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HTC One Review: The Competition Is Fierce, But HTC’s New Flagship Rises To The Challenge

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Look, it’s no secret that HTC knows how to put together a nice phone. Despite the quality of its wares though, HTC spent most of 2012 releasing disappointing earnings statements and being outflanked by much larger rivals — what’s a company to do in a situation like that? The answer, according to CEO Peter Chou, was to double down on innovation and design in hopes of creating a device that would truly resonate with consumers that were already up to their necks in Android phones. That device was the HTC One.

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Even so, plenty of questions remain. Is it really all that it’s cracked up to be? Does the One really have a chance at changing HTC’s fortunes?

To answer all of the above: yes. If you’re in a rush you can skip to my final thoughts here but make no mistake: the HTC One is the sort of device that deserves to be talked about.

  • 4.7-inch, 1080p Super LCD3 display
  • 1.7GHz Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset with 2GB of RAM
  • “Ultrapixel” rear camera, 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera
  • Available with either 32GB or 64GB of internal storage, no memory card slot
  • NFC
  • Sealed 2,300 mAh battery
  • 32GB model available for $ 199 with a two-year contract with AT&T and Sprint, while T-Mobile offers it sans contract for $ 579. The $ 299 64GB version is an AT&T exclusive.

Test notes: Sprint has provided me with a pre-release version of the One to review, and HTC has given me an unlocked international model to play with. They’re nearly identical, but I’ll point out any pertinent differences as they come up.

I was smitten with the One’s design from the moment I first manhandled the thing back in February, and that feeling has never really gone away — the One is a truly stunning device both to hold and to look at. Samsung could really learn a thing or two from these guys.

Before I get too effusive with my praise, let’s take a quick tour around the device itself. The One’s face is dominated by a 4.7-inch 1080p Super LCD3 display that’s flanked on all sides by a thin black bezel. Sitting directly above and below the display are the One’s unfortunately named Boomsound stereo speakers (a small notification LED will occasionally blink at from the top grille), and the 2-megapixel wide-angle front-facing camera rests on the top-right corner of the device’s visage.

The One’s sides and bottom are fairly nondescript — the volume rocker, microUSB port, and SIM slot are nestled along the right, bottom, and left edges respectively, while the top edge hosts a headphone jack and a sleep/wake button that doubles as an IR blaster for controlling your television.

Phew. Now that I’ve run through the laundry list, permit me to gush a bit about how the One looks.

To say that the One is understated in its design would be putting it mildly; the thing is terribly handsome in a stark, minimal sort of way. It’s worth pointing out, though, that the One isn’t actually that big a step forward from some of its predecessors when it comes to physical design. If anything, it represents the refinement of a design formula that HTC has been working on for the past 9 or 10 months with devices like the Butterfly and its American cousin the Droid DNA. Familiar elements like elongated speaker grilles, textured volume rockers, gently sloping backs, and highlighted camera pods seen in those earlier devices all make appearances on the One, but HTC has clearly upped the ante in terms of quality and construction this time around.









The first thing you notice as you pick it up is how light it is — at 143 grams it’s only a hair heavier than the Droid DNA, and (thankfully) the One’s minimal heft belies just how sturdy it feels. That’s all thanks to the device’s unibody aluminum chassis, which HTC says takes somewhere around 200 minutes for a CNC machine to carve out the One’s frame from a single block of aluminum.

That’s a considerable chunk of time for HTC to spend while some of its rivals spit out handsets like it’s nothing, but the end result is a device that feels as reassuring in your hand as HTC’s would-be savior should. That said, you still won’t want to toss the One around all willy-nilly. The white plastic polycarbonate that runs around the device is flanked on both sides by polished, chamfered aluminum edges that are prone to picking up scuffs and dings, though some people won’t care nearly as much about that as others.

Samsung could really learn a thing or two from these guys.

The One isn’t without its share of question marks, though. If you’ve used pretty much any popular Android device before spending some time with HTC One, then one little omission will probably stick out like a sore thumb. I’m talking of course about the lack of a third soft key — the company opted to stick solely with Back and Home keys separated by an HTC logo.

