Gadgetory

it seems like new phones are coming out every few months it's great for us to get a play with new toys but sometimes a bummer for you buy a new phone within like a week later it seems like you got an upgrade well HTC is back with their latest phone this is the bolt and it's exclusive to sprint and it's kind of a follow-up to their flagship HTC 10 with some questionable choices made but also some nice features that you might want that the 10 is lacking so let's go ahead and take a look at the phone let me know what you guys think before I jump into specs let's talk about design first its iconic HTC not just because it's got the HTC logo we can look at this phone and they've cover that out Vic is clearly HTC it's got that industrial look and industrial feel to it and the build quality looks to be really awesome they did some different things with the design here there's a lot more angles than we've had on previous devices even around the corners it's a series of different angles that sort of make it go all the way around where companies are going to prefer that more smooth look like we saw with Samsung HTC is going a different direction I think it works here as well this is a nice looking phone it's a nice feeling phone as well we've got it here in the black color but there's a glacier silver available as well in case that's your fancy all of this nice looking phone is not going to come cheap to set you back 25 bucks per month for two years for a whopping out of the door total of almost $600 what if you're doing your math at home you might know the HTC 10 is on sale for five hundred and forty nine dollars so $50 more you figure you get $50 more in the spec Department and if that $50 more in the spec Department means you want some sort of water resistance this is probably a good phone for you to pick up because it is rocking ip57 whereas HTC 10 doesn't have have anything but if you care more about Ross specs than you are going to disappoint it especially for your extra $50 on the screen you're looking at a qHD screens 5.5 inches initial impressions here it looks to be on par with other q HD screens not going to stand out from the pack as one of the best screens outside but if you want the extra resolution especially for things like a virtual reality you're going to have that here with the HTC bolt so here's where things get a bit questionable for me it's rocking a Snapdragon 810 now it's a new modified version the a-10 but it's still the a-10 you gave 10 that's been in phones for a little over 12 months now memory serves me properly so it's a bit tough to justify and that Snapdragon 810 is paired with three gigs of RAM which is a bit under what we're seeing now flagship phones have and we compare this to flagship phone because they're charging flagship prices for that's sort of my metric for what I consider relieve anything $550 and higher I consider a flagship and this one again pushing $600 32 gigs of storage are on board you have an expandable storage slot for microSD cards where HTC might have been to Fishtown the processor side they really tried to push things forward on the software side this is shipping out of the box with Android 7.0 nougat with HTC's own skin sitting on top and I love it states you see your sprint thing but there's a lot of bloatware on this phone it extends all the way to the wallpaper it's shipping with there's there's a lot of apt I didn't want to put in a folder HTC has been stepping up their camera game especially you starting with HTC 10 and that continues here with the bolt have a 16 megapixel sensor on the back with f 2.0 aperture paired with eight megapixel selfie camera on the front rather than other things we like to see boom sound so the best speaker is going and USB type-c for charging and syncing on the bottom so it appears to be a mixed bag for the bolt I love to design things like the power and lock button have a nice texture to it the fingerprint reader seems to work really well the industrial feels seems solid but questionably outdated specs so kind of hard to look past and I get it's not always about the processor and that is certainly very true now androids really been streamlined the past few years especially with 7.0 or it becomes less dependent on having raw power and a ton of RAM to run smoothly but you're charging 600 bucks as a consumer you kind of want to feel like you're getting $600 worth of phone and I'm not sure that you're getting that here with the HTC bolt there's a lot of options for that same price point from Android and of course from Apple as well so whether or not you want the bolts you're gonna come down to design water resistance and carrier your sprint you like HTC you want waterproofing then get the bolt you're gonna love it if your wish sprint maybe want the best phone for your dollar look at the whole portfolio and decide for yourself