Taking in hand for the first time this HTC ONE came to my mind the words of Armand Gerard “Operations that depend on the imagination can be very strong to form the taste, but at the same time lack of liveliness and extension that make the genius» . In fact, in philosophy, the concept of taste has always correlated with that of the feeling of pleasure: the two concepts are seen as being related to the subjectivity considered, in its aspect of inclinations, passions and sympathies, as independent of the pure rationality. And well this HTC ONE gives you the feeling of pleasure in us that tickles the taste of the “beautiful.”
Those with long memories will remember that the house in Taiwan as early as 2011 had seen the turnover decreased by 39.5% and the number ONE was meant to revive the fortunes of the company, but the reality has been quite different, and the market has disappointed the initial expectations. Availability problems, quite a few glitches in the software initial and foremost a communication campaign soporific HTC forced to retreat again in the ranking of manufacturers in 2012.
In hindsight, the not having focused on one top of the range but I calved One X and One S phones as One V, VX, XL, XT, XC, SU, SV, SC and has been replaced after only 6 months with ONE X plus version that corrected the defects of origin is been a real suicide market. In the same year the novel approaches the market with the Samsung Galaxy S3 and with 2 notes that saturate with tens of millions of copies sold, the market leaving the other Android manufacturers crumbs.
HTC in the fina ncial statements for 2012 announced he had learned from the mistakes of the past and that there would be a sharp turn in the marketing strategy and production in the more strictly to the motto “the quality that brings the amount” and, in the words of Benjamin Ho, (November 2012 New Chief the marketing division of HTC) products in 2013 would have been: “Bold”, “Authentic” and “Playful”.
HTC ONE fully embraces this recipe because:
? the term “Bold”, refers to the desire to promote its products, and HTC is promoting every aspect of the terminal ONE;
? the term “Authentic” means that HTC will focus on the introduction of innovative features, without copying the ideas of competitors; under this aspect ONE has the unique features and other inspired terminals of success even if reinterpreted “in sauce Taiwanese”;
? “Playful,” that is full of features created takin g into account those that are the demands of consumers.
how to tell if the target production was centered marketing for that, despite the large investments, financial difficulties in paying suppliers and the shortage of strategic pieces have left many users “at stake” as is testified, around the web, from the numerous post in threads “waiting for Htc one” rather than the “Official HTC ONE”.
Before concentrate in the comments on individual aspects of my review below the technical specifications of Htc One.
1. The package
The package contains: the classic user manuals quickly, a USB-microUSB cable, a pin to remove the microSIM, the Italian power supply and a pair of stereo headphones with flat cable (also included inserts to fit the size of the ears), interesting design, but above all, of excellent quality, which together equalization Beats phone do their homework very well. It will not be urbeats accompanying the Sensation series, but are very close as surrender.
2. Quality construction and design
In recent years, HTC has been growing in terms of design, in my opinion, because it is not afraid to experiment with new materials on new forms.
Detractors of this mobile phone argue that there is no nothing really new since it is difficult to imagine new line and / or materials on a large smartphone and its lines reproduce the style of the Blackberry Z10. These gentlemen would answer with a simple consideration: close your eyes and put your right hand on a Blackberry Z10 and on your left a HTC ONE and now tell me what will warm your heart.
One is made largely of aluminum, the rear and the frame of the display, with frosted edge and a central core made of white polycarbonate strongly reminiscent of the shell of the One X.
The advertising slogan reads “all metal. Construction intact. With tapered edges that provide an outlet thin, but solid. The new HTC One is a phone with a design that does not compromise. “
Taking the phone in your hands you will understand how the marketing did not exaggerate in describing the terminal.
Its shell” unibody ” aluminum, obtained by digging a unique piece with an industrial process very complex and very accurate, raises the production process of the interior terminal to 200 minutes per unit produced.
The end result is a building that HTC has called “zero -gap “and indeed the spaces between the aluminum and the polymer surrounding the unibody are imperceptible.
