Review: HTC One (2014)

The new HTC One is a very, very nice phone. It has even better hardware than last year's model, and a few new smart and well-chosen software tricks. Some of the new software are mere gimmicks, but in the time I spent testing it, I came away more pleased then puzzled.

To put the HTC One through its paces, I took it to the happiest place on earth: Disneyland. It ended up being a great proving ground, especially for the camera, the usability of the the Sense interface, and the battery. I can report that overall, this is a solid, though relatively unexciting, upgrade to the previous One. It is instantly one of the two or three best Android handsets out there, and worth a look when it becomes available across all major U.S. carriers (prices will vary between $200 and $250). It goes on sale today, with a Google Play Edition coming soon. HTC could have pushed the camera a bit more, but other than that, it's very hard to find fault with this device.

I'm not one for putting too much weight on specs, but let's plow through these because the numbers are a key selling point of just about every top-tier handset today. It runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of on-board storage with an easily accessible microSD card slot, and a 2,600 mAh battery. It has NFC and Bluetooth 4.0 with aptX support. The screen is a 5-inch 1080p display, slightly larger than last year's 4.7-inch One with a slight drop in pixel density.

Of all the specs, the cameras are the only bring-downs. HTC didn't beef up the rear camera. It's the same 4.1-megapixel shooter as last year's, although HTC did add a second lens to the backside to help it achieve some effects (more on that later). The front-facing camera has also been upped to 5 megapixels, but despite that fact, when I used it to shoot video, it looked pretty bad. Not even so-so, but bad — pixelated and low-res. It was actually bad enough that I regretted using it to capture some of my child's happy moments, wishing I'd used the LG Nexus 5 that was in my other pocket instead.

Instead of bumping up the hardware, HTC has instead loaded up on the gimmicks: an auto selfie timer, parallax images, photo filters, a function that lets you see a view from both cameras (front and back) at once, thus taking a reaction shot of yourself. In the end, the only thing you'll care about is how well the camera performs over the life of the phone. The backside camera is great — it's fast and shoots well in a variety of lighting situations. The front-side camera is pretty good, although as I noted, video was janky. But neither is best-in-class (the iPhone 5S still sports my favorite camera on the market) and I suspect by the end of a two year contract you're going to be really hungry for a better camera.

But in most respects, this phone has excellent hardware.

The dual front-side speakers earn their (considerable) space with impressive sound — whether you are playing music or video. I really enjoyed kicking back and sharing this screen to show off my movies in a way that normally isn't so pleasant, thanks largely to those speakers. It's more like watching a little TV than a big phone. Yes, the screen's pixel density is slightly lower given the increase in size, but you won't notice or miss it.

It is slightly larger than last year's One at 5.7 inches tall and 2.8 inches wide, but is still extremely pocketable, thanks to a slim 0.37-inches (9.35mm) thick all-metal body. The housing now wraps fully around the sides, with no plastic "sandwich" holding it together like we saw on last year's One. It's far more solid-feeling, and doesn't have the rough edges of the previous model. I also hope this will help keep it together — the 2013 model One we have in the office dents easily and is literally bursting at the seams.

There are a lot of clever little features. You can activate it with a variety of gestures, for example. Double tapping the screen will unlock it. Swiping up, down, and from the sides all wake the phone and launch different apps. Picking it up horizontally and pressing the volume button automatically launches the camera. I found this last one really useful, but the rest were mostly novel. Still, all these are pretty cool touches, and emblematic of the little details HTC has put in throughout the phone.

Most of these touches are in Sense, which is probably the best of the Android skins, and really the only one on par with stock Android. Sony, Samsung, and LG could all take cues from HTC's minimalist sensibility (sorry!) where less is more.

The recent app launcher, for example, which lays out all your recently used apps in a grid, rather than vertical column as with stock Android, is probably even more useful than the garden variety KitKat version as it makes more efficient use of the phone's limited screen real estate.

To put the HTC One through its paces, I took it to the happiest place on earth: Disneyland.HTC put a lot of tricks into the camera. Like the gestures, they are neat and interesting, but mostly for their novelty. I think that with few exceptions you won't use them long-term. That second lens that sits just above the main camera on the back of the phone can be used to refocus photos after the fact. It collects distance information that stays attached to every photo you take, and the phone's camera software can interpolate the distance information to create a depth-of-field effect. It knows your distance from all the objects in the frame, so you can adjust the focus point to fall on any object in the image. It's an effect similar to what you get with a light-field camera like the Lytro. It makes for some pretty images, and is one of the best things going on the camera.

There's also an editing feature that uses the same data to add a fake 3D parallax effect. It's mostly gee-whiz for the sake of being gee-whiz, as it only works on your phone and on other HTC Ones. It's one of those features where you can picture your dad showing it off to his friends with a "See? See? Cool, right," but never actually using it outside of that context. There are Instagram-ish photo filters too. They are maybe my least favorite of any photo filter I have ever seen, but they are there, and I suppose we're at the point where photo filters are table stakes.

One area where I was very impressed was with battery performance. As previously mentioned, I tested this phone at Disneyland, and it was over a long, crowded spring break weekend too. Those kind of situations, with overloaded cell sites, can be hell on a phone's battery. But I managed to go all day, from about 7am until after 10 pm, on a single charge, even while taking lots and lots of photos and auto-uploading them all to Google+ over the air. By way of comparison, the Nexus 5, which I was using less, had to be charged up in the late afternoon both days to keep it from dying.

Finally, a note about the case. You can buy a $50 "dot case" with the phone. The front side is covered with holes, and the phone senses when it is closed. Tapping the phone when the case is closed reveals the current time and weather in a large, retro-pixel, format through the case. It's pretty cool. But when you open the case, it doesn't fold completely back on itself. That makes it awkward in a way I could forgive on a $10 or $20 case. But at $50, that shouldn't be happening.