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In today's mobile phone market, it takes a tremendous effort to come back from missteps.
This is what HTC experienced for the past 2 years.
With the increased importance of the Chinese market. HTC has offered a few models tailor made for it. Such as the limited edition Butterfly. As well as emphasizing its Chinese root to add likeability.
The strategy with the One is to offer dual sim cards version on all 3 domestic carriers. It differs significantly from the International Version. (Dual sim is basically a phone that can have 2 sim cards with 2 numbers active at the same time)
The difference makes the distinction of the 2 versions especially important.
What we see with the domestic version today will be a good measuring stick of what to expect.
After a transition period, HTC is finally ready with this unique product. Can it overcome Samsung's market dominance and become your one?
After some delay, we finally received the retail version of the phone. Lunch box shaped packaging contains the WCDMA/GSM dual card One.
The packaging is simple yet still feels of quality. It includes a charger, usb cable and various instruction manuals.
HTC figures that we all have strong preferences towards our headphones and didn't bother including one that most would discard anyway.
HTC has always had unique designs. It has wowed us, both good and bad, in the past. The One definitely wowed us in a positive way.
You definitely won't appreciate how good looking the phone is from just pictures. You might think it looks like the Blackberry Z10 or the iPhone. But some hands on time will tell you that it is very unique in its own way.
Lots of phones have aluminum bodies now, but their durability is a concern, especially after drops. The One just feels significantly sturdier than its competitors. It's quite obvious.
Samsung try its hardest to make their plastic looks like other materials, it can fool the eye but it can't fool your hands. HTC One's hardware design is in a whole other level compared to the rest of the Androids.
One looks like a sandwich from the side, with aluminum bottom, a plastic mid, and a glass/aluminum top. It has a very clean body and is the natural progression from the Butterfly.
One has improved significantly from the Butterfly design and just look so much more upscale. One example is that the One's volume rocker does not extrude from the body, thus maintaining its uni-body look.
To improve visibility and touch recognition with the new unibody design, HTC has made the power key black and added texture to the volume rocker.
The buttons are quite soft, which can be a plus or minus depends on your preference.
International version has its sim card slot on the top left side. While you can open the back of the domestic version to replace sim or microsd cards.
The openable back design does add about 1mm of thickness. But the bigger problem is that the openable back compromises the unibody feel of the phone. The international version just seems to offer more consistency in term of construction.
noise cancelling microphone.
No protruding camera this time around. Very simple and elegant design. Plastic lines in aluminum back improves various signal reception ability.
Top line: Cellphone antenna Camera circle line: NFC Bottom line: cosmetic.
We will do test later to determine how well this design compromise worked in term of reception strength.
2 front Boom Sound speaker. Numerous sensors and the camera on top. The dotted design of the speaker is a continuation of prior HTC products. It is a delicate process that requires a certain amount of industrial accuracy.
HTC logo on the bottom can be hacked and be used as a capacitive button, but it doesn't do anything out of the box. I would love for it to offer a similar unlocking experience to the Blackberry Z10.
Home key were put in the unusual bottom right corner, it is a bit counter intuitive and can be considered a strike against the design. We would much prefer to have the home key in the middle like other phones.
HTC has followed Google's footstep in abandoning the MENU key, it even went one step further this time and gotten rid of the multi task key. We will talk later about the issue that those design choices cause.
The handfeel is excellent due to its material and it's curved edges. With mobile phones becoming increasingly more modular, the One stands heads and shoulders above the rest.
One has a 4.8 in SLCD screen, a technology that HTC has quite the history with.
It all started 3 years ago when Samsung cut off its AMOLED screen supply to other OEMs. HTC was forced to change the screen in its hot-selling Desire G7 from AMOLED to SLCD.
This decision not only entrenched HTC and Samsung as rivals, but also made Sony's SLCD the screen of choice on most future HTC flagships.
SLCD has had 3 generation of products. Gen 1 on the Desire Gen 2 on the One X Gen 3 on the One and Butterfly
The difference between Gen 3 and Gen 2 are mostly in its pixel density. From 720p to 1080p. Unfortunately the Butterfly's screen come with compromised brightness (only 366nits) due to its design.
The One has improved significantly on that with better backlight, resulting in a brightness 499nits. One's screen is all around excellent with no significant weakness.
Both International and Domestic One has brightness near 500nits. Slightly lower than the 536 mark set by the iPhone 5. This screen is readily readable outdoors.
In addition to that, the One's screen offers improved contrast. Normal contrast for LCD is roughly 1000:1 while the One stands at 1600:1.
SLCD has traditionally been awesome at color reproduction. The One is no different. It is slightly worse than the Butterfly but practically unnoticeable.
Most don't like their screen to be yellowish. Both the International and domestic version has color temp around 7000k. Which is very acceptable if a bit colder than the standard 6500k.
International color temp preference 6500k, Asian preference 7000k. One's screen hit the spot for the Asian market.
Viewing angle is also excellent on the IPS screen.
SLCD can be understood as a high end, Sony version of IPS screen. Similar in technology to Apple's AH-IPS tech. One of the benefits of SLCD is its 50k hrs lifespan. Which is more than enough for a cellphone.
Clarity and color accuracy are also excellent. SLCD=high end IPS.
HTC has been relying on SLCD technology for a long time now and One's screen is undeniably excellent. But HTC not having their own screen technology remains a concern, there is no telling if Sony will suffer similar screen shortage in the future.
One of the most unique feature of the One is its camera. When everyone else is putting in 13 mp sensors, HTC went the other way and put in a 4mp sensor.
