Gadgetory

last February HTC announced the one a smartphone critically praised for its design build quality and performance but unfortunately for HTC it didn't turn into a huge sales success the company still has declining market share in profits now the company is ready to release another new smartphone also called the one we're here in San Francisco at the companies wanting Co design studio to talk to the industrial design team behind the new HTC One and to find out what HTC is bringing to the table in 2014 the new one is a refinement of last year's successful design it's softer and more coherent looking with more metal and less plastic it's a better looking phone than last year's model and it's rounder edges make it more comfortable to hold in your hand HTC wasn't content to write out a familiar design like Samsung did it built upon last year's well-received phone and made it better and really it had two HTC doesn't have the same luxuries as Samsung the screen has been bumped up to five inches though it's still 1080p resolution and the entire phone is a little bit taller as a result the display looks really great as wide viewing angles great color reproduction and no visible pixels the phone itself is upgraded on the inside too with a Snapdragon 801 processor bigger battery two gigabytes of RAM and 16 or 32 gigabytes of storage both the new one and the model before it were designed right here in San Francisco by one and company the firm the HTC purchased in 2008 and turned into its own internal design studio before that one and Co was involved in a variety of projects everything from digital cameras and smartphones to furniture and even snowboard boots I run the user experience and industrial design teams at HTC which is basically it's comprised of essentially three locations there's the Taiwan team obviously that's where our headquarters is so we have a fairly substantial and user experiencing there we have the team here in San Francisco primarily industrial design although there are a few user experienced people and then my head of user experience is based out of Seattle so drew Bamford is vice president of user experiences based out of Seattle I think one thing you don't realize as a consultant is how much happens on the back end and how many leaps and hurdles and travails you have to kind of get through inside of corporations so I think that's it's very rewarding when something comes out if I think about the HTC one last year having that focus having moved inside of HTC having that focus really let us deliver and just a really remarkable phone last year's model debuted HTC's ultra pixel camera to varied successes and this year the company is once again betting big on the ones camera the new one has a secondary sensor on the back that accompanies the for megapixel camera it acts a lot like a light row camera providing depth information to do things like refocus images after the fact or give pictures of 3d like effect we essentially use a stereoscopic optics system that allows us to basically define or assign range to every pixel what that allows to do is then take that information we can actually reinterpret that for various applications when you were developing this camera and coming up with these concepts and the ideas did you see a need in the marketplace that you know people wanted to be able to refocus their promote Oh after the shot or was it just kind of like this can do this and it's really cool and you know what we're gonna throw it in there and it's gonna be fun focusing your focus actually is an issue extremely fast autofocus you know that needs probably been met one of the sort of big shortcomings that we felt in the optics in smartphone cameras is because the extremely small TTL that the absolute necessity having a thin optic stack is that you can't get those sort of the gorgeous shallow depth of field shots so you can actually no use that information it's like super compelling portraits or actually replicate the sort of thing you'd get from extremely essentially unattainable glass you know a small thing HTC tells us ed it's also completely revamped sense for the new one it runs on top of Android 4.4.2 and features various color coding for different types of apps the entire OS feels cleaner and flatter and things like the camera app interface have been simplified and cleaned up a lot blinkfeed has been expanded with data from Foursquare and the one now has built-in Fitbit integration to track your steps and movement throughout the day the one can also be woken up with a double tap on the screen and there's gestures right from the lockscreen to launch apps or go directly to your homescreen HTC is also debuting a basic flip cover case for the one called dot view it has a grid of holes that see through to the ones display letting you see time weather or notifications with just a glance it's whimsical and fun and injects a little bit of personality into the device but more importantly it also gives HTC yet another marketing point like Zoe and blinkfeed and boomsound and ultra pixel the company wants people thinking about and talking about its phones you mentioned that you learned some things from last year's model and applied it into this year maybe could you get more specific into that initially we had some supply issues that's we've now the supply chain is up and running and we've solved a lot of those those issues and so that's that's one of the big things just operationally we're able to execute on it number two is if you think about just going from 70 and 90% there's another antenna breakthrough that's happened there where we can actually have even more metal on the product we don't have to have that plastic sidewall anymore we can actually bring the metal all the way up to the front surface of the phone and it's actually I mean it's quite challenging a lot of people don't know this but there's more than 10 super sensitive antennas inside these phones so somehow you look at this phone you're like where where are those antennas actually broadcasting or are they actually coming through as much as there is to like with the new ones Hardware design and really it is nice hardware wasn't a problem for the company last year HTC is far enough behind Samsung and Apple at this point that shooting for the stars probably is in its best strategy the company could carve out a comfortable third place position much like how Microsoft is trying to do with its Windows Phone platform the third place is dangerous it frequently means that customers aren't necessarily thinking about your product when they walk into a store HTC can't afford to wait for customers to be pleasantly surprised and they pick up the one that strategy didn't work last year and it likely won't work this year competing with Samsung's marketing machine is by no means easy but it's what HTC has to do the road ahead is an uphill battle