A nother phone that was highly anticipated this year is the HTC One. With this release, HTC is bringing its A-game in a big way. This year HTC, in a very gutsy move, decided to focus on only one main phone release, and its bet seems to be paying off as the new HTC One is set to be the hottest phone of 2013.
The first time you see the One, there’s an immediate feeling of amazement at the beauty of the device – when you hold it, that astonishment is confirmed even further. From a hardware design perspective, this phone is unparalleled. It’s machined from a solid block of aluminium, each piece taking 200 minutes to carve out. Despite being really light and thin, it feels rock solid. The curved back sinks into your palm, while the slightly angled edges help you grip it.
On the front side of the device you find the Super LCD 3 screen under Gorilla Glass 2. The screen reaches up to 1080p (1920x1080 pixels) over 4.7-inches, which gives it 468 pixels per inch, making the pixels invisible to the naked eye. As you can imagine the screen is absolutely glorious and the vividness and brightness is also a sight to behold.
The bezels on the sides of the screen are very thin. Above and below the screen are speaker grates to give you real stereo sound. At the bottom of the screen are two capacitative touch buttons – Home and Back – though I would have certainly preferred none.
The micro USB port on the bottom doubles as an HDMI port (special cable required) for connecting your phone directly to a television, though you’ll also be able to do this wirelessly via Miracast. Speaking of television, the power button at the top doubles as an IR blaster for using your phone as a remotecontrol.
There are a lot of goodies under the hood too, including Android 4.1 with Sense, 1.7 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600, 2GB Ram and 32GB or 64GB storage.
At the top front of the phone sits a wide angle front-facing camera and a special back camera that HTC boldly dropped to a 4MP resolution using a totally new technology called UItrapixels – basically, bigger megapixels which let in more light. The camera has an f2.0 aperture and optical image stabilisation, both of which are impressive for a phone.
HTC’s reasoning behind this change kind of makes sense as most people nowadays mostly publish their photos on social networks, so an 8/13MP camera isn’t used to its maximum potential. I do agree with HTC that the drop from my previous 8MP phone camera to the 4MP didn’t make any difference at all.
HTC’s camera app gives you a lot of granular control over the images you take and the shutter is instantaneous. Viewing the things you shoot is much more enjoyable on the One, as the Gallery app has been revamped. On the video side, not only can it shoot HDR 1080p video, but it records HDR audio.
HTC claims that by using two mics tuned to different ranges (one higher, one lower), the One can cancel out distortion. Indeed, recorded audio sounded terrific for a phone camera.
The HTC One is simply one of the most exciting pieces of hardware I’ve seen in a long time, including the Galaxy S IV. As of this moment, the HTC One is looking like the best Android phone you’ll be able to buy for the foreseeable future.
Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.