Gadgetory

nobody's made Android phones longer than HTC and from the g1 to the one it's always done good work even when it hasn't been hugely successful but for all HTC is done in the Android universe it's new phone might be its most important yet this is the new HTC One technically it's the one parentheses m8 and I keep calling it the one too but everyone's going to know it as the one it's sort of appropriate that it has the same name too because it's not exactly a huge shift HTC got a lot of things right last year and it's left those things mostly alone while trying to fix what went wrong before the phone is still incredibly well made and attractive though it's a little more subtle this year it's a little more rounded and made of a slightly softer metal it doesn't feel or look quite as impressive but it's much more comfortable its back now wraps around the sides giving it a sort of unibody feel like there's a metal out there that just naturally curves this way the phone's a bit taller than last year's model mostly to accommodate a slightly larger 5-inch screen but it doesn't feel any bigger than the old one that screen is gorgeous by the way a 1080p display with perfect color representation and fantastic viewing angles it may not be the most pixel dense display on the market but it's every bit as good as I need it to be the one comes in a beautiful silver and a hideous gold plus a brushed metal gray that's nice looking but not quite as eye-catching as the silver HTC moved the headphone jack to the bottom added an SD card slot stretch the IR blaster across the whole top of the phone and has on-screen buttons instead of sticking them below the screen one thing that hasn't changed the two big boom sound speakers on the front which still sound fantastic even better than last year is actually a little louder and fuller but this phone is more the same than different it's a little heavy extremely well made and still probably the best-looking Android phone around last year's one had two big problems chief among them it's mediocre battery life this year it's really not a problem I could get a full 30 hours out of the phone even with extremely heavy use there's also a new extreme power saving mode which basically shuts off everything but the phone texting and manual email refresh and can pretty much by itself get me through an entire night with only about 10% of the battery there's a big 2600 milliamp battery inside but the ones new Snapdragon 801 processor certainly helps too and along with two gigs of RAM it makes the phone incredibly fast I don't think I've ever had such a smooth experience with an Android phone other than maybe the Nexus 5 but that's not to say I didn't have issues with the phone HCC's send software still changes every single pixel of android and many of them are for the worse especially some of the icons and menus but HCC skin has become far more coherent than last year's with a flat design that often does look really nice everything about this phone feels like HTC is searching for something it can make commercials about there's blinkfeed the built-in newsreader that now lives one screen to the left of your home screen it's a really handy way to kill a minute or two waiting across the street and I use it a lot but it's really not meaningfully better than say Flipboard blinkfeed now integrates with Foursquare for restaurant recommendations and Fitbit for Fitness information that you can sync from either the phone's internal sensors or any Fitbit device you own both are cool add-ons but again neither is better than the apps themselves the other thing is a bunch of gestures HTC enable to make it easier to do things quickly on your phone swipe right on the screen when it's off and you'll launch straight into blinkfeed swipe left and you go home down kicks you straight to voice dialing and double tapping just turns the screen on you can even pick up the phone in landscape mode and hit the volume button and you're launched straight into the camera after a day I stopped using the power button entirely which is still irritatingly placed on the hard to reach top of the phone now here's the second thing HTC got wrong last time the camera it's much advertised for megapixel ultra pixel camera basically saw in the dark had some cool features and took bad pictures in this year that's still kind of the case the software is better than ever with a super simplified interface that also gives you lots of control over white balance filters ISO and more it's uncluttered and useful which is hard to do one of the coolest new features is the ability to focus a photo after the fact like with a light row it's using a second camera on the back of your phone to capture depth as you're capturing a photo the effect isn't quite as pronounced as with a light row but it's really cool to tap a blurry spot in a photo and watch it spring into focus HTC also still has Zoey's the sort of automatic highlight real shots that are nifty but lost my attention pretty fast the software is great and there's lots of features but the camera still isn't very good it sees in the dark yes taking photos of things where my iPhone sees only black but those photos and photos in just about any other situation are still too soft and too muddy even the five megapixel front-facing camera does better in some spots it's certainly an improvement over last year's camera but all the cool features in the world can't hide that it's photos just don't compare to the galaxy s4 or the iPhone 5s or even really the Nexus 5 depending on your carrier the HTC One cost $199 or 249 dollars with a two-year contract if you're phone shopping in the next few months that camera is my only reservation in telling you to buy the new HTC one it's gorgeous comfortable well-made and competitive in every spec and feature HTC Sense software isn't great but it's far less problematic than it's ever been and the parts you don't like can be obviated pretty quickly it's big butt so we're all flagship phones these days and my iPhone is starting to look mighty small really it's all about priorities HTC is so close and so good at so many things if it can just make a great camera it might run away with the crown for best Android phone but we can't have it all at least not yet HCC's onto something this year with the new one but I'm already waiting anxiously for next year's model