HTC 10
Welcome back, HTC… to the Big Boys Club!
Back in 2013, most Android smartphones were downright ugly and made of cheap-feeling plastic-y material. It was almost as if the manufacturers didn’t care about build or design quality. It was extremely easy to single out Apple as the only company who cared about how their phones looked.
In fact, the chasm of build quality between an iPhone of that time and almost any other manufacturer was so wide, that it became a USP for iPhones. This facet itself compelled millions of people to buy iPhones.
HTC flipped that paradigm on its head with their One M7, which featured a gorgeous aluminium unibody anatomy and an attractive, minimalist design. The sublime quality and finish actually put HTC in the same stratosphere as Apple. HTC had arrived.
Fast forward 3 years and twelve near-identical ‘One’ variants later, HTC’s latest flagship, the HTC 10 is now more of the same. Now, that staple design risks feeling dated. So, how does it (the design) and the hardware do against the oh-so-many smartphone manufacturers of today? Let’s find out.
Announced in April 2016, the HTC 10 is a breath of fresh air in at least one way — after a highly cumbersome naming system (HTC One M7, One M8, One M9), it’s good to see HTC dropping the ‘One’ moniker, finally!
The HTC 10 features a 5.2 inch Super-LCD5 display with a Quad-HD resolution (a first on an HTC device since they’ve previously relied solely on 1080p screens) and a pixel density of 565 ppi. There’s also a coating of Corning Gorilla Glass 4 on top. HTC like Apple, banks on LCD panels, which is not a bad thing, really. This display is sharp and bright (in fact brighter than most screens), yet some people might find it not quite as vibrant or eye-catching as an AMOLED display.
That said, it is definitely a good screen and often offers a truer representation of real-world colours than those found on other brands’ AMOLED based-displays.
Born in 2016, the year of the water-resistant smartphone, heralded by the just-launched Samsung Galaxy S7 family, the HTC 10 loses out somewhat unfortunately, in not being water-friendly. So you really shouldn’t get it wet at all!
The HTC 10 honors a nano SIM and rides Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with HTC’s Sense UI running things on top. And this is third big change on the HTC 10, and the true game changer.
Where older HTC models were burdened by duplicate apps, heavy skinning, and odd interface choices, the UI on the HTC 10 is skinnier and simpler — it has one browser, one calendar app, one music app, and so forth. Many times those apps are Google’s, not HTC’s; the few captive apps that HTC has included, the company has made efforts to design its own apps around Google’s Material Design directives.
Consequently, Sense UI looks and feels drastically like Stock Android, which is something I personally appreciate. What is most surprising though, is that it often felt faster than even Stock Android!! Now that got our attention!
The 10’s internal components are something you’ll see on several smartphones this year. It is powered by a quad-core Snapdragon 820 processor and 4 GB of RAM, both of which combine to lay out that snappy performance. Backing them is an Adreno 530 graphics processor that performs! It even makes sure your device doesn’t heat up like crazy while you’re managing your clan on Boom Beach or playing some Poker on Zynga’s servers.
It’s a very fast and responsive phone: apps open very quickly and gaming feels like a breeze, more times than not.
The HTC 10 comes with 32 or 64 GB of internal storage with the ability to expand that by an additional 2 tera bytes, via a microSD card.
At the back is a 12 megapixel camera with an f/1.8 aperture, dual LED flash, optical image stabilisation and laser autofocus. This camera also supports 4K video recording. It’s the best performing, most competitive camera HTC has ever had and it is capable of taking good pictures.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite as quick as I’d like it to be. Sometimes is a tad slow to boot up, and at other times, its takes a brief nap while saving an image. That said, it’s a drastic improvement over the camera on last year’s One M9 (not sure if that’s an accolade really, but I did need to mention the improvement).
The front shooter though, has been majorly upgraded. You get a 5 megapixel camera with an f/1.8 aperture, autofocus, 1080p video recording and HDR. It is also the world’s first smartphone with optical image stabilisation for the front camera! Consequently it can take sharp selfies and video in low light, which, for a lot of people, is probably more important these days than the back camera’s capabilities.
Another headline feature on the HTC 10 are its dual speakers with a woofer placed at the bottom edge of the phone. Historically, HTC phones were renowned for their emphasis on audio quality — sponsored by the inclusion of Beats Audio technology and fitments (up until Apple bought Beats). The HTC 10 heralds a return to audio-focus, and the speakers belt out really, really good tones.
Some other note-worthy features on the HTC 10 are: a USB v3.1 type-C connector for charging purposes, a fingerprint sensor embedded on the physical home-button (which is a first for HTC!), and fast battery charging (50% in 30 minutes), via QuickCharge 3.0.
When released to public in May 2016, the HTC 10 will be available in three colours: Carbon Gray, Topaz Gold, Glacier Silver.
Originally published at chip-monks.com.
