So contrary to what I said earlier, I found a deal on the HTC One that I just couldn't pass up. I am now a fan of HTC, bar their twitter feed, and an owner of the One. It was a mixture of a cheap contract and not being able to put up with my temporary phone that made my decision a pretty easy one. If I'm honest, it was a good decision. After using the phone for five days with it being rooted, I can't see myself looking over at anyone with an S4 with jealousy.
Now that I have a HTC One, I might as well review it. There are a lot of reviews for the One, but they are either too technical, focussing on just one aspect of the phone (such as the screen) or not very thorough. I'll aim to keep it simple and go through as much of the phone's features and some of the negative points, of which there aren't many.
Display
The phone has a full HD screen, very clear and sharp and for a 4.7 inch screen, it has a very high resolution. In direct sunlight, it is still relatively easy to see the screen but you may struggle a little bit even on full brightness. We don't get the sun very often in the UK so it's not a big problem but generally speaking, most phones don't perform as well as this in the sun so it's probably as good as it is going to get.
Phone design
This is one area where I cannot stress just how beautiful the phone is. In my opinion, it's much better looking than the iPhone 5. You only have to hold it in your hand to feel the build quality to fall in love with the phone. I was a big supporter of plastic phones but no more, design such as this will definitely catch people's eyes. Front speakers are also something which it is a fantastic addition to this phone. You'll find watching videos, playing games, and listening to music a totally different experience with these speakers. They also deliver very crisp and clear sound, with HTC's Boomsound technology. Many videos dotted around to show comparisons with the S3 and other phones and it's pretty incredible for playing and for recording music.
Functionality
First off, let's discuss Blinkfeed since there's no way of getting rid of it! It's not as bad as I first thought but not that useful for me either. Blinkfeed basically tries to mesh your social networks and news onto one RSS like feed so you can get everything you want from one place.
As you can see, it brings news from various media sources and merges them all together, you can scroll down for news and social updates in chronological order. It also brings up other stuff such as calendar reminders and TV shows (which you can personalise) but I do wish you could switch it off, as some people just won't find enough use for it and the amount of battery it uses is no doubt pretty high.
Next is Sense 5 which is definitely the best skin out of any Android manufacturer I've seen so far. I go as far as saying that it's better than vanilla Android and that is saying a lot. There are a lot of nice touches that Sense has that makes me need less widgets on my homescreens, one of which is the weather which is displayed at the top of your app drawer by default.
I admit that I didn't use Sense at first. I rooted the device, restored Nova Launcher and thought I was happy but then my friends wanted to see what the HTC skin looked like and afters showing enough of them, I found myself preferring it too and removed Nova and rebuilt my app and widget layouts on Sense.
HTC haven't opted for on-screen keyboards but instead left two touch sensitive buttons, the back button and the home button. The home button has the functionality of accessing Google Now and multi-tasking. Long press to get to Google Now and double press to access multi-tasking. Took me a while to figure out!
This is the multi-tasking window you see when you double tap the home button, you can swipe up apps to remove them from the list. As you can see there are just nine spaces, I haven't figured out if more than nine apps are open then would the tenth one be closed or not...?
The phone has a notification light behind one of the grills of the top speaker, but I found out the hard way that it only has one colour for notifications. So no more having personalised colours for different people, the green light just flashes when you have an email, text etc. and it's actually quite small! Bit of a shame they didn't go for a normal RGB notification light like the S3. If I had my way I would have a different coloured notification light under each grill and make them shine light a disco ball! How cool would that be?
The phone has a kid mode which restricts various different functions when enabled so that you can easily let children play on the phone. Very easy to enable and disable, I think it's a nifty feature worth mentioning for people with children.
The one thing I will mention, which isn't phone related but more web related is searching for help online will mean you'll have to sift through all other HTC phones before finding the right article, like the HTC One X or S! It can be very frustrating if I'm honest. I'm sure as time goes on, HTC One results will come up further on search engines so this might become less of a problem.