This video spread by HTC that shows the manufacturing process
The build quality is remarkable and, in my opinion, is comparable only to that of the iPhone 5 and the Meizu MX2, for attention to detail and accuracy. HTC has kept the two keys below the display front, and back home, both the touch. The Home button in particular, as to the right may be maybe not so comfortable in the first days of use, but it soon becomes a habit. IFixit tests are there to show the perfect assembly.
The unibody aluminum is, in fact, so strong that it is virtually impossible to open without damaging the device, which becomes a problem if the screen is broken, which requires the removal of the entire cover for be replaced. Even the inner lining of copper, which helps to dissipate the heat very well, it is rather difficult to put into place once removed. In essence it is so well constructed that the index of adjustability is the lowest (points 1/10) never attributed to that site.
As for 2012 for me it was better built ONE S smartphone so for the I think 2013 will be difficult to unseat the ONE from the first step and impossible to get him down from the podium.
The diagonal of the display of 4.7 inches is not well penalizes the thickness of the phone because it is very thin: the thickness of the middle reaches 9.3 mm, but the profile to “soap”, causes the phone to give a perception of greater subtlety and lightness (the weight is 143 g rams).
Below the comparison with the size / weight of the other top of the range
? Apple’s iPhone 5 to 123.8 x 58.6 x 7.6 mm, 112 grams
? HTC Butterfly – 143 x 70.5 x 9.1 mm, 140 g
? HTC One – 137 4 x 68.2 x 9.3 mm, 143 grams
? Nokia Lumia 920 to 130.3 x 70.8 x 10.7 mm, 185 grams
? Samsung Galaxy Note II – 151.1 x 80.5 x 9.4 mm, 183 grams
? Samsung Galaxy S4 – 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9 mm, 130 grams
? Sony Xperia Z – 139 x 71 x 7.9 mm, 146 grams
HTC One is comfortable to wear in your pocket, and we are at the limit with average hands for use with only one of them except for the unlock button of the screen that often, especially in the car, it is really inconvenient to get to, but maybe it’s the price you have to pay to hold your smartphone as a remote control when we use the IR starts.
Who just can not get used can install this app that will allow you to turn off the display with a simple tap on the widget owner.
With an aluminum body engineers and developers HTC had to solve, mindful of the antenna gate of the iPhone 5, the question of the placement of the antennas. In the end, it seemed like the best solution to position the antenna to the outside of the body of the smartphone. The antennas, therefore, were transformed into small grooves on the outer side of the smartphone filled with decorative inserts made of plastic.
As noted in the technical HTC has come under the body of the ONE that was best hardware on the market at the time of design.
At the front there, the LCD from 4.7 inch display has a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels for a “density” record of 468 dots per inch.
screen it can be described with only one word: spectacular! And ‘the best I’ve ever seen between smartphones and also enjoys a good readability of the display in the sun While it is true that blacks are not as deep as on the screens of the Samsung AMOLED color rendering and the white point has not equal screens in the Korean giant that always prefers a technology that tends to contrast the colors too.
glass, protected by Gorilla Glass 2, has a very good oleophobic treatment that makes it difficult to observe the fingerprints on the screen of your smartphone. I never liked too much Gorilla Glass 2 and I would have preferred a coating dradontrail waiting to try on t he new Galaxy s4 gorilla glass 3.
The touch is managed by Synaptics ClearPad Series 3 S3202 law that touches up 10 points. Always front we find the 2 megapixel camera light sensors and proximity in particular. In the lower part instead of the two capacitive keys with the HTC logo in the center and right speakers. The two capacitive keys have multiple functions. The “back” button, as well as allow you to go “back” button also functions as a menu. The “home” key returns you to the default home screen with a single tap, double tap to open the task manager and with a long touch opens the search “universal.”
Into I was afraid of being suffered badly with the key configuration choice by HTC, but you get used to the new buttons in no time and also the lack of middle button.
