HTC One Review and Experience (for a first time Android user)

[MrTomnus]

There are two reviews of this phone on the forum already, but I felt like there were a few things they didn't mention and I wanted to go into a little more detail. The phone has been out for a while so some issues other people have had may have been addressed.

 

Having only owned an iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 in the past, I felt like it was time to switch from Apple, simply because Android wasn't quite as reliable in the past, it's made a lot of ground in the last year or so, and EVERYBODY has an iPhone where I live. I felt like being different

 

Build Quality and Design

 

Personally, I don't think I've seen a more beautiful looking phone. This thing is damn sexy! I always loved the iPhone for its design, and the HTC trumps it. An all aluminium and glass enclosure with a "zero gap" design, meaning no screws on the exterior. This gives the phone an amazing premium feel and it is great to hold. I think this is also helped with the slightly curved back of the device. It fits my palm just right (I have between small and medium sized hands). The iPhone had very sharp corners and was uncomfortable to hold for longer periods of time. I don't have this problem at all with the HTC. The speakers being on the front of the device is probably the best innovation of recent smartphones - why nobody has done this earlier I have no idea! The weight is just right and doesn't fatigue my arms when holding it for a while either.

 

I only have a couple of niggles with the design. Being aluminium on the back it is very slippery, so it's not going to rest easily on an angled surface. The position of the buttons, I find, could have been implemented better. The lock button on top is almost unreachable with one hand, but I can understand why it is on top, as it also acts as an IR blaster, allowing you to control your television with the device. The volume rocker is completely flat so is difficult to feel for sometimes.

 

Overall a very well built device. I wish every manufacturer made phones that looked like this!

 

Screen

 

The screen is one of the main things that made this phone appeal to me. With a 1080p resolution in a 4.7" display, pictures are super sharp and consuming content is a joy. Even small things like checking my Twitter feed are very nice thanks to the insane pixel density of 469ppi! It is above and beyond the iPhone's retina display, with colours being very natural looking and small text being easily legible. With the large real estate web browsing is great too.

 

Speakers

 

HTC is marketing this phone with BoomSound. While I don't quite know what that entails, I do know they sound AMAZING. The speakers work in a stereo setup and make consuming video content so much more immersive. Compared to my iPhone 5, this blows it away in terms of audio quality and volume. These things are LOUD, especially with the Beats audio setting activated. You can hear so much more detail in music, voices are less tinny, and I would even consider watching an entire movie with them. My only gripe with them is that they are too loud - the lowest volume setting is far too high, and there is no manual volume control like my iPhone had - only incremental steps. This could be fixed with software, but for now I'm sure this could be altered by rooting the device.

 

Camera

 

I haven't had a hugely enjoyable experience with the camera unfortunately. The 4 megapixel sensor is designed to collect 300% more light than it's competitors, coping with dark scenes much better. Also there is a feature called "Zoe", which takes short video clips along with photos, to animate your picture gallery. Personally I don't find this feature particularly appealing and have never used it. Coming from the iPhone, whose camera settings are hideously limited, I was happy to see a long list of scene modes and other camera options such as ISO adjustment, white balance and exposure (and video recording resolution, a feature I always wished was implemented on the iPhone) among others.

 

As far as the camera itself goes, I think I have a defective unit. Macro shots are wonderfully sharp, but the device struggles to focus on anything further than six or seven feet, producing very soft, out of focus  images. In addition to this, in darker settings the camera interprets black as either blue or purple, and when the sensor is completely covered the image turns from shades of dark blue to purple to hot pink. Altering various settings such as ISO and white balance affects this problem, and it seems setting the ISO to 400 or less alleviates the colour issue. I have contacted HTC support and they have told me the android 4.3 and sense 5.5 update to be released this week in the UK is claiming to fix this issue. If not, I am eligible to have my phone repaired or replaced under warranty. This is a huge shame considering the phone does very well in almost all other aspects. I will update this section once the phone update has been issued to confirm if this problem is fixed. Another small issue is the display brightness is always maxed out when opening the camera, which becomes annoying and I think is unnecessary. Again a software update can fix this.

