Interesting review of htc one m7. HTC One M7 - Specifications. Text and voice input of text

The flagship HTC ONE M7 was introduced back in 2013, when it created a lot of noise and beat out most of its competitors. The device has become a key one in the manufacturer’s lineup, because before it things weren’t going well. Conducting a review of the HTC One M7 gold in Russian, we were only convinced that this is truly a revolutionary flagship, which ensured good sales of the entire “ONE” line and the success of the brand in the global market.

We believe that the flagship remains relevant even now, especially considering the current price. The manufacturer does not follow trends, he creates them independently, and therefore the smartphone can compete even with modern devices in the mid-price category.

HTC ONE M7 equipment

The kit includes the smartphone itself, charger, micro-USB cable, headset and documentation.

The box is made of white cardboard and has a stylish design. On its back side, as expected, are the characteristics of the gadget.

HTC ONE M7 design

The model turned out to be successful in all respects and appearance was no exception. Navigating HTC ONE M7 dual sim review we noticed that this is one of the first phones made in a monolithic body made of solid aluminum. It was not possible to completely abandon plastic inserts, because in this case the smartphone would not receive the signal well. For this reason, there are two stripes on the back side, but they do not spoil the overall style. The metal case not only had a positive effect on the durability of the gadget, but also made it possible to obtain an original design that remains relevant even to this day. The build quality deserves the highest praise.

The smartphone fits well in the hand, and the material itself is pleasant to the touch. After prolonged use, fingerprints become noticeable on the glass, but thanks to the oleophobic coating, they are very easy to remove. It is better to carry the HTC ONE M7 in a case, as noticeable scratches and abrasions remain on the metal surface.

The front panel has a display with what we consider to be the optimal diagonal of 4.7 inches. There are speakers at the top and bottom of the screen, the sound quality of which will satisfy any music lover. At the top you can see the selfie camera lens, indicator light and light sensor.

On the right side there is a volume rocker. It is slightly pressed into the body, which at first creates some inconvenience, but after several days of use this disadvantage no longer makes itself felt.

There is a hole on the left side to accommodate a micro-sim, but you won’t be able to open it without a special paperclip.

There is a power button on the top of the smartphone, which has an infrared port built into it, and a 3.5 jack for a headset is also located nearby.

There is only a micro-USB port on the bottom.

Performance and Features

HTC ONE M7 dual sim 32gb characteristics correspond to the level of 2013 flagships. The device uses a 4-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.7 GG processor and 2 GB of RAM. The graphics are handled by the built-in Adreno 320 video module. The characteristics of the HTC ONE M7 phone allow you to enjoy smooth operation of the interface and run any games at maximum graphics settings. But the disadvantage is the inability to expand the memory by installing a memory card. 32 GB of internal memory may not seem enough to some users, because the memory quickly becomes filled with photos, music and games. The metal case gets quite hot during intense games, but everything is within normal limits.

HTC ONE M7 display

The HTC One M7's screen has become one of the key features. It had an innovative resolution at the time of its release - 1920x1080px. The picture on it looks simply amazing. All colors are saturated, and there is no distortion at any viewing angle. The overall impression is complemented by a protective glass coating Gorilla Glass 3. An oleophobic base is applied on top of the coating, due to which there are practically no fingerprints left during use. In terms of image quality, the smartphone can be compared with Apple products. The brightness reserve is sufficient, the colors are saturated, the picture looks realistic. But of course the powerful filling and a high resolution display had a negative impact on the autonomy of the gadget.

Autonomy

HTC ONE M7 dual sim lte specifications include a non-removable battery with a stated capacity of 2300 mAh. With intensive use, the smartphone will have to be recharged at the end of the day, especially if you include additional navigation and communication modules. Overall this is a good result, but it could have been better.

Cameras

The HTC ONE M7 camera is a revolutionary solution, because the manufacturer decided to abandon existing standards and proposed an interesting technology of enlarged pixels that better capture light. The resolution of the main camera is 4 ultrapixels, so the pictures are high-quality and detailed. In terms of its photographic capabilities, the gadget can be compared to mid-price cameras. The benefits of larger pixels are especially noticeable at night, as even in low-light conditions, images turn out great. The only thing is that when shooting in some conditions, there is a pinkish tint in the pictures.