There is however one exception and is represented by all those applications that have not been rewritten according to Google guidelines contained in the document “say goodbye to the menu button (say goodbye to the menu button, ed)” and that it is not technically been updated to Android SDK level level (11 or above) make it appear an awkward button marked by three points (the so-called overflow) over a big black stripe.
In preliminary versions of HTC, in truth, there was the possibility to choose in the settings on the back button if to display the menu with a long press. In the final version, however, the option is gone, but can easily be re-introduced with a little modding.
All of these pixels are moved from one of the most powerful processors available today, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, with quad-core CPU with 1.7 GHz, supported by 2 GB RAM and with all the connectivity that today may require a smartphone: LTE to 100 Mbit / s, HSPA +, Wi-Fi 802.11 with the new protocol ac (backwards compatible), Bluetooth 4.0, MHL, NFC.
Into 
On the back there UltraPixel the camera and its LED flash, the two lines of plastic that allow a good reception of the antennae and the hole for the microphone that allows the cancellation of ambient noise.
On the left side (remember that is covered by a thin layer of white polycarbonate), we find the slot for the micro-Sim, while on the right side there is only the volume rocker, made of aluminum.
In the top we have the 3.5 mm jack for headphones and enter the key on / off switch that also acts as infrared port to control any television. In the lower part instead we find the micro-USB port for connection to a PC or a TV thanks to the support MHL, and the main microphone for calls.
View unibody construction is not possible to access the battery or install microSD cards. HTC One uses micro SIM and is available in two denominations of internal memory, 32 and 64 GB.
3. Benefits
From the point of view of performance I have already said that the ONE has a chip Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 APQ8064T, which performs all normal operations (including game) without any hesitation or lag.
The performances are certainly the result of the quad-core Krait 300 clocked at 1700MHz, 2GB of RAM and the graphics processor Adreno 320 GPU.
These are the results of the most common benchmark:
Into 
In all tests the ONE almost always got the highest score. Currently such as speed recorded in the test is second only to ‘LG Optimus Pro G
The only tests that show that the ONE still has room for improvement are SunSpider (which measures the performance of JavaScript) and BrowserMark 2 (which assesses performance HTML5)
4. Connections
When submitting quite a few have had doubts about the real power of the antennas of this terminal in the light of the aluminum body. As can be seen from this graph antennas WiFi / BT are placed at the top, while those for the telephone signal are placed either at the top or at the bottom. The management software radio terminal will choose the antenna with better reception. The HTC engineers have studied this system that is more effective than Iphone 5.
Here a comparative test of receipt with the same operator in the same test points (the mean of 10 measurements at different times):
Legend : dBm measures the power of the radio signal and is expressed in decibels to the reference level of a milliwatts; ASU is, as dBm, a measure of the power of radio signal, but with a more linear scale of representation.
4.1 – GNSS
GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) on the HTC One is activated by the typical form MDM9x15/MDM8215 card Qualcom. The fix is ??almost instantaneous.
4.2 – NFC
Engineers HTC will be very industriati to enter the NFC in a metal body. The active region useful for the NFC was, in fact, inserted around the opening of the camera. The NXP PN544 controller does its job very well not giving us any problems in the use of NFC.
4.3 – WiFi In this respect the
One is the first smartphone to support 802.11ac, the Wi-Fi standard for the next generation, and thus inherits support for 802.11a/b/g/n.
From the hardware point of view the Broadcom BCM4335 chip allows us to introduce a number of optional functions such as rates of short guard interval, beamforming, space-time block coding, and support low-density parity check that allow actual speeds up to 433 Mbps
in my tests I compared the Xiaomi Mi2 (terminal with wifi reception above average) with the One. Well as you can see from the comparison chart there is no comparison. The router Asus Rt-AC66U connects to the One with ac protocol allowing a wifi speed 20 times greater than the E2 that connects, instead, with Protocol.