If you go by the company line, the choice was made in an attempt to simplify how users interact with the One. I’d actually argue that dropping that extra button is more counterintuitive than anything else since most current Android users are likely familiar with the three-button layout, but it doesn’t take too long to readjust to the two-button lifestyle.

And of course, HTC has once again seen fit to exclude a microSD card slot in its latest flagship handset. I can’t really be surprised at this point considering this is a recurring theme for HTC, and it’s not as big an issue as it was in other devices since HTC offers 32GB and 64GB versions of the One, but I’ve often looked to expandable memory as a hallmark feature of an Android device, and I’m sad to see HTC skipping them completely on its top-tier handsets.

Both versions of the One I’ve played with come loaded with Android 4.1.2, but as always, HTC has done its level best to paint over the stock UI with its custom Sense interface. The Taiwanese company has been diligently trying to trim the fat from Sense for months now with largely positive results; Sense isn’t the kludgy, overwrought beast it used to be, and Sense 5 represents HTC’s biggest leap forward to date.

Put very simply, Sense 5 looks great. Stock icons and the once-bubbly default keyboard and dialer have been designed to look flatter and less skeuomorphic, and HTC has dumped its usual font in favor of Roboto Condensed, which imbues the UI with a much cleaner vibe. The app launcher has gotten quite a facelift, too — a persistent time and weather widget lives at the top of the screen, and right out of the box you’re treated with a spacious 3×4 grid of applications. Tinkerers can easily fiddle with those particulars should they prefer a more densely packed grid like I do, and you can easily switch between ordering apps by name, recency of use, or whatever other convoluted scheme you can dream up.








Of course, some changes are more drastic than others. Take BlinkFeed for instance — in one fell swoop, HTC has decided to try and reinvent the Android homescreen. The concept is simple: the way HTC looks at it, smartphones are content-consumption devices so BlinkFeed was designed to surface content based on your interests and your social connections with as few steps as possible.

Getting Blinkfeed set up is painless enough — you can tailor your feed by selecting from some broad areas of interest (think gaming, music, politics, etc.), and by opting to receive content from your social networks, apps, and a handful of featured sources like ESPN, Vice, and Reuters (disclosure: some of Aol’s media properties are featured sources). From there, all of that stuff gets splayed out into a vaguely Flipboard-y grid for your immediate perusal, and all it takes to refresh your feed is a downward swipe.

It all makes sense on paper, but Blinkfeed in practice leaves much to be desired. Why can’t I add my own content sources? Why can’t I just turn it off rather than manually disable each content feed and switching its default homescreen status off? The likely answer to both of these questions is a familiar one: it’s all about simplicity.

BlinkFeed wasn’t necessarily designed with the power user in mind — we spoke to HTC’s Jeff Gordon just prior to the One’s launch, and he made the feature out to be a consummate time-waster, something people use when they find themselves stuck in a queue somewhere. That’s about the only time I bothered to use it to be quite honest; the rest of the time I would just fire up Flipboard or Twitter and get my content straight from the sources I wanted it from. Fortunately for me, more traditional Android homescreens are but a single swipe away, but you can only have up to four of them.

The unlocked international model doesn’t have much in the way of bloatware — just a few preloaded apps like TuneIn Radio and a Kid Mode courtesy of the folks at Zoodles — but the Sprint variant doesn’t fare quite as well. Expect oodles of carrier-loaded apps that range in quality from mildly useful (Lookout Security is nice to have around) to the nearly pointless (do we really need the Sprint Music Plus store when Google Play is right there?). Most of them can be uninstalled without much trouble at all, and those that you’re stuck with (I’m looking at you, Sprint Zone) can be easily hidden thanks to the revamped app launcher.

As you’d expect from a device that sports a cleverly-hidden IR blaster, the One also comes pre-loaded with a remote control app developed in partnership with Peel. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no TV buff, so my experience with the remote control feature was short and sweet — the setup process was over in a matter of moments, and the One succeeded in turning my television on and changing the channel and volume a few times. After popping in my zip code and selecting my cable provider, the app also provided guide data for all the shows I don’t watch. While it’s unlikely to replace your actual remote, it works like a charm and that’s frankly a lot more than I was expecting.