Example photo:

Conclusion

HTC ONE M7 characteristics and price are chosen perfectly, because now the smartphone can be ordered from China at a price of 9,000 rubles. For this money you get a decent device with a revolutionary camera, a gorgeous display, good battery life and characteristics. Another positive point will be the manufacturer’s proprietary shell, which is made in a simple but very comfortable style. The disadvantages include the lack of a slot for a memory card, as well as strong heating during games (but you can warm your hands in cold weather). The sound deserves special praise. When listening to music, you get the feeling that you have turned on a high-quality audio system.

Where can I buy?

You can purchase the device on the Aliexpress website http://ali.pub/ymhiv

Your rating for the smartphone:

The last "lone hero"

It so happened that of all the top new products of the current season, it was new smartphone HTC was the last one in our hands, when reviews of all other flagship devices had already appeared on the pages of our publication. This happened through no fault of ours - the release of the device was postponed for a long time, there were no final samples, and this situation is quite symbolic. The Taiwanese company is not doing very well now - over the past year and a half, NTS has gradually lost its former glory among users, and the company’s position in the world market has noticeably weakened. After the release of problematic models with the prefix X and X+ in the name, the company did not offer the market any significant new products for some time, and the only notable model released during this time, HTC Butterfly, suffered a strange fate. For some reason, the European version of the phone had too little flash memory, and at the same time there was no possibility of expanding it using cards. All this, coupled with a dubious glossy body and a very high price, could not arouse (at least in our area) much user interest in this model. And now the company has decided to “reboot” and start all over again. The developers once again concentrated all their efforts on just one model, no longer scattering themselves, and this immediately bore fruit. NTS's latest creation turned out to be so interesting that it instantly attracted the lost part of users' attention back to the company. Although we are not yet talking about a full return to its former positions: at the last Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ​​the NTS stand could not boast of either its size or the amount of attention from visitors and the press. And practically only one model was presented at the stand during the exhibition - HTC One. The one on which all the company’s bets are now placed: “if it takes off, we’ll fly further.”

The unusually tense attitude in the company towards the “new hope” was manifested even in the very name of the new product. A very strange name, I must admit. The Taiwanese suddenly decided to give their creation a name that corresponded to the general name of the entire line of smartphones that came out of their factories over Lately- no more, no less. “HTC One” is the same as if Sony called its next smartphone simply “ Sony Xperia", without any additional letters or numbers. Interesting solution. Very inconvenient for searching on the Internet (when you type in the name of any other device starting with “HTC One”, information about the HTC One itself will automatically appear, and vice versa) and very profitable for the company itself (for the same reason). However, given the recently shaken position of the Taiwanese company in the global market, perhaps this step was quite deliberate in order to raise the fading interest in HTC products?

For ease of visual comparison, we have added the main flagship models that we tested earlier to a single table presented below.

