HTC One review: To rule them all

22 March 2013.

Introduction

Voted Manufacturer of the Year in 2011 by the GSMA and emerging as the top US smartphone vendor later that year, HTC hit a rough patch and was struggling to find form through the better part of 2012. Complacency, fatigue, or something else - we don't even want to think arrogance - the company somehow forgot that even great products, which the One X and One S certainly were, need proper support and marketing to sell.

At the speed smartphones are evolving, a bad year can cause all sorts of trouble and HTC had to learn it the hard way. Fortunately, the financial trouble seems to have had no impact on the company's ability to produce excellent smartphones, as the HTC One is here to prove.

Arguably one of the most exciting pieces of smartphone design in recent times, the HTC One is also properly powered and flaunts a screen that should please even the most demanding eyes. It also brings an overdue redesign of the Sense UI and a new camera that takes a completely new approach to mobile photography.

Key features

Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support; 3G with HSPA; LTE
4.7" 16M-color 1080p Super LCD3 capacitive touchscreen with 469ppi pixel density
Android OS v4.1.2 Jelly Bean with Sense UI 5.0
Quad-core 1.7 GHz Krait 300 CPU, 2 GB RAM, Adreno 320 GPU; Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset
4 MP autofocus "Ultrapixel" camera with 1/3'' sensor size, 2Âµm pixel size; LED flash
1080p video recording @ 30fps with HDR mode, continuous autofocus and stereo sound
HTC Zoe
2.1 MP front-facing camera, 1080p video recording
Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA; Wireless TV out
GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS
32/64GB of built-in storage
MHL-enabled microUSB port
Bluetooth v4.0
NFC
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
Aluminum unibody
Front-mounted stereo speakers with BoomSound tech
Class-leading audio output

Main disadvantages

4MP camera has disappointing performance in good lighting conditions
Non-expandable storage
Awkwardly-placed and uncomfortable power button
Sense UI still lacks connectivity toggles in notification area
Non user-replaceable battery
Poor video and audio codec support out of box

The One is a tempting package indeed and even though it will take HTC a while to get out of the slump, this is certainly a confident step in the right direction. With proven performers in both the computing and screen departments, it's only the low camera resolution that will potentially raise doubt. HTC say the extra-large "ultrapixels" are worth the sacrifice though, and we are as keen as you are to find out if that claim is justified.

With a spec sheet like that, the One has nothing to fear when it takes on the likes of the Xperia Z and the Galaxy S4 in the battle for the ultimate flagship. Here's hoping that it delivers on the promises in real-life performance.

As the tradition goes, we start with the unboxing and hardware checkup right after the break.

Retail package is par for the course

The HTC One comes with the standard set of accessories to look for in a smartphone's retail box, premium or else. A pair of headphones (the cool looking red earbuds are a nice touch) is joined by an A/C adapter to use with the supplied microUSB cable.

There's also an HTC-branded SIM eject pin in case you need to swap microSIM cards. Since the HTC One doesn't have a microSD slot, there's obviously no memory card in the package. The base version has 32GB of internal storage, which should be more than enough for the majority of users.

Design and handling

The combination of metal and glass gives the HTC One a premium feel that few other smartphones can match. The handset is an instantly recognizable HTC device following the design philosophy of its predecessors, but is clearly more sophisticated than any of them - without being overdesigned.

The exquisitely built HTC One wouldn't look out of place in a luxury phone shop alongside Vertus, Mobiados and the likes. Even the glass-clad Sony Xperia Z, which oozes with style, can't match the compelling simplicity of the HTC One. The Apple iPhone 5 probably comes the closest, but its design is starting to get a little played out and there's way too much bezel at the front.

The HTC One is a bit narrower than the HTC One X, which makes its handling a bit easier. A slimmer waistline might have helped even further, but let's not get greedy. To put things into perspective though, the Galaxy S4 about the size of the HTC flagship (slimmer, and a tad shorter) and has a larger screen at that.

Controls

Things on the front have been moved around a bit. The face of the One is split into three - the massive middle section is the Gorilla Glass 2 covered screen, with strips of aluminum on both sides. The latter house the stereo speakers with BoomSound tech. A strip of glass right below the screen keeps the two capacitive keys, Back and Home. Long-pressing the home button launches Google Now, while a double tap brings up the task switcher. There are no dedicated Menu and App switcher keys.

To make up for the missing Menu key, there are gestures throughout the Sense 5 interface (swipe down in the App Drawer or the BlinkFeed homescreen. On the pre-release units we tested there was an option to set a long press of the Back key to act as "Menu", but this is not available on our review unit.