5. Media
5.1 – Beats Audio
HTC in August 2011 bought a 51% stake in Beats Audio spending about $ 300 million. The Taiwanese giant wanted to differentiate themselves from the competition going to be included in the packaging of its smartphone a pair of headphones with excellent reputation and of reasonable quality. Unfortunately for HTC users have been shown to not buy a smartphone for the type of headphones within it (word of Martin Fichter, HTC product executive) then here is the decision taken at the end of 2012 to sell 25% of its stake in Beats Audio and reserve only for the exclusive use of the Beats Audio technology on mobile phones.
This year, however, the equalizer Dr. Dre mounted on HTC One works differently than in the past. As is well known in previous HTC equalizer acting on the DRC (dynamic range compression) enhancing the bass at low frequencies. With headphones including the equalizer is activated by default (the same can be enabled or disabled via a main settings menu) and the typical effect of this equalizer is undoubtedly present, but not vigorous, as in previous models.
The general feeling is that of a software conceived this year just to work best with headphones beats and worsen the audible sound when it is turned off or when you listen to music with different headphones.
The feeling is also supported by a changes to the software present on Xda really makes pleasant listening. This change, if you have the released terminal with root and, for me is a “must”.
Regardless, the effect of activating Beats equalizer is still evident – there is a positive pulse volume and bass – both audible from the headphones supplied both by excellent speakers BoomSound.
5.2 – BoomSound
Above and below the screen on the right there are two speakers from very high quality for a smartphone.
Together, they give a sound soft, deep and pleasant timbre and stereo depth and by dependable. This is audible if you listen to instrumental complex. Where in previous smartphone was hard to clearly distinguish the voice from the various instruments here are easily audible with a good sound stage.
I note that despite what you read in these reviews hasty funds therefore have a much higher volume to other smartphones (only 2db of iphone 5), but is the quality of sound that posts them and many more.
After trying a smartphone with stereo speakers front one wonders, but what they are up the other manufacturers to design them just so. Who uses the phone in the car as a navigator can finally hear the voice guidance without any compromise. It’s priceless, finally, watch a video on youtube or a mo vie with friends: they leave everyone speechless!
Finally, boomsound goes well the ringtones and notifications system are very high: often I had to lower the system volume to not disturb or get noticed, something that I had never happened in all the other terminals that I had.
5.3 – Audio Talk
For me, the sound quality of One call is great, but not excellent. For example, the quality slightly less than I called the iphone 5, both as a volume or as timbre, the iphone is clearer, has better dynamics, while that of the One has a lower volume and is slightly muffled almost canned, but , however, is discerned.
Let’s say that in this segment BB z10, Iphone 5, just to mention two top of the range Android does not do the best thing.
To improve both the conversation and the audio recording HTC has introduced two microphones with double membrane (that marketing calls Voice Sense) to introduce the noise cancellation and allow you to get excellent sound quality in the video. A microphone, in fact, is used to record ambient noise and remove it from what you are recording.
Technically a membrane handles sounds up to 75 dB and the other picks up sounds that occur beyond this threshold (such as . at a concert).
Htc one uses a particularly good second microphone noise reduction algorithm software with Qualcomm’s Fluence accompanying the platform APQ8064T that is obvious to the more experienced by the string unearthed in system / build.prop (persist.audio.fluence.mode = endfire)
In daily if you are in a quiet environment in the audio call, even if set to maximum, is not very high, but if you move in an environment with background noise it seems that the audio automatically goes up to compensate for the noise they perceive the surrounding environment.
Like all new top of the range the HTC One is also AMR-WB (cd call High Definition) and the sound is extraordinary on TIM if both phones support this protocol.
The outstanding speakerphone with stereo sound that call, unfortunately, is not like the BB z10 full duplex.
5.4 – Music Player HTC
to allow us to listen to the best music has not only thought about the hardware, but also has worked in the field of software. It has in fact completely redesigned and streamlined its music player.
The audio player allows you to recover all the track information and cover art using Gracenote. Can also retrieve the text of a song that will appear in sync with the music. Compared to the past is lost integration with Soundhoud who now works as you say, only on the FM radio.