	HTC One	Samsung Galaxy S4	Sony Xperia Z	Oppo Find 5	Google Nexus 4	LG Optimus G
Screen	4.7″, S-LCD3 (IPS)	4.99″, SuperAMOLED	5″, IPS?	5″, IPS	4.7″, IPS Plus	4.7″, IPS Plus
Permission	1920×1080, 469 ppi	1920×1080, 441 ppi	1920×1080, 440 ppi	1920×1080, 440 ppi	1280×768, 317 ppi	1280×768, 317 ppi
SoC	Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 @1.7 GHz (4 cores, ARMv7 Krait)	Exynos 5410 @1.8 GHz (8 cores)		Qualcomm APQ8064 @1.5 GHz (4 cores, ARMv7 Krait)	Qualcomm APQ8064 @1.5 GHz (4 cores, ARMv7 Krait)	Qualcomm APQ8064 @1.5 GHz (4 cores, ARMv7 Krait)
RAM	2 GB	2 GB	2 GB	2 GB	2 GB	2 GB
Flash memory	32/64 GB	16/32/64 GB	16 GB	16/32 GB	8/16 GB	32 GB
Memory card support	No	microSD	microSD	No	No	No
operating system	Google Android 4.1	Google Android 4.2	Google Android 4.1	Google Android 4.1	Google Android 4.2	Google Android 4.1
SIM format*	Micro-SIM	Micro-SIM	Micro-SIM	Micro-SIM	Micro-SIM	Micro-SIM
Battery	non-removable, 2300 mAh	removable, 2600 mAh	non-removable, 2330 mAh	non-removable, 2500 mAh	non-removable, 2100 mAh	non-removable, 2100 mAh
Cameras	rear (4 MP; video - 1080p), front (2 MP)		rear (13 MP; video - 1080p), front (2 MP)	rear (13 MP; video - 1080p), front (1.9 MP)	rear (8 MP; video - 1080p), front (1.3 MP)	rear (13 MP; video - 1080p), front (1.3 MP)
Dimensions	137×68×9.3 mm, 143 g	137×70×7.9 mm, 130 g	139×71×7.9 mm, 146 g	142×69×8.9 mm, 165 g	134×69×9.1 mm, 139 g	132×69×8.5 mm, 145 g

* The most common SIM card formats are described in a separate material.

Key Features of HTC One

• SoC Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, 1.7 GHz, 4 cores, ARMv7 Krait
• GPU Adreno 320
• Operating system Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean
• IPS touch display, 4.7″, 1920×1080
• RAM(RAM) 2 GB, internal memory 32/64 GB
• No microSD card slot
• Communication GSM GPRS/EDGE 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz
• Communication 3G UMTS HSDPA 850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz
• Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, MHL, OTG
• Wi-Fi Display/DLNA support
• Wi-Fi 802.11a/ac/b/g/n
• GPS/Glonass
• Digital compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, position sensors, light sensors
• 4 MP camera, supports HDR video
• Camera 2.1 MP (front)
• Lithium polymer battery 2300 mAh
• Dimensions 137.4 x 68.2 x 9.3 mm
• Weight 143 g

Appearance and ease of use

The description should begin, of course, with the materials of the case. Unlike most modern plastic communicators, the NTS One is made almost entirely of metal. At every presentation, the developers tirelessly show this picture, especially focusing on the production technology of the body of the new smartphone.

The body is entirely cut out of a single piece of aluminum, leaving space only for the screen glass and camera optics. In principle, NTS has previously had experience working with metal when creating cases for its smartphones. However, by her own admission, she always had to make a compromise by integrating plastic parts into a metal body so that the metal did not shield radio waves. When creating HTC One, the developers took a different path. They took all the antennas and microphones outside, placing them in special recesses - grooves cut from the outside directly into the body material. Those elements that should not be shielded by metal are placed in these recesses. From above these grooves are filled with a special composite material, reminiscent in structure of ordinary plastic. It is curious that not only the grooves on the back side, but also all four side edges along the perimeter are also filled with this material. This does not cause any inconvenience for the user, and it looks unusual - somehow “unhackneyed”.

Everything else here is just metal and glass, so there’s no need to talk for a long time about whether the new smartphone looks expensive or cheap. The materials themselves are premium, so the HTS One looks exactly like it is ready to match any environment at any moment. In other words, the HTC One will look equally good on an expensive suit and in the hands of a teenager.

The smartphone is quite heavy (143 g), which is logical, given the abundance of metal from which the body is machined. If we talk about dimensions, then due to the narrow edges and sloping back, the phone fits quite comfortably in the hand. But this does not mean at all that I am ready to praise metal as the best material for the production of smartphones. Many users, by the way, prefer “warm,” light and rough plastic, especially since it can now also be quite durable. And in terms of ease of holding in your fingers, the matte soft-touch coating is probably more practical than smooth and sometimes slippery metal. This one can slip out of your hand (especially considering its mass), and is more susceptible to heat than plastic. Yes, of course, metal removes heat from the processor filling better than plastic, we all know this, but in terms of comfort it is difficult to say that it is very pleasant to hold always cold metal in your hand, which after a few minutes of operation suddenly heats up to hot. In this sense, plastic simply behaves more calmly, that’s all. But in any case, the neat appearance and small thickness allow us to speak of the HTC One as a universal smartphone that is equally suitable for both male and female hands.