Above the screen is the front-facing camera, plus the ambient light and proximity sensors. The top speaker takes the role of an earpiece during calls.

Display

The HTC One has a brilliant 4.7" Super LCD3 screen, not a 5-incher, which is becoming the flagship standard. The One's screen is 12% smaller than the 5" models, but boasts a pixel density of 469ppi, up from 441ppi.

The 300+ ppi screens of last year's flagships are pretty close to the limit, but the jump to 400+ ppi isn't about individual pixels - it was already pretty hard to see jagged edges on 720p screens but the 400+ ppi displays look smoother still. The difference between the 469ppi of the HTC One and the other 1080p screen out there (even the 401ppi LG Optimus G Pro) isn't the kind that can be easily seen. Anyway, we assume HTC were driven by a screen size they considered most usable, rather than trying to top some pointless pixel density charts.

HTC has been putting out some excellent screens recently and the One's display is just another example of this. The contrast is impressive and the viewing angles are extremely wide - there's no shift in colors and only a slight contrast loss at extreme angles.

Display test	50% brightness			100% brightness
Display test	Black, cd/m2	White, cd/m2	Contrast ratio	Black, cd/m2	White, cd/m2	Contrast ratio
HTC One	0.13	205	1580	0.42	647	1541
HTC Butterfly	0.14	173	1200	0.45	501	1104
Sony Xperia Z	-	-	-	0.70	492	705
Oppo Find 5	0.17	176	1123	0.51	565	1107
Samsung N7100 Galaxy Note II	0	215	∞	0	402	∞
LG Optimus G Pro	-	-	-	0.41	611	1489
Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III	0	174	∞	0	330	∞
Nokia Lumia 920	-	-	-	0.48	513	1065
LG Optimus G	0.14	197	1445	0.33	417	1438
Apple iPhone 5	0.13	200	1490	0.48	640	1320

The screen is laminated too, for a maximum close fit between individual layers, bringing the image as close as possible to the surface of the glass.

The only area of the HTC One screen performance that is not quite perfect is sunlight legibility. It's still good, helped by its good brightness levels, but it's not quite up there with the best we have seen.

Sense UI 5 centered on BlinkFeed

The HTC One runs Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, but more importantly it comes with the latest version of Sense UI, 5.0. Much like Samsung, HTC prefers to add its own exclusive features to Android, instead of marching to Google's drum.

Here's a quick over

The lockscreen looks different but it is unchanged in terms of functionality. There's a clock, weather info and four (not five) shortcut slots. You can put a folder instead of an app shortcut if you need more than four apps accessible right from the lockscreen. Missed calls and incoming messages are duly displayed too of course.

There's no way to change lockscreen shortcuts independently from the ones docked on the homescreen. Many users may find that inconvenient - LG and Samsung both let you do that.

view of the HTC One interface:

The homescreen is quite different, however. The leftmost pane is called BlinkFeed and looks quite a bit like Flipboard. It aggregates posts from your social networks and stories from over a thousand news sources. You can pick what topics you're interested in and BlinkFeed will automatically pull relevant content. You can also search for specific content.

You're not stuck with BlinkFeed if you don't like it - the rest of the homescreen panes are the standard type with shortcuts and widgets and you can set one of them to the be default one (the one you get to when you tap Home). You can't remove the BlinkFeed panel altogether, though.

Benchmark performance

The HTC One relies on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset, which features four 1.7 GHz Krait 300 cores, the Adreno 320 graphics processor and 2 GB of RAM.

Snapdragon S4 Pro has a little time to stay on top but now this new configuration is reigning as the benchmark champion best. We'll still have to wait a while to see Tegra 4 and Exynos 5 Octa in action, so for now Snapdragon 600 is the best money can buy. This means that the only smartphone we have tested the One has to fear is the Galaxy S4, which offers the same chipset, but with higher clockspeed.

We start you off with BenchmarkPi and Linpack, which evaluate CPU performance in single and multi-core mode, respectively. The HTC finished third in both tests, but it was pretty close to the Galaxy S4 and LG Optimus G Pro ahead of it.

Great phonebook

The People app in Sense 5 has seen some minor changes too. Instead of clickable tabs on the bottom of the screen you get side-scrollable tabs on the top, which is a more convenient solution (and along the lines of stock Android's solution).

You get the dialer, all contacts, groups (including favorite contacts there), as well as a call log. Once again, you can reorder tabs and remove the ones that you don't need (Groups or Call history).

