One on One with HTC One

To be honest, we weren’t really impressed with HTC’s offerings, especially after being stuck with the Taiwan tech company’s HD Mini and ChaCha (Status) for about two years. (Don’t ask. It’s a long story.) But even we could not help but revise our opinion of the company when it released One X, One X+, and Droid DNA last year. As Gizmodo’s Brent Rose puts it, these were excellent phones. Of course, now that it’s 2013, it seems that HTC is pulling out all the stops and focusing its efforts on promoting “a single dominant device: the HTC One.” To which we say, how about we take a look at the One’s specs and see if it’s as “Quietly Brilliant” as the company would have us all believe?

5 Powerful HTC Smartphones

Design

Forget about Samsung’s apparent devotion to plastic and let’s take a moment to appreciate the HTC One’s aluminum front and back, as well as polycarbonate top, bottom, and sides. Compared to the iPhone 5, it’s safe to say that the One is the first Android phone that looks just as good in terms of fit, finish, and build quality. According to HTC, “it takes 200 minutes to machine-cut each unit.” The One also features “polished chamfered edges, the spun-metal volume rocker, and the etched antennas on the back of the phone.” With the HTC One, you’ll get a handset that feels super solid – one that is thinner than the Droid DNA, but heavier than the Galaxy S III, which is—as you may have guessed it—all plastic.

HTC ONE Review

Other design features you may be interested in include: a power button, which also functions “as an IR blaster for controlling your TV or cable box” and a microUSB port located at the bottom the phone.

Performance

Under the hood, the HTC One uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core 1.7GHz processor. The One also boasts of 2GB of RAM, which you can say gives it more than enough firepower to be rightly classified as a “powerful smartphone.” But of course, you don’t have to take our word for it. If you check out the One’s score using the Antutu benchmarking app, you’ll see that it has been getting consistently high marks. Take note that the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and Google Nexus 4 only scored 13,357 and 11,884 respectively, while the HTC One clocked in at 22,000. And nope, it’s not a fluke since we didn’t just check the benchmark numbers once or twice. Suffice it to say, this phone is an awesome device for playing games and watching videos. And if you’re a big music guy or gal, you’re going to love the speakers “driven by the included Beats Audio software.”

Camera, battery life, Sense

With the One, HTC’s not messing around with megapixels and just went right ahead with larger “Ultra Pixels.” Ultra what? Well, made-up word or not, there’s no denying that the HTC One’s camera “makes for an impressive shooter…with great low-light performance (both with and without flash).  As for its battery life, the One promises “almost 17 hours of 3G talk time and lasted an impressive 8 hours and 32 minutes during constant video playback.” Remember, however, that the One has to power a Full HD touchscreen display, which could affect uptime. Now regarding Sense, HTC’s UI, the Taiwan tech company made some modifications, making Sense 5.0 more enjoyable to use. From Google’s Roboto font, to “a crisper, more simplistic layout with flatter icons,” it’s definitely a step up from the “heavier, slower, and arguably less necessary Sense v1.5.” All in all, it seems like HTC may have a winner on their hands. And we’re even inclined to say (just as soon as we’re done figuring out how to send an Internet fax (check the best phone services) on our cheapo tablet) that we may yet again try to buy another HTC mobile phone.

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