Gadgetory

well this is David with the verge and this is the HTC One basically this phone is HTC's hail-mary the company's been in rough shape for a long time and it's hard to say how many more chances it's going to get to make a real dent in the smartphone market the one is HTC pulling out all the stops trying to prove it can really be relevant again it has some remarkable specs some impressive features but how can it compete so let's start with the hardware the one is gorgeous full-stop the 1x last year was one of the best designed and best made phones we'd seen and the one bests it in every way it's light and thin but it's matte aluminum body still feels really sturdy and strong the back curves ever so slightly and the chamfered edges sloped down toward the front of the phone so the whole handset kind of just Nestle's into your hand the phone's back and edges are pretty minimalist they're silver with white accents plus beats and HTC logos and there's only one port a micro USB that doubles as micro HDMI on the bottom the power button is on top which is a little awkward to reach on a phone this big but at least there's a good reason there's an IR blaster built-in to the power button which lets you use your phone to control your TV the software for doing that isn't great but it does work and it's a handy feature to have there's a little more going on on the front of the phone there are speaker grilles on the top and bottom which both look cool and sound awesome they create a really nice stereo effect as you hold the phone sideways and they're a lot louder than most phone speakers I think the rules don't apply to you as you disagree with some free watch there's some beats software at work here and it does make a noticeable difference though it's basically just adding a low-end to whatever you're listening to but the star of the show here is the 4.7 inch 1080p display in between those speaker grilles with tiny black bezels on either side 1080p displays aren't exactly novel anymore we've seen similar displays on the droid DNA the sony xperia z and the like but this one is every bit as good and even a little sharper since its 4.7 inches instead of five like the other devices colors are great text looks fantastic viewing angles are really good the screen is not super bright and it can be tough to use outdoors but this is otherwise one of the best smartphone displays out there there are two buttons below the screen flanking an HTC logo you get home and back and for some reason there's no multitasking button that's fine you just double tap the home button to get to the multitasking menu and long press to get to Google now but the buttons are really awkward to press unless you hold the phone in two hands just because they're located off to the sides the one is running Android 4.1.2 which is already outdated software and is missing some of the nice Android 4.2 features and as always it's skinned by HTC's Sense software HCC's tone sends down a lot over the years but it's still pretty unmistakable and HTC has even done some new things in this version the most obvious new thing here is blinkfeed which is basically Flipboard for your home screen HCC's theory is that you want quick at-a-glance news on your phone so it puts a scrolling customizable news ticker right on your home screen you pick a bunch of news sources or connect Facebook and Twitter and just watch the news roll in it works and it's a fairly handy thing to have I guess but it really just feels cluttered and makes using the one kind of exhausting plus without that much work you could just use Twitter and Flipboard widgets to create an even better system in settings you can change it so you have a more normal homescreen and then the blink feed set up one screen to the left and I actually found that was a pretty perfect setup there are a couple of other quick changes worth making on the phone too by default the app drawer only shows nine apps at a time which is just a huge waste of space on such a high res screen you can make it slightly denser and you should you should also sort apps alphabetically which just makes things easier to find with some effort those things work well but a few things about cents continue to be kind of a mess take the people app for instance you can get around by swiping through tabs in the holo interface or you can tap on the header to switch or you can tap on the other header to pick your sources there are just too many ways to do everything too many steps in you have to remember and it just gets confusing there are also a few ugly icons and font choices which make the one feel like a toy when it's really much more than that otherwise in a lot of cases HDC seems to be changing things for the sake of changing things but one place that's definitely not the case is the camera instead of going for more megapixels the one has what HTC calls an ultra pixel camera which is a custom sensor that's essentially a four megapixel camera but with much larger pixels that means in theory that the camera can take in a lot more light at once and even though you're getting slightly smaller photos HTC doesn't think you'll care that much this approach is good and bad on the plus side low light performance is excellent I got shots in low light but the iPhone 5 just couldn't and this is definitely as versatile in that sense as a camera like the Lumia 920 there's also optical image stabilization which helps in bad light so the shutter can stay open longer but the downside is that you get noisier softer photos there's a lot of processing happening with each photo which leads to a lot of softness and sort of mushy photos and even in great light photos don't feel particularly sharp the photos look great at Facebook or Instagram sizes and in fairness HTC's betting that's all you want to do and that's probably accurate there are a lot of internal filters and settings for the camera but the coolest one by far is called Zowie basically it takes one second video before you press the camera shutter and three seconds after and then lets you scrub frame by frame through the video to pull out exactly the shot you want it it works great and really helps undo their shutter lag problem every smartphone has the cameras are trade off its photos aren't as sharp as some of its competitors particularly at larger sizes but there are a bunch of cool features and you really can just get shots you couldn't otherwise the one runs Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor with 2 gigs of RAM and it's just off the charts even intensive games almost never lagged or dropped frames and except for a few pervasive Android issues like scrolling which is for some reason still jumpy on every Android device it's as good as I've seen it's kind of overkill honestly since a quad-core processor is really beyond what you need and what any software is tuned for and the performance isn't noticeably better than any other high-end phone but that's obviously not a bad thing and it does work really well call quality and reception are about what you'd expect noise cancellation was actually really good on the one picking up less background noise than the iPhone or other Android phones I tested but it's not a huge difference I didn't get to test the LTE version but this unlocked European model was fast and on a team when you look at the ones spec sheet from the superfast processor to the big and high res screen it seems impossible that the one would get good battery life and it is impossible the one will last a full day but only with really light use and some serious optimization in more practical use you're going to want to keep a second charger with you at all times after I spent about 10 minutes demoting blinkfeed fixing the app drawer and installing a third-party keyboard I kind of fell in love with the HTC One actually I fell in love with it the moment I took it out of the box but with a little work it became not only a beautiful phone but one I could actually use to get work done there are a handful of things I still hate about Sense and the battery life is really unfortunate but I can pretty easily say this is my favorite Android phone yet of course Samsung may have something to say about that with the upcoming Galaxy s4 but as of this moment the HTC One is the gold standard for Android devices