hundred million power battery which sounds like it should be plenty but it's definitely not it could have something to do with the display so it is a 6 inch 28 80 by 1440 Super LCD panel will work it has something to do with H see software but I'm basically barely getting a day out of it when I thought I'd be getting a day-and-a-half easily it charges quick and that's nice there's no wireless charging like I said but that's not a deal-breaker for me I just wish the battery life was better to begin with maybe software can be improved maybe a software update can actually make that better so that just leaves us with the software and the camera the software is HTC Sense so it's about what you'd expect and the camera is pretty good so HTC Sense UI is on top of Android 8.0 Oreo and hopefully with Android P coming very soon and I've never had a problem with HTC Sense really it's never been my favorite skin on top of Android but it's also been pretty tame for a while you still have blinkfeed to the side of the homescreen you still get all these fancy looking icons with these shadows now and everything there is a customizable second panel next to the navigation bar for shortcuts which is pretty cool but you can't add app shortcuts I wish I could add a custom app down there if I wanted but that would have been even cooler they added face unlock which everyone seems to be doing now but I still prefer this phones fingerprint reader which is great and there's even a smart rotate feature which I love which keeps the phone in portrait mode at all times when it knows it's being gripped in portrait mode but lets it rotate when it's not being gripped that way I think that's really cool so it's mostly what you're used to from HTC here pretty quiet just tossing in a couple things here and there over the last couple years you can still phim it but there's no radical design changes here it's it's about what I expected and then on the back the camera or cameras like I said are pretty good so you're getting a 12 megapixel main shooter with F 1.75 aperture with optical image stabilization and your secondary is a telephoto 16 megapixel shooter f 2.6 with no OIS and the photos I've been taking they're not quite the best in any smartphone but they do fit right in here with I would say a top 5 good detail and color and even a shallow depth of field and a kind of nice looking bokeh if you get shallow enough I think the cameras biggest flaw is that it tends to overexpose making things a little bit too bright and you'll notice it doesn't have the best dynamic range so you might lose a little bit of highlights but overall I'm sure automatic metering can be adjusted and you can always do manual metering easily with slider so I'm just being picky I think this is a sneaky top five smartphone camera right now I think right now you're clear top dogs are pixel to iPhone ten and then this falls right in line with like Galaxy S nine and I'd say better than one plus six so yeah overall right now is a packaged HTC u12 plus is a flagship worthy of your consideration you know it's SPECT like a flagship it's definitely built like a flagship and it's price like a flagship but as an overall package it feels like this this phone is like almost there it's it's I mean I guess if you're a super anti notch if you're one of those people that left a comment saying this phone has a notch so I'll never buy it then I guess your choices are like this and galaxy s 9 because this is one of the few phones without enough but other than that this phone legit checks a lot of boxes with a thumbs up and really only fall short in the buttons and the battery life like these buttons I'm just barely okay with like I'm used to them now but I feel like I'm not gonna be happy about them in two or three years but they are what they are but it's the subpar battery life you got to think about and that experience that all comes with it and I think HTC is not always tops or first to update their phones to the new OS but fingers crossed they get to Android peace soon like they seem to have promised counting on you guys anyway that's it that's HTC u12 plus you think you could rock a phone with no real buttons let me know what you think in the comments below I'll be hanging out there answering questions of course as usual thank you for watching doc together the next one peace