And of course, such a strong case will better withstand various external influences than plastic. Although at this point it is worth noting that specialists from one popular foreign publication who disassembled the NTS One smartphone claim that the smartphone is practically not repairable because it cannot be disassembled. That is, if the speaker wheezes or the glass cracks, replacing these elements will probably be very problematic. However, this is only an unofficial opinion of some journalists.

Now let's look at the details and individual elements of the NTS One body. In the back, in addition to the mentioned grooves, there is a digital camera window and a photoflash eye nearby - everything is standard. The case form factor is monoblock. The case is non-separable, there are no removable parts, so the cover cannot be removed either.

Another fact logically follows from this structure of the body. The SIM card here is inserted into a side groove on the left side of the smartphone, sliding there on a metal slide. The mounting method is exactly the same as for the iPhone: you need to press a key clip to eject the container with the card. The SIM card here is used in Micro-SIM format, the container itself is made of metal.

Both connectors, traditionally located on the top and bottom ends of the device, are universal: Micro-USB is at the bottom, 3.5 mm audio output is at the top.

But that's where the logic ends. All other controls on the NTS One are so unusual and inconvenient that you can only be amazed. Firstly, that ill-fated power and lock key. For some reason, it was again placed not on its side, but on top - where no finger could reach. And the fact that this button is also an IR transmitter does not justify it in any way. And who, in fact, forced the IR port to be embedded in the power button? At the top end, even without it, there would be enough space to install an IR transmitter. By the way, it is needed here to control various equipment, such as a TV or set-top box- appropriate software already installed on your smartphone.

Secondly, both this key and the other one that controls the volume are both embedded flush with the plane of the case. They do not protrude from it at all, and therefore, it is not possible to feel them blindly. It is extremely inconvenient to manipulate such buttons; you always have to look where you are pressing, and it is impossible to get used to it. As already mentioned, these buttons feel indistinguishable from the rest of the surface.

And this list of absurdities is crowned by an unusual touch panel of control buttons under the screen. During the time that humanity was creating smartphones with touch screens, it seemed to have gone through all the possible options for designing a block of buttons under the screen. But the developers from NTS managed to change everything this time. The button that calls up the menu was simply “cut out” from the standard set. In its place is now the NTS logo - right in the middle of the panel, and on the sides of it there are only Back and Home, there is no Menu button here at all. There was no talk about saving space: unlike the entirely virtual block of buttons that migrated to the screen in some smartphones, here the strip under the screen still takes up space, albeit with two buttons rather than three. It’s a rather strange decision, and how it is justified is not entirely clear. Accordingly, the list of recently opened applications is now also not easy to find intuitively: it is called up here by double-tapping the Home button.

Finishing the topic of buttons, it is worth noting that the menu that pops up when you long press the power key, in addition to standard features shutting down, rebooting and switching to flight mode is supplemented with one more item - calling the child mode. In this mode, you can safely let your children play with your smartphone without fear of access to important phone functions that are blocked for them.

It remains to add that two versions of the HTS One are available on the market with different color schemes: Glacial Silver (metallic gray with the romantic name “silver glacier”), as in our review, and Stealth Black (“invisible black”) - in the photo above. In the black version, all the materials are the same, only the metal is painted, and the plastic that fills all the recesses and sides matches the color of the case: in the gray version it is white, but in the black phone it is black. Otherwise, the smartphones are identical. Both options are not too easily soiled, since there are no glossy surfaces here. True, on the surface of the black HTC One, fingerprints, dirt, dust and grease are more noticeable than on the gray one - pedantic purists should take this into account when choosing.