With the One, HTC has officially bowed out of the megapixel race. It’s easy enough to write off the word “ultrapixel” as a spurious bit of marketing fluff, but the One’s camera manages to prove that pixel size really does make a difference.

Photos taken with the One look phenomenal when viewed on the phone’s crisp 1080p display — they’re nicely detailed and colors were vivid (perhaps a little too much so, more on that later). Sadly, a bit of that impact is lost when you transfer them to PCs or televisions. The shift towards fewer larger pixels instead of more smaller ones sounds like a good idea, and it mostly is, but there’s a sort of fuzziness apparent in some of the One’s photos that keeps my support from being full-throated. I suspect it’s an issue that won’t matter to a majority of users — the results are definitely more than adequate for [insert social network name here], and I’ve found the shots the One takes are still more pleasing than many of its competitors. If anything videos seem to fare little better; my test clips were all crisp and bright, and to my surprise the microphones blocked out plenty of background noise.

Speaking of competitors, the camera sensors in most of them struggle in low light but the One manages to dodge those issues rather nicely. It’s surprisingly good at capturing light even when it’s in short supply and manages to do so without introducing much grain into the situation. It’s worth noting that the ability for the One’s sensor to pick up as much light as it does has an impact on color reproduction. Consider the comparison shot with the iPhone 5 above — the One captures more of the scene, but some details (like the tree branches in the bottom left corner of the photo) are lost because of overexposure.






As far as the Camera app itself is concerned, it remains remarkbly clean and easy to operate. Switching between the front and rear cameras takes a single swipe, popping into Zoe mode takes a single touch, you see where I’m going. Beyond the simplistic interface though is an impressing array of settings — you can muck around with ISO, white balance, timer, scene modes, face detection, and even the review duration for recently snapped photos. Honestly, I find the idea of layering filters on top of perfectly good photos to be a little ridiculous, but the One has plenty of them for you Instagram-types to fiddle around with too.

And then there are the aforementioned Zoes, those peculiar little three second video clips that HTC has started to push with the One. When I first played with the One, I was downright dismissive of the concept. I’m still not entirely sold on them, but I’ve grown just a little more appreciative of the notion. My biggest issue with them is how you’re supposed to manage the things. It’s simple enough on the One itself — the short clips are accessible from the Gallery app and you can use the HTC Share service to post them online for 180 days, but the real problem emerges when you try to pull them off the device through USB. Zoes are locally stored as very brief video snippets but as a series of stills as well, so pulling them off the One en masse feels a bit more labor-intensive than it should.


Goodness, it seems like just yesterday that finding a 1080p display on a smartphone was a rare and wondrous event. These days nearly all the major Android players have worked those sorts of high-resolution panels into their new flagship phones — just look at the Optimus G Pro, Xperia Z, or Galaxy S4 to name a few.

Even with such notable rivals to consider, the One’s 4.7-inch Super LCD3 panel is perhaps the best smartphone display I’ve ever seen. Text and high-res images were remarkably crisp (not a surprise considering the display sports a pixel density of about 474 ppi), and the colors are bright and accurately reproduced. While some displays pump up color saturation to lurid levels and others exhibit a pale cast, the One strikes a thoughtful balance between those extremes.

I haven’t noticed any distortion or discoloration despite seeking out some of the most awkward viewing angles — in short, the One’s display is a real pleasure to ogle.

One of my biggest issues with the 5-inch 1080p panel found on the Droid DNA was that it just wasn’t all that bright compared to the competition — it was perhaps the most notable miss for an otherwise impressive display. Thankfully, HTC has addressed that issue with the One. When screen brightness is cranked all the way up on both devices, the One’s display is noticeably more luminescent than its cousin and shines on the level of devices like the Nexus 4 and the iPhone 5. It may seem like a trivial upgrade, but the weather’s getting nicer and that bump in brightness has definitely helped outdoor visibility, too.