 

-UPDATE-

Today the Android 4.3 and Sense 5.5 update was released in the UK. Unfortunately, the issue I have with colours in dark environments hasn't been removed. As for the issue with focus: on playing around with the camera once updated, I find it is able to focus on distant objects, although the autofocus and tap to focus is rather poor the majority of the time. I have a suspicion that the lens array in the camera is slightly uncalibrated or has been damaged, as moving the device backwards and forwards increases the sharpness of an image slightly. Obviously this is no practical fix, so I will chase HTC on this again and update here when I receive a reply.

-UPDATE-

Due to the camera still not functioning, I called HTC and asked to have my phone repaired. They got me to send it to their repair centre and the whole process took about 4 days - UPS made it a bit longer because it was stuck in the warehouse for a while... Anyway, I now have my phone back and the camera is completely fixed! No more pink hues in dark scenarios, and I took some beautiful shots of the setting sun earlier this afternoon and they look completely in focus! Safe to say I'd be happy to recommend HTC to anyone after a smooth service.

 

Phone Stuff

 

Obviously a phone has to do its designed purpose well. The HTC One passes well. Signal reception is excellent - I can always maintain a DC-HSDPA or HSPA+ connection, living in a semi rural area. 4G isn't widely available in the UK, but 3 is rolling it out starting in late November, free of charge, so I will hope to take advantage of that soon. Call quality is admirable, but not amazing. Voices sound clear but there is a robotic quality to them sometimes. This could be blamed on my carrier or the caller's device though. I haven't experienced a single dropped call.

 

Software

 

HTC has redesigned their Sense skin for the One, and I have to say I love the look. The interface is very slick, performance is great and nothing is overly complicated. I found moving over from iPhone very easy (despite a bug in iMessage that meant my iPhone owning friends were still sending texts via iMessage. However this was a problem on Apple's side and to fix it I had to put my SIM back into an iPhone - thank god my sister has an iPhone on the 3 network, I would't have been able to do it otherwise - turn iMessage off while signed into my iTunes account to remove my number from the database then put the SIM back into my HTC). HTC even gives the option to transfer an iTunes backup to the device, which is an awesome feature. HTC's Blinkfeed is a main feature, aggregating all of your social networks in one home screen. Like Zoe, I find this feature quite pointless as you can simply open the specific app to view its content, and it uses unnecessary processing power. An option to disable it would be welcome but sadly this is not included.

 

So far I find android 4.2.2 just right. The Play store has a lot of the same apps as the App Store, and tweaks that I could only get on my iPhone through jailbreaking are readily available for the One. The only things I find that are bad are process management and ease of access to settings. Many settings are fragmented and different implementations are used for various applications, and there is quite a bit of jargon which I find difficult to understand sometimes, while I would prefer a more universal way to access, for example, power saving settings and mange the processes on the phone.

 

In addition I find the device runs quite warm under normal use (browsing with Chrome, using the camera and emails) which would happen on a smaller scale with my iPhone. Again, hopefully the 2.3 update will fix this and I will update this post accordingly.

 

-UPDATE-

The 2.3 update hasn't improved the heat problem, but it is still useable.

 

Battery Life

 

Similar to the camera, battery life hasn't been hugely impressive yet. My iPhone 5's was appalling - I averaged just six hours of use on a full charge, which included checking Twitter and Facebook frequently, no calls, one or two YouTube videos, messaging over 3G and some infrequent browsing. This was another reason why I switched. The HTC fairs only slightly better than the iPhone 5. With a bigger screen and powerful processor you might expect a device like this to use a lot of power. I can get from 9am to 5pm before the battery dies, but I have been using it quite frequently as it's new. This is with the power saver feature enabled and no user background processes. Again the imminent update, I hope, will fix this. Unfortunately for some the battery isn't user replaceable, but I have never carried more than two batteries with me so this isn't an issue.

 

Conclusion

 

Overall, I do love this phone. Its shortcomings are noticeable, but aside from the battery, can all be fixed with software. The pros are enough for me to highly recommend this phone to anyone looking for a very capable device which will easily last two years. Is it better than an iPhone? I think it's subjective. If you know your way around tech (which if you're on this forum you most likely do) then the HTC One is a great choice for new Android adopters. If you need an extremely simple interface that does a lot of the hard work for you, the iPhone is probably a better choice, if you can live with the smaller screen and bottom facing speaker. The hardware is excellent for a phone of this price range, it's just a shame the software has let it down slightly. 