Screen

HTC One has a very high-quality touch display, called S-LCD 3 by the creators. In numbers, the physical parameters of the new screen are as follows: dimensions - 58x103 mm, diagonal - 119 mm (4.7 inches), resolution - Full HD 1080p ( 1920×1080 pixels), PPI pixel density is 469 ppi, which is now a record in the smartphone market. The HTC One display has both manual and automatic brightness adjustment, which is based on the operation of the light sensor. Multi-touch technology allows you to simultaneously process up to ten touches, which is confirmed by tests. It is curious that here this feature must be manually enabled in the settings, otherwise the screen will recognize only two simultaneous touches - such a strange know-how has already been seen in NTS devices before. There is also a proximity sensor that blocks the screen when you bring the smartphone to your ear.

A detailed examination of the display using measuring instruments was carried out by the editor of the “Monitors” and “Projectors and TV” sections, Alexey Kudryavtsev. Here is his expert opinion about the HTC One screen.

The smartphone screen is covered with a glass plate with a mirror-smooth surface and, judging by the reflection of bright light sources in it, has an anti-glare filter. There is a special and quite effective oleophobic (grease-repellent) coating on the outer surface of the screen, so fingerprints do not appear as quickly as with regular glass, but are removed more easily.

With manual brightness control, its maximum value was about 450 cd/m², and the minimum was 11 cd/m². The maximum value is quite high, so in bright daylight the screen will still be somewhat readable. In complete darkness, the brightness can be reduced to a comfortable level. Eat automatic adjustment brightness according to the light sensor (it is located in the upper left corner of the front panel): in complete darkness, the automatic brightness adjustment function reduces the brightness to 18 cd/m² (not very dim), in an office illuminated by artificial light it sets it to 81 cd/m² (acceptable ), in a very bright environment increases to a maximum of 450-460 cd/m² (as it should be). In automatic mode, as external lighting conditions change, the screen brightness both increases and decreases. There is no backlight flickering.

IN this smartphone An IPS type matrix is ​​installed. The micrograph shows a typical IPS subpixel structure:

The screen has good viewing angles without inverting shades and without significant color shifts, even with large viewing deviations from perpendicular to the screen. When deviated diagonally, the black field brightens quite a bit and, depending on the direction of the deviation, acquires a purple tint or remains almost neutral gray. When viewed perpendicularly, the uniformity of the black field is very good. The response time for the black-white-black transition is 21 ms (12 ms on + 9 ms off). The transition between halftones 25% and 75% (according to the numerical value of the color) and back takes a total of 33 ms. The contrast is good - about 950:1. The gamma curve constructed using 32 points did not reveal a blockage either in the highlights or in the shadows, and the index of the approximating power function is 2.23, which is close to the standard value of 2.2, while the real gamma curve deviates slightly from the power dependence:

Color gamut is sRGB:

Therefore, visually, the colors on this screen have natural saturation. The spectra show that the matrix filters moderately mix the components with each other:

The balance of shades on the gray scale is good: Colorful temperature although above 6500 K, over the entire significant part of the gray scale this parameter does not change very much, while the deviation from the blackbody spectrum (delta E) is less than 10, which is considered a good indicator for a consumer device. (Dark areas of the gray scale can be ignored, since color balance there is not very important, and the error in measuring color characteristics at low brightness is large.)

As a result, we have a high-quality screen version on an IPS matrix that deserves high praise.

Sound

In terms of sound, the HTC One smartphone is one of the best solutions on the market. Of all the smartphones we've tested recently, only the Oppo Find 5 can compare with the HTC One in terms of sound quality. HTC One's speakers are located in the most unusual way - the creators never tire of reminding us of this in television advertising. The phone has two front-facing stereo speakers, and both of them face the front surface, and not the back, like most smartphones. The device produces not excessively loud, but very clear, smooth throughout the entire range, deep sound, rich in low frequencies. The openings of the speaker grilles on the front surface cannot be blocked by the surface of the table, so nothing prevents the sound from coming out (except, of course, for the option when you place the smartphone “face down”). The sound here is further processed and improved using HTC Boomsound and Beats Audio technologies.

There is an FM radio in the smartphone, but traditionally it only works when headphones are connected, which act as an antenna. There is also a standard voice recorder used for creating voice notes. Both applications should be searched in separate folders, where icons corresponding to the application topics are carefully collected: radio in the Multimedia folder, and voice recorder in the Tools folder. Unfortunately, HTC One does not have a built-in ability to record telephone conversations by default.