Let’s just get it out of the way now: with a Snapdragon 600 chipset and 2GB tucked away in its handsome frame, the One was able to handle every task I threw at it with aplomb. Swiping back and forth between BlinkFeed and my more traditional homescreens were utterly seamless, as was scrolling down long webpages, and crafting ornate rococo structures in Minecraft Pocket Edition. If you’re the type that prefers numbers to anecdotes, the One’s five-run Quadrant average topped out in the low to mid 12,000s, handily blowing away devices like the Nexus 4 and the Droid DNA. Running Geekbench on the thing yielded similar results: the lowest of three trials was a 2728, which puts it on top of the performance heap again… for now anyway. It won’t be long at all before other devices start to catch up in terms of pure power, but there’s little question that the One will be able to handle nearly anything you load onto it and that’s really all that matters.

All that power comes at a cost though. The One managed to stick it out for four hours and 21 minutes of our standard battery test, in which the device is made to run through an endless cycle of Google image searches over the wireless data connection with the screen lock turned off and display brightness set to 50%. Granted, less than 4.5 hours doesn’t sound all that great, but bear in mind that’s nonstop usage — in my experience, the One always managed to make it through a full work day’s worth of checking emails, firing off text messages, playing music through the Boomsound speakers, and playing the occasional game with at least a little juice left over.

I won’t dwell too much on network performance for two reasons: your mileage will almost certainly vary from mine, and Sprint can be frustratingly sketchy in my particular corner of New Jersey. In case you were itching for a dose of schadenfreude for the day, I was never able to pull speeds greater than 2 Mbps down and my upload speeds topped out at 3.5 Mbps — that’s not really the One’s fault but man, that really hurt. On the upside, call quality was just peachy on both version of the device I tested (you know, in case you actually wanted to use this thing as a phone).

I need to take a minute here and touch on one of the most impressive features HTC has baked into the One, and it may not be what you expected. I’ve reviewed my fair share of phones during my tenure here at TechCrunch, and with few exceptions they’ve all mostly let me down when it came to sound reproduction and quality. The One simply doesn’t — it’s got the best speakers on any smartphone I’ve ever used. Granted, that’s not really saying much since most smartphone speakers are downright wimpy, but the One’s BoomSound speakers managed to pump out crisp, loud audio along with a surprising amount of bass too. The jaunty bassline in Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al was bright and easily discerned, and not once during my testing did the One fall prey to the dreaded muddy audio syndrome.

I can boil the preceding 3,000 or so words into a few brief sentiments for you to chew on: the HTC One is easily the best device that the company has ever crafted, and it’s perhaps the single nicest Android phone I’ve ever used. Despite some minor faults, I haven’t so much as picked up any of the other Android smartphones scattered around my office during my time with the One unless I absolutely had to. It’s really that good.

And yet, after releasing a smartphone to near-universal acclaim, HTC’s future is still unclear. As Matt pointed out a little while back, building the perfect phone just isn’t enough anymore. These days it seems like technical expertise and the achievements that stem from them can often be overshadowed by lavish ad campaigns and the ability to churn out devices at a breakneck pace. That said, the mobile industry has never really been what you could consider meritocratic — the market is fast and unforgiving, and there aren’t many companies that have learned that lesson as clearly as HTC has.

There’s no question that the One will be facing some very serious competition in short order, but if you’re looking to pick up a new phone in the weeks or months to come it’s definitely worth your consideration. Trust me, you’ll find plenty to like here.