From a drop-down menu at the top, you can filter contacts based on where they came from - the phone's address book, Facebook, Twitter or your HTC Sense account. If an account has multiple subgroups (e.g. Gmail's groups), they can be toggled individually as well.

Selecting a contact displays the basic details: name and photo, numbers, emails and such. That's just the first tab - the other tabs hold further details and means of communication, including email and a call log.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overal score
Sony Xperia Z	60.1	58.3	61.6	Below Average
Apple iPhone 5	66.8	66.1	67.7	Below Average
Nokia Lumia 920	61.6	64.8	65.8	Below Average
HTC One X+	64.6	65.8	74.6	Average
Asus Padfone 2	57.3	66.7	77.8	Average
HTC Butterfly	69.0	70.7	77.9	Good
Oppo Find 5	70.7	67.7	73.0	Good
HTC One	69.3	66.6	75.9	Good
Google Nexus 4	71.1	66.6	78.8	Good
Samsung Galaxy S III	75.1	66.5	75.0	Good
LG Optimus G	74.6	71.3	82.7	Excellent

Messaging well set

Android and the HTC One are capable of handling all sorts of messages - SMS, MMS, email. Social networking is covered by several apps and widgets, and there's Gtalk, which can connect you to Google's chat network and compatible networks too (like Ovi Chat).

SMS and MMS messages are displayed in threads - you see a list of all conversations, each one is listed with the contact's photo, name and the subject of the last message, as well as a part of the actual message (you can choose 1, 2 or 3 preview lines). Tapping a conversation brings up the entire message history with that contact.

To add recipients, just start typing a name or number and choose from the contacts offered - the phone will find the contact you want even if you misspell it (e.g. "drx" matches Dexter).

The compose box covers about a fifth of the screen in portrait mode or about a third in landscape. A tap-and-hold on the text box gives you access to functions such as cut, copy and paste. You are free to paste the copied text across applications like email, notes, chats, etc. and vice versa.

HTC Zoe is a wiz at photo retouching

HTC Zoe is more advanced than any other gallery on a phone and it was made possible by the dedicated ImageChip 2 that the One uses. When you use the camera in Zoe mode, every time you press the shutter key, the phone captures up to 20 full res shots and a 3 second video (1 second before you press the shutter key and 2 seconds after). All that information is required for the advanced features of Zoe.

Video player with very limited codec support

The Video player on the HTC One has a pretty simple interface. There isn't even a dedicated app, you just pick a video from the gallery. Anyway, you get a Play/Pause button and a slider to scrub through the video, a button to launch the camera and a small square with the current time and battery charge. Those automatically hide after a few seconds, of course.

The video player can use the Beats audio sound enhancement just like the music player, which is great for watching videos. The video player supports DLNA and you can use an MHL adaptor to plug the phone into a TV.

Music player with Beats

The HTC One comes with a custom music player, which is HTC Beats enabled, of course. It can organize your music library by Artist, Album, Songs, Playlists, Genres, Podcasts or Folders (we don't see this option very often). The phone will also easily stream songs over DLNA, you're not limited to the music library you have in the internal memory.

Top notch audio quality

Update 11 April: We've identified an issue with our testing procedure that caused lower readings for dynamic range, noise level and stereo crosstalk on some smartphones. We've since rectified it and updated the scores to reflect the actual performance on the affected devices.

The HTC One audio output is almost identical to that of the HTC Butterfly, which is great news really as the former HTC flagship really aced our audio quality test. In fact the two Beats-powered smartphones offer arguably the best audio quality in the smartphone world right now.

The HTC One did great in the active external amplifier part of the test, posting great scores all over the field. In addition it had volume levels higher than all of its direct competitors, save for the aforementioned HTC Butterfly, which it only matched.

More impressively, there's next to no degradation when you plug in a pair of headphones. The stereo crosstalk rises a tiny bit, but that's the only affected reading. Volume levels remain at the same high level, too. This is the second smartphone in a row where HTC makes the Beats audio logo stand for something other than a simple equalizer, but as we said last time, the wait was probably worth it.