 

Feel free to leave your comments below

[sperkowsky]

i have been looking a lot at this phone being a long tie iphone user. I own an android tablet and it doesnt feel very intuitive and clean compared to apple devices so Idk where i stand

[Freaky_spider]

i find it to have good battery life, i also find the costumization of android really good, maybe if you'll dive deeper you'll see if something doesnt appeal to you software wise, you can almost always change it

very good writen and injoyable to read

[MoYo]

i have been looking a lot at this phone being a long tie iphone user. I own an android tablet and it doesnt feel very intuitive and clean compared to apple devices so Idk where i stand

My situation is excactly the same, my friends and family use android phones but it just doesn't appeal me very much. My iphone 4 is getting slow but I don't have the money to upgrade to a 5s as I have spend all my money on my pc waiting for the iphone 6 I guess

[sperkowsky]

My situation is excactly the same, my friends and family use android phones but it just doesn't appeal me very much. My iphone 4 is getting slow but I don't have the money to upgrade to a 5s as I have spend all my money on my pc waiting for the iphone 6 I guess

yeah i like apple and respect their build quality and the cleaness of there ecosystem even though im a pc guy i dont have to hate the whole company i mean they have engineered a lot of new things regardless of what people say

[MrTomnus]

i have been looking a lot at this phone being a long tie iphone user. I own an android tablet and it doesnt feel very intuitive and clean compared to apple devices so Idk where i stand

I was looking at android quite recently too. It was actually when Linus talked about his HTC One on the WAN show that I warmed to the idea of owning one.

 

As for your Android tablet, it completely depends on the manufacturer of the device. Different companies put their own spin on android, unlike iOS, so some devices can be completely different. In the HTC's case the interface is very easy to navigate. I'm never left wondering what to do, but it took a little bit of time to get used to using different gestures to complete different actions. I'd advise you have a good play around with an HTC one, if you can find one, to see if you like it or not. I am very glad I switched. Though Apple makes it hard for you to move over to Android, you can in fact sync your mail, calendar and contacts with iCloud with a little bit of info on the internet.

[MrTomnus]

i find it to have good battery life, i also find the costumization of android really good, maybe if you'll dive deeper you'll see if something doesnt appeal to you software wise, you can almost always change it

very good writen and injoyable to read

Thank you for the kind words - coherence is something I try to focus on when writing so it's nice to see it recognised Yeah, being new to android I still haven't fully realised the level of customisation that's possible. I think my time with the phone will get a lot better as I play around with it!

[needmorewood]

root and install GPE based rom. u may love it even more

[MrTomnus]

root and install GPE based rom. u may love it even more

Thanks for the advice, I'll have a look!

[needmorewood]

Thanks for the advice, I'll have a look!

oh and the camera in the GPE custom roms are ussually better. might fix the issue u have

[MoYo]

yeah i like apple and respect their build quality and the cleaness of there ecosystem even though im a pc guy i dont have to hate the whole company i mean they have engineered a lot of new things regardless of what people say

I fully agree but they are also (a little) overpriced:€700 for the cheapest iphone 5s is just too much. Hope to be able to sell my iphone 4 for and get a iphone 6 when it launches (or 5s).

[GIJew]

Its peculiar that you're battery life is so low...

On moderate to high-usage mine can go for at least 10-12 hours.

[Andrew0472]

i lightly use the phone and get around two days however if apple comes out with a larger iphone and a better battery i would switch back instantly. The htc one is built nice but i think its safe to say apple have build quality down by a mile 

[MrTomnus]

i lightly use the phone and get around two days however if apple comes out with a larger iphone and a better battery i would switch back instantly. The htc one is built nice but i think its safe to say apple have build quality down by a mile

Yep, me too. I don't like their attitude in that they think their form factor is the only and the best one. I'm in agreement with them that huge screens are ridiculous for a phone but 4 inches is a little too small.

And that's the main reason why I got the iPhone - for the built quality. But the design was becoming too samey.

[Andrew0472]

Yep, me too. I don't like their attitude in that they think their form factor is the only and the best one. I'm in agreement with them that huge screens are ridiculous for a phone but 4 inches is a little too small.

And that's the main reason why I got the iPhone - for the built quality. But the design was becoming too samey.

i find 4.7 inch displays perfect. The issue with the htc one is consistency with the build quality, they just aren't that consistent where as apple in my opinion are very very consistent.