HTC One Review: The Beauty Is a Beast

Design

The first time you see the One, there's a "Whoa..." moment. And after you hold it, and use it, that astonishment bleeds into awe. The One commands respect. From a hardware design perspective, this phone is unparalleled. It was machined from a solid block on aluminum, each piece taking 200 minutes to carve out. It's pretty light (5.04 ounces) and thin (0.36 inches) but it feels rock solid. The curved back sinks into your palm, while the slightly angled edges help you grip it.

On the front side of the device you find the Super LCD 3 screen nestled under Gorilla Glass 2. It's 1080p (1920x1080 pixels) spread over 4.7-inches, which gives it a heretofore unheard of (in a smartphone, anyway), 468 pixels per inch (PPI), which is excessive bordering on silly. Safe to say, pixels are invisible to the naked eye.

The bezels on the sides of the screen are very thin. Above and below the screen are speaker grates to give you actual stereo sound (more on that in a minute). At the top of the phone sits an 88-degree wide angle front-facing camera, so you don't fill up the frame with your gigantic face when video-chatting. HTC opted to include just two capacitive buttons—Home and Back—though I would have preferred none. The micro USB port on the bottom doubles as an HDMI port (special cable required) for connecting your phone directly to a TV, though you'll also be able to do this wirelessly via Miracast. Speaking of TV, the power button on top the the device doubles as a IR blaster for using your phone as a remote control. All of the hardware buttons are flush (almost too flush) with the phone.

There are a lot of goodies under the hood, too. There's what you'd expect in a contemporary high-end phone: 2GB RAM, 32GB or 64GB storage (unfortunately not expandable), NFC, LTE (on the U.S. versions), Bluetooth, etc. The real star of the show, though, is Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 600. It's a quad-core chip clocked at 1.7GHz, and it's an absolute beast.

There's also HTC's proprietary ImageChip 2 attached to the 4MP rear camera. Yes, just 4MP, that's not a typo. HTC claims it's a totally redesigned imaging system that uses "UltraPixels"—bigger megapixels, basically—which lets in more light. The camera has an f2.0 aperture and optical image stabilization, both of which are impressive for a phone. The battery is a 2300mAh, which is good, but I wish it had something closer to the 3300mAh battery on theRAZR MAXX HD. Then again, that would leave you with a bulkier phone.

Using It

At launch the One is running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) with HTC Sense 5.0 (the company's third-party skin) on top. Sense 5.0 is a pretty major redesign from its predecessor, and it has a lot of new features. The most prominent of those, BlinkFeed, aggregates stories from your favorite news sources and social media into a more visually appealing array of tiles, much like you'd find on Windows Phone. It takes up one panel of your desktop, and while it's the default home panel, it doesn't have to be.

There are other changes in Sense 5.0, too, like a more customizable lock screen, an overhaul of the classic HTC clock/weather widget, and a new layout in the app drawer. Visually speaking, it's cleaner, more minimalist, and more attractive than the old Sense, but it doesn't always work the way you want it to. 

The first time the phone makes a noise, it's startling. HTC has claimed that its BoomSound (i.e. the dual frontal stereo speakers with built-in amps) gives you "bigger sound with less distortion and more detail." I was sure that was just marketing jibber-jabber. It isn't. It is hands-down the best-sounding phone I've ever heard. Listening to music on a phone's external speaker is generally an awful experience. With the One, you can turn the volume way up and it still sounds excellent (for speakers that size, anyway). You can really hear it on songs that utilize the two channels separately—there's a third-dimensionality that you just can't get from a mono-speaker. It's great for gaming, too.

HTC's camera app is really nice, though it isn't as easy to switch between modes as it is on Samsung's Galaxy S IV. That said, HTC gives you a lot of granular control over the images you take, and the shutter is instantaneous. Viewing the things you shoot is much more enjoyable on the One, as the Gallery app has been revamped. It now shows automatically cut-together slideshows day by day. Basically, it gives you a little preview into the folder before you click into it which ends up being just mostly useless fun. On the video side, not only can it shoot HDR (high-dynamic range) 1080p video, but it records HDR audio. HTC claims that by using two mics tuned to different ranges (one higher, one lower), the One can cancel out distortion. Indeed, recorded audio sounded terrific for a phone camera.

Should I Buy It?

It's simply one of the most exciting pieces of hardware I've seen in a long time, including the Galaxy S IV. As of this moment, the HTC One is looking like the best Android phone you'll be able to buy for the foreseeable future.

HTC One Specs

• Network: All major U.S. carriers (except Verizon)
• OS: Android 4.1 with Sense
• CPU: 1.7 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600
• Screen: 4.7-inch 1920x1080 Super LCD 3 (468PPI)
• RAM: 2GB
• Storage: 32GB or 64GB
• Camera: 4MP rear ("UltraPixel")/ 2.1MP front
• Battery: 2300 mAh Li-Ion
• Price: $200/32GB, $300/64GB with a two-year contract