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
HTC One	+0.11, -0.14	-92.4	91.2	0.0012	0.013	-92.4
HTC One (headphones attached)	+0.16, -0.07	-92.1	90.9	0.014	0.055	-70.8
HTC Butterfly	+0.13, -0.29	-82.5	82.3	0.0090	0.022	-80.8
HTC Butterfly (headphones attached)	+0.16, -0.24	-82.3	82.1	0.0094	0.042	-59.7
HTC One X	+0.02, -0.08	-82.1	82.1	0.137	0.393	-80.7
HTC One X (headphones attached)	+0.10, -0.10	-80.6	80.6	0.174	0.459	-60.8
Sony Xperia Z	+0.11, -0.10	-81.9	82.1	0.043	0.041	-81.3
Sony Xperia Z (headphones attached)	+0.62, -0.09	-81.7	81.5	0.204	0.249	-56.4
BlackBerry Z10	+0.16, -0.29	-82.8	82.6	0.010	0.022	-80.5
BlackBerry Z10 (headphones attached)	+0.18, -0.28	-82.7	82.7	0.014	0.059	-45.3

FM Radio and TuneIn Radio

There's an FM radio, which has a pretty simple interface. It automatically scans the area for the available stations and allows you to mark some of them as favorite. It also supports RDS and allows loudspeaker playback.

Aside from the headphones or loudspeaker choice you also get Mono sound if the reception is poor. There's no Beats enhancement here, however, not is there a playback control card on the lockscreen.

Camera features and UltraPixels

The HTC One comes with a camera that's unique in the smartphone world. It's only the second smartphone to feature optical stabilization and it's the first to use a new design which involves photosites that are three times as big as those on a 12MP size. However, since the sensor is equally sized to a 12MP sensor, it only gets to capture a third of the resolution. In HTC marketing talk these larger photosites are calls UltraPixels.

The ultrapixels are bigger than you would get on all other current cameraphones. The Nokia N8 had 1.75-micron pixels, while the 808 PureView and the iPhone 5 both have 1.4-micron pixels. So, each pixel in the HTC One camera is twice the size of a pixel in the 808 and iPhone 5 cameras.

Bigger pixels mean lower noise levels and usually, better dynamic range. Low-light performance is also helped by the Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) as we saw on the Nokia Lumia 920.

The sensor used in the HTC One has a 1/3" diagonal with a 16:9 aspect ratio and it's mounted behind a 5-element lens with F/2.0 aperture. The sensor takes 16:9 photos with 2688 x 1520 pixel resolution, while switching to the traditional 4:3 aspect ratio limits the maximum resolution to 2048 x 1520 pixels, or just over 3MP.

HTC has included a second-generation ImageChip to process the images captured with the camera and also handle the needs of HTC Zoe.

The HTC One continues the trend of using a unified camera interface for stills and video. We didn't like it all that much on the One X and its siblings, but it makes much more sense here. Since the default resolution of the still camera now matches that of the videos - 16:9, so you don't need to worry about framing different aspects on the same viewfinder.

The only remaining complaint is that all still and video settings get dumped into one menu, instead of just getting the relevant settings depending on the current mode, but we can live with that.

Camera interface and image quality

Update, April 30: We've updated our HTC One unit with the latest firmware. It promises to bring improvements over the camera image quality, so we have taken the HTC One camera for a spin once again and changed all the samples. We've also updated the text below to reflect our new findings.

Anyway, the camera interface itself is pretty simple - there are two shutter keys (one for stills and one for video), above them is the gallery shortcut and below is the effects button. On the left side of the screen you get flash mode selector and the Zoe toggle.

Now, we already covered what Zoe does after you've taken a shot, here's how the actual shooting goes. You enable Zoe (an indicator at the bottom of the screen confirms you're in Zoe mode) and tap the still shutter key. The key turns into a progress bar, counting down the three seconds during which the phone records video, reminding you to stay relatively still.

The Optical Image Stabilization offers active correction of the image module in two axis with a frequency of up to 2000 times a second. That, combined with the F/2.0 aperture of the lens and big pixel promises unrivaled low-light performance.

So let's get down to brass tacks here - the image quality. The HTC One promises a lot but does it deliver? Well that depends on the scenario. When used in good lighting condition, the low resolution really takes its toll and while the per-pixel detail level is impressive the total resolving power is quite limited.

Colors are quite decent and images generally look pretty nice when zoomed at 100%, but we were surprised to see that a lot of noise is present. There is some purple fringing, too, so it's not perfect either. Overall, the gamble HTC took with the ultrapixels certainly doesn't pay off when in good lighting conditions. Just about every other high-end smartphone will produce better stills in that scenario.