Camera
This is where HTC aren't doing themselves justice, after buying the phone I was a little disappointed that the One would not have the features the S4 has like removing passer-bys from a photo. In fact it does, using a feature called HTC Zoe, you can take a three second 'photo' and then edit the photo to remove someone using object removal. It has a whole host of other features on the camera which I have yet to fully explore but I'll definitely be using the camera on my holidays and hopefully being very happy with the results. There are a lot of comparison of photos taken on the One compared to the S4 and most are in favour of the One even if it does have 9MP less on it's camera.
Speed
2GB RAM and a very snappy processor makes running many apps at the same time a piece of cake. For so long I've had to put up with simple apps on my S3 taking more than five seconds to load up, quite embarrassing when you want to take someone's number and the contacts app is loading, many awkward situations of me staring at my phone...never again! I guess it comes with the territory of these new generation phones but it is such a relief, especially when I want to run more than three tasks at the same time. There's not much else to say here and no point doing a benchmark test, I prefer to play with a phone and see how smooth it is rather than some number on Quadrant which I can only use to show off with.
Accessories
Pretty standard here: headphones, USB cable, wall charger. The headphones are pretty good, capable of producing a lot of bass, similar to Beats headphones but without the logo. Not a surprise since the phone has Beats audio built in and HTC own Beats.
Storage and battery
The phone comes with 25GB Dropbox storage for two years and comes in 32GB and 64GB models. Moving from a 16GB phone with a 64GB memory card has been hard but I've managed it. Time to utilise the cloud! The battery is a big issue, or so I thought. The only time I remove the battery is when the phone locks up, but you can easily hold the power button to reboot so a bit of a non-issue. Apart from that, the bigger problem of replacing the battery is still there.
Overall
In my opinion, this phone is better than the S4. It's a breath of fresh air in a world of incremental updates. I hope HTC claim some marketshare for their own sake (struggling profits at the moment) as this phone is underrated and its features hidden until you try the phone for yourself. I've never been this happy with a phone and left it relatively unadulterated, which I guess doesn't mean much to people who don't know me but it is supposed to say a lot! Either way, I think this phone should be given serious consideration if you're looking to upgrade soon.
Mo
Now that I have a HTC One, I might as well review it. There are a lot of reviews for the One, but they are either too technical, focussing on just one aspect of the phone (such as the screen) or not very thorough. I'll aim to keep it simple and go through as much of the phone's features and some of the negative points, of which there aren't many.
Display
The phone has a full HD screen, very clear and sharp and for a 4.7 inch screen, it has a very high resolution. In direct sunlight, it is still relatively easy to see the screen but you may struggle a little bit even on full brightness. We don't get the sun very often in the UK so it's not a big problem but generally speaking, most phones don't perform as well as this in the sun so it's probably as good as it is going to get.
Phone design
This is one area where I cannot stress just how beautiful the phone is. In my opinion, it's much better looking than the iPhone 5. You only have to hold it in your hand to feel the build quality to fall in love with the phone. I was a big supporter of plastic phones but no more, design such as this will definitely catch people's eyes. Front speakers are also something which it is a fantastic addition to this phone. You'll find watching videos, playing games, and listening to music a totally different experience with these speakers. They also deliver very crisp and clear sound, with HTC's Boomsound technology. Many videos dotted around to show comparisons with the S3 and other phones and it's pretty incredible for playing and for recording music.
Functionality
First off, let's discuss Blinkfeed since there's no way of getting rid of it! It's not as bad as I first thought but not that useful for me either. Blinkfeed basically tries to mesh your social networks and news onto one RSS like feed so you can get everything you want from one place.
As you can see, it brings news from various media sources and merges them all together, you can scroll down for news and social updates in chronological order. It also brings up other stuff such as calendar reminders and TV shows (which you can personalise) but I do wish you could switch it off, as some people just won't find enough use for it and the amount of battery it uses is no doubt pretty high.
