HTC U11 11-Month-In Review: Still Going Strong

HTC is a consumer electronics company based in Taiwan whose mobile phone division has some some trouble in recent years. While they had quite the showing in 2013 and 2014 with the One M7 and M8, they’ve had an uphill battle with their following generations of devices. The troubled One M9 and poorly-received U Ultra put a bad taste in customers’ mouths, and perhaps rightly so. But the U11 marks HTC’s departure from their dismal trend with a gorgeous design and some neat tricks. But by many standards the U11 isn’t a spring chicken: it has been 11 months since its launch. How does it hold up today?

You can find the U11 for sale online in various carrier and unlocked configurations. The U11 is offered in 64GB flavors, with a 128GB model being sold exclusively as unlocked. Find out more and buy your own here.

Specs

• CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 (up to 2.45GHz)
• Memory: 4GB, 6GB (128GB model only)
• Storage: 64GB, 128GB
• Expandable Storage: Yes
• WiFi: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 & 5 GHz)
• Bluetooth: 4.2
• NFC: Yes
• Screen: 5.5 inch, Quad HD (2560 x 1440 pixels), Super LCD 5 with Gorilla Glass 5
• Battery Size: 3000 mAh, Quick Charge 3.0
• Front Camera: 16MP, ƒ/2.0 aperture
• Rear Camera: 12MP, ƒ/1.7 aperture, 1.4μm pixel

Build and Design

The U11 is a gorgeous phone, in the truest sense of the word. A mirrored, shimmering material encased in curved “3D” glass creates a unique visual experience on the rear of the device. HTC’s deviation from the norm is indeed brilliant.

The main focal point of the back, beyond its reflective shimmer, is the round camera. The U11 suffers from a camera hump, like many of its generational relatives, but actually makes it work. The hump doesn’t impede the U11’s ability to lay “flat” on a table.

The aforementioned curved-glass back gently slopes into the rounded sides of the device, almost seamlessly. The border of the U11 is made from a smoothly textured aluminum colored to match the back of the device. The corners of the edge feature antenna lines which are colored slightly lighter than the rest of the aluminum. This arrangement is quite visually stimulating, but does make it easy to drop for those who are less coordinated.

The volume and power buttons are fitted to left hand side of the device, with the volume button sitting above the power button. They are both made from the same metal as the rest of the border. Thankfully, the power button is textured differently from the volume button, making it easy to locate in the dark. Both buttons have held up extremely well over the last 11 months of use, and have not become loose or squishy, a testament to HTC’s engineering.

On the subject of engineering, the guys at HTC managed to fit some pressure sensors underneath the U11’s sides. Those sensors are the core of Edge Sense: a feature made by HTC that enables you to run context-specific commands or launch apps by squeezing the sides of the phone (more on that later).

Moving to the front of the U11, the first thing you’ll notice is the 5.5-inch, QHD LCD screen using a Super LCD 5 panel. It’s protected by Gorilla Glass 5, which much like the back of the device, has rounded edges that blend into the border of the phone. Gorilla Glass 5 stands its own against the daily wear and tear of use; I’ve not used a single screen protector since I bought the phone last May and have but one very small scratch on the upper left of the screen. And even then its so small I rarely ever notice it.

Above the screen is a microphone, the front-facing camera, and a notification LED, all of which are embedded below the same slab of glass that is protecting the screen. The ear-speaker is centered squarely above the screen, and the fingerprint scanner is centered below it.

Now the a couple years ago the U11’s screen would be easy to review: it has good brightness, rich colors, a high pixel-density, and excellent viewing angles. But in a market now dominated by the Note 8, Galaxy S9, and iPhone X, the U11’s screen feels boxy. I personally don’t mind the bezels though. They feel much smaller than the bezels on my previous device, the Google Pixel.

Fortunately, the U11 sounds nearly as good as it looks. While it doesn’t hold a candle to the Boom Sound front-facing speakers of old, it easily beats out any other device on the market in terms of quality, and almost always in volume. The bass is audible, if not punchy, and the treble is clear and tonally pleasant. The midrange is merely adequate in absolute terms, but good relative to other smartphones on the market right now.

Scattered across the U11 are four high-fidelity microphones. They provide the U11 with some best-in-class performance both in recording quality and in volume sensitivity.

The bottom of the phone features the U11’s only port: USB type C on a USB 3.1 Gen 1 bus. The lack of a headphone jack is a bummer, especially for a music enthusiast like me, but I’ve adapted to using a USB-C adapter. While it can be inconvenient to forget to take the adapter with me, I’ve learned to just store it and my headphones in the same case to avoid repeating such a mistake. And by the way, the adapter HTC included in the box is still going strong with no signs of going bad any time soon.

