HTC One Hands on - INDIA

HTC One, the comeback of HTC !

By K.M.Guruprasad

This year started of with lots of criticism for the company which started making smartphones after all, HTC. They were producing way too many devices from 2011 and through 2012, none of which brought fortunes to them. They had way too many flagship devices in 2012 with the lights of HTC One X, One S to the Q4 releases HTC One X+ and the first smartphone with 1080P display, HTC Butterfly. They had lots of expertise in each department but failing to put them together to bring the perfect device. That is when HTC's CEO , Peter Chou decided to bring out that one device which would bring back HTC to the top and regain their losses. With which started a dream , a dream which was codenamed "HTC M7" . There were a lot of leaks and rumours before the device finally got launched at an HTC event in March 2013 and was called HTC ONE !

This device was announced in India earlier than the Samsung Galaxy S4 , however HTC, failed to get it to public hands before the S4. Nevertheless, the device was finally available for purchase in India from second week of June ! We were very excited to play around with this device which had taken a lot of time before entering India ! Finally it was time !

It was a beautiful Sunday evening here in Hyderabad and with light rain, it was perfect ! We got a chance to see the HTC One in person at Chroma store. Although we wanted to check out the brushed silver metal version of One, we only managed to find the black version, which was stunning too !

First thing we noticed was how the device felt in the hand. The curved back made out of aluminium was cold to the touch and felt premium , very much after using the Samsung galaxy S3 for a long time ! There are few things worth noting. The device's design itself is an art. No wonder, HTC has put a lot of work in designing this phone. The importance given to the minute details of the device is evident. The aluminium chamfered  edges, the boom sound front facing stereo speakers, the concentric aluminium volume rockers to the right, power button which acts as IR blaster to the rear and front facing wide angle camera,everything has been given a lot of importance.

The first thing you notice once the device is turned on is the beautiful 1080p screen fitted in a 4.7" display. This display is an IPS LCD 3 display with an RGB matrix and a very high pixel density of 468ppi. The screen suddenly takes over the attention that the design of the phone demanded until then. Yes, it is an amazingly sharp screen. It is by far the best screen out their on a smart phone, period ! The colours produced by this screen was vibrant and the whites looked white, unlike amoled screens which tend to produce a bluish tinge. Although the blacks were not as deep as it can get on an amoled display , it was almost up there. 

The HTC One runs on HTC Sense 5 which is a flavor of android Jelly Bean 4.1.2 . It has a powerful hardware too. It comes in with a Qualcomm APQ8064T Snapdragon 600 chipset , Quad-core 1.7 GHz Krait 300 CPU and an Adreno 320 powered GPU. What does this mean ? It means speed, crazily fast ! The device handles any task you throw at it with ease. From day to day activities such as making calls , messages , Facebook and so on were handled with ease. It is also very fast at launching apps.  The sense 5 UI takes some time getting used to. With HTC Blinkfeed sitting at the left most screen and the vertically scrollable app drawer , everything looked different from what we've seen before from HTC. However, the redesigned UI was close to Jelly Bean's guidelines and hence, close to stock experience.

The HTC one comes with a 4MP Ultra Pixel camera on the rear and a 2mp camera in the front. Both are wide angle cameras providing a wider field of view. This is also the second smartphone to feature optical image stabilisation alongside the Lumia 920 from Nokia. The ultrapixels are bigger than you would get on all other current camera phones. The Nokia N8 had 1.75-micron pixels, while the 808 PureView and the iPhone 5 both have 1.4-micron pixels. So, each pixel in the HTC One camera is twice the size of a pixel in the 808 and iPhone 5 cameras.Bigger pixels mean lower noise levels and usually, better dynamic range. Low-light performance is also helped by the Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) as we saw on the Nokia Lumia 920. However, we right now can't judge on the image quality that the One has promised to as we just had few minutes to play around with the device. It indeed captured images very quickly.

We also had a Samsung Galaxy S4 alongside to check the heavily marketed boom sound and was indeed clear and loud. It is not a gimmick and is indeed exceptional speakers on a smart phone ! Wonder why no other manufacturer ever though of having the speakers in the front instead of rear part of the device.

Check out our hands on video of the device below. 

Conclusion :

In the short amount of time we had to play around with the device, we came out heavily impressed with this smart phone which is by far the best looking device out there. However, it too has its own shortcomings, such as the very weirdly arranged capacitive buttons and the power button on the top which is very difficult to reach. Though they are not deal breakers, it is worth mentioning. We'd review this device if we get a chance to ! It is safe to say HTC One delivers on the promise it made and we can see it with HTC seeing profit in sales after two years of disaster. We hope the One brings back HTC's fortunes back.