HTC One: The high-end flagship to rule them all?

The HTC One looks like the kind of smartphone you’d imagine from a future science fiction world; especially if you get it in silver. 

 

It’s mostly because of the sleek, full metal body, tapered edges, and zero gap construction. Meaning, this thing is pretty hard to open up (read: mahirap buksan). 

 

At the Philippine launch on May 21, at The Fort BGC’S Hyve, handling the smartphone itself with its weight of 143g had a remarkably satisfying grip. There was a “thereness” to it that, say the LG, or others in its class lack. While it’s still too big to conveniently fit in your pocket with its 4.7" screen, it does strike a nice balance between feel and portability.

 

They even named this flagship Android product aptly. I mean as The One; you know, to rule them all? 

 

It’s great to see HTC pull itself up by its bootstraps again and race ahead of the competition this time, and doing it by keeping its ethos of “quietly brilliant.” 

 

They did hit a rough patch for a bit and were struggling to find better form through the better part of 2012. Call it fatigue or complacency? While fielding great products like the One X and One S, there was a glaring lack of marketing and support push for either. 

 

With the HTC Butterfly and, now, the HTC One, looks like they’ve once again found their stride. 

 

There’s a host of reasons why this newest smartphone is an exciting stakes-changer, least of which are the specs under the hood, [http://www.htc.com/sea/smartphones/htc-one/#specs] but what really stood out for us was a redesign of the Sense UI that made everything easier to navigate and a camera that touts a very novel approach to taking pictures. 

 

Powered by a Quad-core 1.7 GHz Krait 300 CPU, running on 2 GB RAM and an Adreno 320 GPU, all inside a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset, this phone, like most other quad-core products, has the capability to compute like nobody’s business. 

 

The Sense UI redesign that’s been renamed BlinkFeed has a minimalist, cleaner, and sleeker look to it that lets you pick the social networks, news and feeds you want right on “several pages”. Seeing it is better than me explaining and it’s certainly a notch up the regular vanilla Android experience. The 4.7" 16M-color 1080p Super LCD3 capacitive touchscreen with 469ppi pixel density makes sure everything’s crisp and beautiful, too. 

 

Let’s get to the camera. It doesn’t have your regular megapixel count, instead HTC now has what it calls an UltraPixel Camera. Press the shutter and the phone snags up to 20 photos with a 3-second video burst. 

 

There was a slew of tech presented to explain why this is better (well, for one thing, no more relighting and re-blowing the candles to recreate a cool birthday scene), but what the Ultrapixel is, is essentially bigger pixels rather than more. Which means that they can take better photos in low-light conditions, just like if a regular camera had its aperture turned all the way open. This also means lower noise levels. The better low-light performance is also given a helping hand by the built in Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) just like on the Lumia 920.

 

HTC also provided a ton of out-of-the-box photo imaging edit controls with the proprietary HTC Zoe photo editing suite. Sort of like a dressed down, mini-Photoshop, it’s still way more advanced than any other gallery on a mobile that you’ve got out there. Controls include skin smoothing, automatic fix for lightning, eye brightening, red-eye removal, anti-shine, and even eye-widener (makes your eyes look, well, bigger and more Anime). 

 

While we’re excited to actually get a hands-on copy for an in-depth review, there are a few caveats to the HTC One. 

 

Chief among the concerns you might want to think about are the lack of expandable storage (no data slots here), a non user-replaceable battery, the pretty awkwardly-located power button (you just might turn this on and off without realizing it), and how Sense UI still lacks connectivity toggles in the notification area —c’mon HTC, isn’t it time you fixed that? 

 

HTC One retails for an SRP of P32, 990 and will be available by May 24. — TJD, GMA News