Performance

Methodology:

The methodology is simple: each benchmark is run eight times, 30 minutes apart so as to let the device return to a cool state. The testing room is set to 72 degrees Fahrenheit. The numbers presented for each benchmark are averages of those eight runs. Any outlier scores are reported, but not included in the average. All benchmarks were installed on the internal memory of the device, not a microSD card. Stock firmware was used in all cases.

These numbers, by themselves, don’t mean much. They are meant as a reference point for you to use in comparison to other devices to get a good idea at their relative performances.

AnTuTu v7.0.7:

• Combined score: 205972
• CPU score: 70630
• GPU score: 80586
• UX score: 43334
• Memory score: 11422

Geekbench:

• CPU single-core score: 1912
• CPU multi-core score: 6340
• RenderScript score: 8021

3DMark Sling Shot Extreme:

• OpenGL Es 3.1 score: 3513
• Vulkan: 2682

Camera

When the U11 launched, HTC was eager to share with us its DXO Mark score. After all, it had just bested all its competitors (including the Galaxy S8 and Pixel), and while its score has been beaten since then, the camera’s quality hasn’t gotten any worse. Pictures in daylight are well toned, sharp, and can even exhibit some high quality DOF affects when taking close-ups.

And the story is just as good when it come to low-light photos: the U11 doesn’t seem to struggle that much at all. While it obviously won’t best a DSLR on a tripod, the U11 certainly produces visually attractive images even for the picky.

The built-in panorama works well too. It does have some post-processing artifacts that I’d like to see worked out in terms of noise, but its usually quite minimal, even when it is nearly dark outside.

I’d say that the results speak for themselves.

Battery

Battery life on the U11 has been consistently impressive. I routinely get about 4 hours of SoT using heavy real-world loads including GPS navigation while I’m biking, 60fps video capture for work, and creating a hotspot for my laptop whenever I’m out of range of WiFi. Over the last four days I’ve standardized my workload, uninstalled all unnecessary apps, and set my brightness to regular levels to create as even an environment as possible to benchmark my battery. The results were unsurprising. Using GMail, OneDrive, Chrome, Alarms, and Pulse, Excel and Snapchat, my U11 managed to average 3.7 hours SoT before I hit 30% battery. That’s some pretty good performance given how heavy apps like Snapchat are and the age of this battery.

User Interface and Experience

HTC’s take on Android, dubbed as Sense, is about as clean as you can expect from a non-Google manufacturer these days. Its pretty noninvasive, and while certain components feel a bit dated, they are easy to replace (such as Sense Home). To the left of the home screen you can find Blink Feed, HTC’s version of Google’s news feed. Its not a critical part of my daily workflow, and if like me, it tends to annoy you, it can easily be disabled from the settings.

HTC’s default apps are few and far between, and those that are installed I find useful. Furthermore, there is very little bloatware to be found on the U11, at least on my unlocked variant. Most of what does come installed though can be easily removed or disabled.

And if you’re a stickler and won’t settle for merely disabling an app, you can unlock the bootloader of you U11, root it, and remove it yourself. The process is fairly simple, and I figured it out in about ten minutes. A quick flash of TWRP and Magisk and I was ready to go.

The raw performance of the U11 is impressive as well. It’s about as smooth as you can get. I don’t experience any animation stutter, freezing, lagging, or performance issues in general. I have yet to discover a workload, even after 11 months, that can trip it up. The 4GB of RAM in my model is plenty and allows the U11 to keep a massive number of apps in the memory at once (though they’ll be suspended after a certain amount of time to conserve battery).

But the U11 has one more trick: Edge Sense (I told you we’d get back to it). It is an incredibly powerful tool for those willing to put the time into it. While it was admittedly lackluster at launch, it has since matured into something power users can genuinely enjoy. You can now even program custom gesture-based commands for Edge Sense based on the app you’re currently using. For example, I can create a command for Instagram to like a picture on-squeeze, create a command to like someone on Tinder, take a picture on Snapchat, and even reverse which camera is being used.

Summary

The U11 has aged very well! In my 11 months of using it I’ve not come across any problems in the software or the hardware. A complete lack of scratching and other bodily damage proves the heartiness of the U11’s design, and phenomenal camera performance makes it a good photographer’s companion. Great UI fluidity, raw performance, and thermal performance mean that the U11 will suite even the heaviest of power users. All in all, I have no desire to upgrade to any other device. It still feels like I’m using a brand-new flagship, even without complex firmware tweaks and changes. So if you can find yourself a cheap U11, get it, so long as you don’t mind the absence of a headphone jack. You won’t be disappointed.