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Robot Challenge 2013: championship for self-made, autonomous, and mobile robots

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Robot Challenge 2013: championship for self-made, autonomous, and mobile robots

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NYFi wins NYC’s Reinvent Payphones challenge, would serve free WiFi

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NYFi payphone concept

There were various intriguing designs in New York City’s Reinvent Payphones competitors, but just one can win the ballot. Individuals have actually made their selection: NYFi will function as the motivation for street-side payphone overhauls. It’s not difficult to see why, as the proposal would theoretically fix a number of metropolitan troubles at the same time. Each NYFi center would dish out free WiFi, taking the tons off of the cellular network. It would additionally utilize open, smartphone-like software and easily versatile touchscreen hardware to consolidate numerous of the boxes that clutter the sidewalks, such as ticket equipments and bike sharing stations. We’ll accept that the gaining concept sounds a little positive to us– we wouldn’t be shocked if any finished city task fell short of the suitable. Even if we don’t get a WiFi hotspot on every edge, however, NYFi’s ultimate offshoot can be a welcome replacement for landline phones that have mostly collected dust in recent times.

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DIYRockets starts a challenge to build open source, 3D-printed rocket engines

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DIYRockets and Sunglass start a challenge to make open source, 3Dprinted rocket engines

DIYRockets believes that our possibilities of advancing space expedition improve when everybody could provide a hand. The company is putting its cash where its mouth is by launching a competition to develop 3D-printed rocket motors making use of Sunglass’ cloud design platform. Groups who register have to build an engine that could boost a nanosatellite-level payload into reduced Earth orbit using 3D-printed steel and various other safe products. The only major specifications are that developers present a great company case and open-source their productions to assist other builders. DIYRockets’reward method reflects its for-the-greater-good aspirations: there’s a$ 5,000 award advantageous motor, but there are different$ 2,500 prizes for both a pupil creation and the design that contributes the most to the sector. Registration officially starts on March 9th, and runs until April 6th, with the finished models due on June 1st. We’ll be closer to a crowdsourced vision of space when the winners are exposed by July 1st. Filed under: Transportation, ScienceCommentsSource: DIYRockets

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With The HTC One Launch, HTC Tries Apple Tactics To Challenge Samsung’s Android Dominance

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HTC revealed its newest flagship phone, the HTC One at a special press event in NYC and London today, and the drastically different design marks a departure from an approach of trying to beat various other Android OEMs (read: Samsung) at their very own game. Rather, HTC looks to be taking cues from Apple to better contend, in more methods than one.

HTC ’ s latest Android smartphone has a physical design that can ’ t aid however be contrasted to the iPhone 5. There ’ s aluminum all over the location (it ’ s a unibody framework with chamfered edges), it comes in both white and black, and a rounded rectangle look that ’ s sure to remind iPhone 5 owners of their very own hardware. It even has the iPhone 4 ′ s external cordless, edge-running antenna. And the focus this time around wasn ’ t on specifications, speeds and technical information, however on features and software: HTC ’ s tacit acknowledgement that a battle over who could develop the best Android hardware isn ’ t one it can win against Samsung. Customers need to view these gadgets as operating in various categories, with HTC doing something Samsung can ’ t or won ’ t.

The central piece of the HTC event today was everything about what the One is that all other Android phones aren ’ t. That ’ s why HTC put its “ BoomSound ” front-facing speaker system on display, highlighted the Ultrapixel camera with its low-light capabilities, and displayed the Sense 5 UI with its BlinkFeed automatic, live-updating material feeds. That ’ s why it emphasized content partners, another page out of Apple ’ s book. In many means, HTC ’ s event was more like the introduction of a brand-new mobile OS than an iteration on an Android smartphone design. The business has put a strong focus on software at previous gadget launches, but here it seemed more worried with making this about OS skin updates.

HTC also downplayed the internals, which remarkably aren ’ t as leading-edge as they might be. The screen was a big tentpole of the presentation, but that ’ s an additional Apple strategy, because it impacts user experience in a much more direct manner than internals. And the quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset is brand-new, but not the top-of-the-line model. 2GB of RAM is basically table stakes, and 32 or 64GB of internal flash storage is absolutely nothing to write house about. It did bring up design directors, however, to discuss exactly what entered the creation of its software and hardware, and showed videos highlighting technical advancements like the UltraPixel camera sensor and body design, all Apple-style moves.

This isn ’ t about competing against Apple or Samsung, it ’ s about fielding an excellent phone.