Update, April 30:The camera samples taken with an HTC One running on the latest firmware are indeed better than the one we've taken with the initial retail unit. There is a bit more detail and the noise has also been reduced a bit. Obviously, HTC fine-tuned its sharpening algorithms, which now do a better job than before. Though the difference isn't huge and not quite enough to let the HTC One catch up with its conventional sensor competitors in good light, but it's still a welcome for anyone who plans to get the flagship.

Connectivity

The HTC One is jam packed with connectivity options and covers a wide array of network frequencies. You get quad-band GSM, quad-band 3G and market-dependent LTE support, making the One a true globetrotter.

The local wireless connectivity has Wi-Fi a/b/g/n and DLNA support (both client and server, for images, videos and music) and stereo Bluetooth 4.0.

HTC has conveniently designed a special options screen, when you connect the One with a PC. The long list of options includes Portable Wi-Fi hotspot, settings, USB and Bluetooth tethering (the phone becomes a modem).

NFC connectivity with Android Beam is present too. We found it to work hassle free with webpages and heavier items like photos.

There's no microSD card on the HTC One but the 32 gigs of onboard storage give you plenty of space (there's a 64 GB version as well).

HTC's Portable Hotspot can support up to 8 devices, you can WEP, WPA or WPA2 encrypt the hotspot and you can enable "allowed users" only to connect or leave it open for all (unsecure, but the quickest setup).

Web browser has full Flash support

HTC One comes with the latest version of the Sensed-out Android web browser. Combined with the fullHD display and potent Snapdragon 600 power inside, the Jelly Bean browser makes for an awesome time on the web.

Most of its UI is out of sight, leaving the entire screen to the web page. And even when it does appear it consists of a single bar, which now holds the address field, the Tabs and Menu dropdown shortcuts.

HTC has also thrown in some extra buttons at the bottom of the screen, which seemed to pop up when you scroll back to the top of a page, which was getting a bit annoying at times. You see sometimes those buttons appeared along with the top bar, whereas on other occasions they remained hidden when the top bar was showing.

Aside from being way too big, those mysteriously behaving buttons let you save a page in your bookmarks or reading list, view bookmarks, saved pages or tabs. You might want to enable Quick controls - they let you tap on any point on the edge of the screen and move your finger to select the desired option from a jog-dial menu.

Once you select some text, you can copy it, do a Google search with that text as the query or share the text over a message or social networking.

Google Play has all the apps

The Google Play Store features several scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. Apps usually have several screenshots (some even offer a demo video) so you can get an idea of what the app looks like before installing it. You can also check out comments and ratings, as well as the number of downloads and so on, to help you decide if the app is worth it.

Final words

So this is it - the One has brought out the best in HTC. It's sure as shooting that five different people will say that about five different HTC smartphones. And at least four of them will be right. But there're certain things that make this one the One.

There was no rush this time around to be the first to the market - HTC actually did it again but with the J Butterfly and the DROID DNA. The One on the other hand was the ace in the sleeve, HTC took their time with it, as if waiting for the magic to happen. Well, it did.

The HTC One claims no major firsts, it arrives to a market that has already experienced a couple of Full-HD five-inchers. No rabbits are being pulled out of no hats - sorry, but Zoe and ultrapixels is not what makes the HTC One special.

It's good old HTC stuff that works better than ever though. There's the best Super LCD yet, the latest Sense UI, and another wicked unibody. There are stereo front-mounted speakers and for the first time since Sensation XE Beats Audio actually means something. That one came with an actual Beats set, which fetches a hefty price on its own. The HTC One however has some of the best audio quality we've experienced in a phone, matched only by its Butterfly sibling.

There's a lot to like about Sense 5 too. The whole OS has been reworked from the ground up. Not only has every icon been refreshed, but the way you use Android has been rethought. Unlike Samsung, who aim to throw as many software features as possible in their handsets , HTC is looking to set itself apart and win you over with simplicity, character and charm. Okay, we're charmed, but let's see what else is out there.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is the pride and joy of the world's Number One smartphone manufacturer. The S4 manages to squeeze a 4.99" FullHD Super AMOLED screen, a 13MP snapper and expandable storage into roughly the same body as the 4.7" HTC One. The Galaxy S4 also comes with either a higher-clocked version of the Snapdragon 600 that powers the One, or the Exynos 5 Octa, which is expected to set new standards in processing power.

We can bet HTC is relishing memories of 2011 and trying hard to forget last year. We think the HTC One is the right phone to help them in that. It is certain to put plenty of pressure on the competition's flagships, just about as much as it's certain to turn heads.

.::TeCh PoRTaL::.

AUDIO PLAYER