Next is Sense 5 which is definitely the best skin out of any Android manufacturer I've seen so far. I go as far as saying that it's better than vanilla Android and that is saying a lot. There are a lot of nice touches that Sense has that makes me need less widgets on my homescreens, one of which is the weather which is displayed at the top of your app drawer by default.
I admit that I didn't use Sense at first. I rooted the device, restored Nova Launcher and thought I was happy but then my friends wanted to see what the HTC skin looked like and afters showing enough of them, I found myself preferring it too and removed Nova and rebuilt my app and widget layouts on Sense.
HTC haven't opted for on-screen keyboards but instead left two touch sensitive buttons, the back button and the home button. The home button has the functionality of accessing Google Now and multi-tasking. Long press to get to Google Now and double press to access multi-tasking. Took me a while to figure out!
This is the multi-tasking window you see when you double tap the home button, you can swipe up apps to remove them from the list. As you can see there are just nine spaces, I haven't figured out if more than nine apps are open then would the tenth one be closed or not...?
The phone has a notification light behind one of the grills of the top speaker, but I found out the hard way that it only has one colour for notifications. So no more having personalised colours for different people, the green light just flashes when you have an email, text etc. and it's actually quite small! Bit of a shame they didn't go for a normal RGB notification light like the S3. If I had my way I would have a different coloured notification light under each grill and make them shine light a disco ball! How cool would that be?
The phone has a kid mode which restricts various different functions when enabled so that you can easily let children play on the phone. Very easy to enable and disable, I think it's a nifty feature worth mentioning for people with children.
The one thing I will mention, which isn't phone related but more web related is searching for help online will mean you'll have to sift through all other HTC phones before finding the right article, like the HTC One X or S! It can be very frustrating if I'm honest. I'm sure as time goes on, HTC One results will come up further on search engines so this might become less of a problem.
Camera
This is where HTC aren't doing themselves justice, after buying the phone I was a little disappointed that the One would not have the features the S4 has like removing passer-bys from a photo. In fact it does, using a feature called HTC Zoe, you can take a three second 'photo' and then edit the photo to remove someone using object removal. It has a whole host of other features on the camera which I have yet to fully explore but I'll definitely be using the camera on my holidays and hopefully being very happy with the results. There are a lot of comparison of photos taken on the One compared to the S4 and most are in favour of the One even if it does have 9MP less on it's camera.
Speed
2GB RAM and a very snappy processor makes running many apps at the same time a piece of cake. For so long I've had to put up with simple apps on my S3 taking more than five seconds to load up, quite embarrassing when you want to take someone's number and the contacts app is loading, many awkward situations of me staring at my phone...never again! I guess it comes with the territory of these new generation phones but it is such a relief, especially when I want to run more than three tasks at the same time. There's not much else to say here and no point doing a benchmark test, I prefer to play with a phone and see how smooth it is rather than some number on Quadrant which I can only use to show off with.
Accessories
Pretty standard here: headphones, USB cable, wall charger. The headphones are pretty good, capable of producing a lot of bass, similar to Beats headphones but without the logo. Not a surprise since the phone has Beats audio built in and HTC own Beats.
Storage and battery
The phone comes with 25GB Dropbox storage for two years and comes in 32GB and 64GB models. Moving from a 16GB phone with a 64GB memory card has been hard but I've managed it. Time to utilise the cloud! The battery is a big issue, or so I thought. The only time I remove the battery is when the phone locks up, but you can easily hold the power button to reboot so a bit of a non-issue. Apart from that, the bigger problem of replacing the battery is still there.
Overall
In my opinion, this phone is better than the S4. It's a breath of fresh air in a world of incremental updates. I hope HTC claim some marketshare for their own sake (struggling profits at the moment) as this phone is underrated and its features hidden until you try the phone for yourself. I've never been this happy with a phone and left it relatively unadulterated, which I guess doesn't mean much to people who don't know me but it is supposed to say a lot! Either way, I think this phone should be given serious consideration if you're looking to upgrade soon.
Mo