It ’ s pretty clear that HTC ’ s approach here isn ’ t to develop a better Android smartphone than Samsung and beat it that means. That ’ s arguably exactly what the whole HTC One line has been until now: basically a different however comparable method to the Galaxy approach. Now, we get a back-to-basics simplified naming scheme, a physical case that better estimates Apple ’ s high-market industrial design, and an emphasis on user experience and software, rather of crowing loud and long about the specification race that has been popular amongst Android OEMs int the past.

This is a pivotal launch for HTC: It should be seen by consumers in non-relative terms to Samsung in order to attract attention, because it hasn ’ t been able to prosper when lumped in with the general mass of Android OEM device-makers. To achieve that it has to stand apart, and there ’ s no much better instance of a smartphone-maker that ’ s been able to do that than Apple. But taking a specific niche in the face of the ascendant Samsung will show hard without Apple ’ s first-mover benefit, so while HTC ’ s technique is arguably vibrant, by no method does it assurance success.

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Rise of the Chromebook: Lenovo is the latest to challenge Windows laptops

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Should the lowly Chromebook — once a laughingstock of the PC world — have Microsoft worried?

Google first announced its Chrome operating system back in mid-2009, before shipping the first Chromebook laptops with the software preinstalled two years later. At the time the idea of just a web browser for an OS seemed confusing to many, coupled with Google’s promise to target netbooks without the necessary functions and features. Nevertheless, Google shipped a developer device in late 2010 and the initial Chromebooks from Acer and Samsung went on sale in June and July in 2011 at $ 349 and $ 299 respectively. They weren’t huge sellers, but recent models could change that, and a new addition from Lenovo appears to strike at the core of…

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Build a better payphone: NYC hosts public design challenge to reinvent public telephones

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Build a better payphone New York City hosts public design challenge to reinvent public telephones

New York Urban area’s SmartScreen payphone refits might be rejuvenating a handful of its 11,000 public kiosks, however the info scrubbing touchscreens do not have an essential interaction component: a telephone With its existing payphone vender arrangements due to expire in 2014, the city sees a possibility to revitalize its communication infrastructure, and is asking the general public to help them construct the payphone of tomorrow. There’s space for equipment breakthrough– the urban area states most payphone locations can be augmented with fiber hookups, opening the capacity to broaden functionality past basic voice telephone calls.

Designers are tested to propose solutions that enhance regional looks, utilize sustainable power sources, combat vandalism, account for emergency scenarios, guarantee ease of access to disabled individuals and, of course, create at least as much income for the City of New York as contemporary payphones Entrants have until February 18th to send their prototypes and designs, and 15 semi-finalists will certainly have to deal with down a panel of judges in March. Want to get started? Have a look at the job’s residence web page at the adjacent source link, and dig in– the city is supplying resources on payphone places, WiFi service metrics and a Collabfinder web page to assist potential designers discover a team.

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Christopher Nolan discusses the challenge of bringing Batman to life

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Earlier this week, Christopher Nolan sat down with film critic Scott Foundas and talked Batman. A transcript of the interview has now been published by Foundas at Film Comment, and it makes for an illuminating read. Nolan discusses his reasons for shooting the trilogy, his philosophy in approaching the characters, and the importance of theatricality in film. Nolan’s hesitance to rely on CGI in his films is well-documented, but The Dark Knight Rises bucked that trend somewhat, featuring an increased amount of computer-generated effects. The filmmaker notes that TDKR only contains “about a third or a quarter the number of CG shots of any other film on that scale,” and explains how he physically combines the effects with the film to achieve…

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Sin™ | 450+ Recruitment Challenge (PS3) : Open

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Here’s the RC, hope you guys do your best! goodluck to all who participate, Feel free to either use “” or “SC3″ as your clantag for trickshotters and either “S2″ or “SC” clan tag for killfeeders. UPDATE: Must record, exceptions if INSANE.
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30 Minute Fat Burn Challenge

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30 Moment Fat Burn Difficulty
30 Days To Lose Weight, Reshape Your Body And Improve Your Health.
30 Minute Fat Burn Difficulty

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