5.5 – Video
A key feature of all phones in Full HD is the performance of the video player and, to this end, most of the producers is industriata engines with proprietary or ad hoc management software. The Sony Xperia Z, for example, uses the Bravia Engine 2 to bring crisp, clear images, the LG Optimus Pro G offers different levels of clarity, brightness and color saturation. And, of course, Samsung is not outdone by inserting a similar management in its Super AMOLED HD. In my opinion, this is the sector in which the One does not excel. And to say that the premises were there as the range of codecs that you can use is impressive (DivX / xvid, but are not there), but their management is just enough.
Watching movies hd though is fluid could, especially in bright scenes show the limits of this part of the HTC software. My advice is to install Mx Player in order to have smooth movies. It is also possible to mirror on any TV usin g an MHL cable: I tested this function on three TV (Panasonic, Samsung, Sony) and two monitors (Samsung and Acer) and everything works properly. On the software side HTC has added to the standard equipment of Google app also their HTC Watch and HTC Music media. In particular, in this sector, there is a clear desire to push the Htc HTC Watch service with offers to 5 cents that allow to rent, usually on weekends, several films at very competitive prices.
5.6 – Gaming
Although I had some concerns as regards the impact of the GPU for the FullHD resolution screen of HTC One, my doubts are quickly dispelled during the tests. Even using very demanding titles, such as the recent Real Racing 3, the fluidity is not in question, and of course the graphic layout seems a very “bright”, thanks to the display very defined. We then had the opportunity to appreciate Oil Rush, the first title optimized for Qualcomm platform, which runs optimally with One and HTC Snapdragon 600.
Constant element of our study on aspects of gaming was then the yield of the double speaker “Boomsound”, always able to produce a sound volume that define more than adequate is reductive. Not only power, but also a sonic quality in any case!.
HTC has confirmed the release of a software update that will enable support to the securities that exploiting the OpenGL ES 3.0, although it has n ot yet provided details relating to the availability date.
Many reviews had experienced overheating of the terminal after 5 minutes of gaming pushed. I measured the temperature detectable with a ScanTemp infrared aiming the laser on the rear bodywork. The temperature is increased by about 10 °, however, making the heat generated bearable. Other terminals (eg. Nexus 4) in the same test have reached temperatures close to 40 °.
5.7 FM Radio
The FM radio has a simple interface, but with a sensitivity not particularly excellent. A function is reliable is the automatic search for the song you listened to via the link to the software SoundHound.
6. Camera and camcorder
Into While all other manufacturers will compete with cameras with more megapixels, HTC has chosen a different approach, by mounting a special camera, the only one of its kind, called Ultra-Pixel. In this sector, the benchmark against which was inspired by HTC is definitely with the Nokia N9 and Lumia 920 models. Starting out, in fact, the assumption that a smartphone with the majority of the shots are made indoors (during dinners and parties) or, in any case, almost never optimal shooting conditions, the engineers of Nokia first (under the guidance of well-known for imaging guru Damian Dinning) have faced the problem of enhancing the shots in these conditions.
HTC engineers have shared with those of Nokia, the fundamental objective, but it gave a different interpretation in view of the engineering Nokia patents on technology PureView. The HTC One has, in fact, a sensor in native 16:9 format (as well as N9 and Lumia 920 smartphone and not like the others who work at 4 :3) with a resolution of 2688 x 1520 for about 4.08 MP . The CMOS sensor is manufactured by ST Microelectronics specific HTC, and is the VD6869 able to leverage technology to BSI 2.0 micron x 2.0 micron pixels. This sensor uses an elementary law of optics: larger pixels capture more light. Indeed, it is amazing how much light is able to capture the HTC One.
While the OIS lens 920 is floating and controlled by gyroscopic sensors 500 times per second and moves in the opposite direction to literally any movement imprinted to the device, eliminating the effect of “moved” (or
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