It has similar sensor size to others, around 1/3 inch. Ultra pixel just means that each individual pixel size is increased at the cost of a lower total pixel count.
S4 pixel: 1.12um One pixel: 2um Bigger pixels=better light sensing.
Left: Domestic Right: International Because the international version is flashed with domestic rom, it probably is a good idea to only reference pictures on the left.
One has a wider angle than the S4. One has better saturation, contrast. Especially on green. One more exaggerated while S4 more accurate, personal preference. One's white balance leans warm during overcast day. S4 the opposite, but S4 more accurate.
Both white balances acceptable. S4's detail clearly wins out due to far more pixels. Is 4mp enough?
For normal usage and social networking, 4mp is plenty enough. 1080p screen is roughly 2mp, 4 is plenty. A side benefit is much smaller file size of the picture.
The downside is that you really shouldn't blow any of the picture you take with the One up to any decent size and that digital zooming provide less than ideal result on the One.
Similar to Nokia 920, the One offers Optical stabilization. Usually used at night, but it can cause some issues with image quality near the border of some picture taken during the day. It happens rarely and shouldn't be a concern.
Besides the annoying focus noise, the one's touch focusing/metering is excellent. Much better than the S4, which rely on presets in more complicated situations.
One does have some issue with image quality during the day, see red spots in the river.
With a f 2.0 aperture, Optical Stabilization and bigger pixel size. The One should be excellent at night. Camera quality at night is going to make or break the One.
One has a night mode in the settings. Activating it increases white balance correction and optimize it for the night. It also increases exposure time and lowers ISO. Left: night mode on Right: night mode off.
One's viewfinder stutters at night compared to the 920, the flip side is that what you see in the One's viewfinder is going to be the final picture while the smooth viewfinder of the 920 can be kindly described as inaccurate at night.
Trash can picture: 920 slightly brighter, One has far better detail. River picture: One's white balance off but still much better detail.
Night mode off for both phone.
Night mode on.
2.1 wide aperture front camera on the One. Sliding to switch between front/back camera. Front camera works fine. I especially appreciate the automatically applied smoothing effect, which makes me look quite a bit younger.
Video: image quality similar. Stabilization less than ideal. One jumps around a lot, S4 looks like jello with its software stabilization.
HTC Zoe is a collection of useful collection of tools for picture optimization.
Small button on left (turns blue after press) turns on Zoe. It takes a 3 sec video as well as roughly 20 pictures for optimization afterward. It saves the whole thing, which means you can always come back and make changes.
Making gifs within Zoe. Only having to process 4mp pictures makes features like Zoe possible. Zoe very well done due to simple and intuitive UI.
Camera overview Daylight performance: B Menu layout: A Night performance: A 4mp enough for most activities. Very well done by HTC
Sense pretty. Sense 5 is much more slimmed down compared to Sense 4. Much simpler effects. No cube effect when scrolling. More modern look to UI.
Much less sense widgets. People always complain about Sense's effect overload. That has been addressed in Sense 5. The slowdown that happens later in the life of a HTC phone should also improve with a slimmer Sense.
Blinkfeed=HTC's limited, fancy RSS reader. Always on the far left of the home screens. Only limited amount of content provider.
App Drawer has also been redesigned. Dock and blinkfeed clock are maintained while in it. Browsing method changed from left-right to up-down.
HTC one of the few early adopters to rid itself of the menu key. But there are still issues with legacy/old apps wasting screen space with onscreen menu key.
double tap home=multi task. Positives: more apps per screen Negatives: no button to close everything, need to wait for animation to complete before closing another app.
Battery mode and network switch always there on drop down menu, wasting screen space.
Boomsound better than any other competitor. Stand out feature. Headphone suggested for speaker demonstration.
Talking about methodology of the review. No sense reviewing "performance" as most flagship does fine in that respect. More concerned with various aspect's performance and how intuitive UI is. We will only mention performance when there are specific issue.
HTC usually don't do as well as Samsung when it comes to battery life. The dual card design adds more questions.
Similar brightness setting. Chinese S4 is an Octa core. This is a test of S4 vs. One with only 1 Sim card in it. Final tally: One with 27% battery left, S4 with 36%. One with 2 Sim cards has better battery life surprisingly, 29% left at the end.
International version with Chinese rom doesn't have good battery performance.
Charging time from 0-100% S4: 2 hours 4 minutes. One can get to 90% in 2 hours but the last 10% takes an additional hour. Total of 3:14 is one of the worst.
Phone temperature in Celcius. 40+ is considered "hot". Blue: domestic version Red: International version. Categories on the bottom: game, music, local video, ebook, 3g twitter, talk, web browsing, camera.
All 3 gets hot, One's metal conduct heat better. Which makes the one feels warmer.
Left: Chinese Right: International
Talking about 5Ghz wifi (802.11ac) vs. 2.4Ghz bands and the benefit of the 5Ghz band. Basically 5Ghz far less busy with other signals. S4, One and Xiaomi 4A all have 5Ghz capability. Brand new tech, only made by broadcom.
Wifi LAN download test, S4 and One on 5Ghz wifi, S3 and One X on 802.11n presumably.
Wifi Lan Upload test, same parameter as download test. 500mb file.
Wifi 100mb download
5Ghz obviously faster than 2.4Ghz.
Reception test. TRP=Power TIS=Sensitivity Chinese phone is Xiaomi M2 Chinese version much worse reception than International.
Voice quality and background noise test.
One overall excellent, great camera, great hardware. Unfortunately some manufacturing inconsistencies. HTC still got a long way to go before overtaking Samsung. HTC has some supply chain issue, similar to what the N4 experienced.