After a lot of rumours HTC finally announced One, their newest Android phone. Although One is right now among the hottest phones available, will this be able to stand out and claim its celebrity ?
HTC One was announced at New York, one week before MWC 2013, which might sound odd because usually Barcelona was a great place to announce HTC devices. It’s a risky decision taken by HTC, knowing that MWC will bring a lot of new phones and next month we’re likely to witness the announcement of the Galaxy S IV smartphone. It appears HTC had the courage to come up first and announce one of the first flagship phone of the year. At this time, we only have those two BlackBerry 10 devices.
For start, I have to say I’m impressed of how HTC One looks like. From the display to the design of the phone, everything yells quality. It’s clearly an evolution from HTC One X smartphone and also an improvement, because the body is made fully of aluminium. The beautiful 4.7-inch Super LCD 3 display supports a 1080p resolution which means that the pixel density is awesome: 468ppi. Above and under the display is a part of what HTC likes to call BoomSound – two front-facing stereo speakers, which feature Beats Audio integration and a dual-microphone HDR recording feature meant to capture a clean, rich sound.
At the back of the phone there’s another new thing: UltraPixel camera which HTC claims it “redefines how people capture, relive and share their most precious moments”. The camera has a 4-megapixel BSI sensor and f/2.0 lens, which is captures 300 percent more light than traditional smartphone camera sensors. Besides this, the UltraPixel camera also comes with another interesting feature called Zoe. This gives you the ability to capture three-second snippets each time you press the shutter button and latter this clips can become animated thumbnails for your photos in the gallery or 3-second videos. For those who like photography in particular Zoe it’s quite interesting.
Just like every previous HTC flagship phone One comes with killer specs. Besides the usual Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and GLONASS, NFC and 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity, it has the latest Snapgragon 600 SoC, which tech specialists claim it’s the fastest processor out there. The 600 SoC features four processing cores that run at 1.7GHz and it’s backed up by 2 GB of RAM and it’s 4G capable. This entire system was made to withstand the power of Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean and HTC’s next version user interface – Sense 5. And here I also want to mention another great addition, a bigger 2,300mAh Li-polymer battery.
Sense 5 is little bit similar with Microsoft’s Windows Phone interface, because it’s “including a personal live stream right on the home screen, photos that come to life”. HTC called it BlinkFeed and it’s the first screen that pops out after you unlock your phone. You can populate it with your favourite content from sources that you can define. It surely looks more like a content aggregator.
Before wrapping this up, I want to say that HTC One seems to be a very competitive phone. I hope HTC will not repeat the mistake the made with HTC One X and One X+ phones which were released in the same year and let the “One” smartphone live up to its expectations. Looking at the quality of this uni body aluminum designed phone and the features that come inside, HTC has no reason to release another flagship phone until 2014. But no one knows.