Camera

Photo evaluation and quality conclusions were made by Anton Solovyov.

HTC One is equipped like most modern smartphones, two digital camera modules. Front-camera, used for video communication, has a sensor with a resolution of 2.1 megapixels, an example of a picture is in front of you. In principle, the shooting quality for the front camera is not bad, you can even make out the text if you wish. The maximum resolution of images obtained using the front camera is 1920×1088 pixels.

For a 2-megapixel front camera, the quality is quite acceptable. In the center the text is quite legible, but at the edges the sharpness drops. The fragment with the barcode is already noticeably blurred.

The whole intrigue lies in the new module of the main, rear camera of the smartphone: here the developers installed a module with a resolution of only 4 megapixels. Explaining the resolution, which is so low by modern standards, the developers tirelessly repeat in their presentations that the number of megapixels doesn’t really mean anything, and suggest looking at the other characteristics of the new sensor. Which, by the way, constitute the most voluminous section in the list of specifications on the manufacturer’s website.

HTC UltraPixel Camera:

• Pixel size 2.0 µm
• Sensor size 1/3″, matrix back-illumination
• Custom HTC ImageChip 2 processor
• F2.0 aperture and [relatively] 28mm wide-angle lens

Colorful epithets and large pixel sizes do not help much yet: the pictures do not shine with special quality and leave much to be desired. “For now” - because there is an opinion that something may improve with the release of new software firmware for HTC One. At least, most fans of the HTC brand are now inclined to believe in it and are waiting. In the meantime, you can independently evaluate the quality of the resulting images by clicking on the thumbnails presented below. By default, the camera is set to shoot at a maximum resolution of 4 megapixels, and the pictures are 2688x1520 in size with an aspect ratio of 16:9.

Good detail for 4 MP. Slight distortions in the geometry indicate that perhaps the lens has too wide an angle. Nice color rendition.

And a few more photos taken from various settings in different light conditions.

Noticeable geometry distortion is quite normal for a wide-angle lens. There is no significant distortion. Small chromatic aberrations are noticeable in the fragment with the telephone wire.

Fairly uniform exposure across the entire field of the image with almost backlight.

A detailed examination of the image indicates either the absence of software sharpening or its good performance.

Examples of macro photography of close objects, as well as text from paper.

Strange deterioration in sharpness on the right side of the image. If the text on the left side is sharp, then on the right it seems to be out of focus. Most likely, just a bad photo.

Good sharpness on the branch. In addition, there is a pleasant absence of chromatic aberrations in the bokeh.

The video settings have four shooting modes: with a maximum Full HD resolution of 1080p, with the effects of fast (60 frames per second) and slow motion, as well as Full HD video using HDR technology.

The ability to shoot video with a smartphone camera in fast and slow modes, as well as use HDR technology when shooting video, are now fashionable “tricks” among manufacturers. We encountered the same set of capabilities when testing the Samsung Galaxy S4 and Oppo Find 5, as well as some other top smartphones. By the way, it is worth noting that high-speed shooting in Oppo Find 5 is carried out at a speed of 120 frames per second, while in HTC One it is only 60 frames per second. However, in Oppo this is achieved by reducing the video resolution to 480p, and in HTC One, although the speed is lower, the accelerated mode is implemented in a resolution of 720p. So it is clear from everything that the struggle on this new front is just beginning to unfold. In any case, for now, both of these “unusual” modes - slow and fast - can only be used when shooting in a lower resolution, and not in Full HD, so the image quality of the resulting videos always leaves much to be desired. Examples of video shooting in all four described modes are posted below.

• Video No. 1 (Regular, 30.5 MB, 1920×1080, 16:9, 30 fps, video - MPEG-4 AVC ( [email protected]), sound - AAC LC, 192 Kbps, 48 ​​kHz, 2 channels)
• Video No. 2 (Slow-motion, 11.9 MB, 768×432, 16:9, 23 fps, video - MPEG-4 AVC ( [email protected]), sound - AAC LC)
• Video No. 3 (Accelerated, 13.5 MB, 1280×720, 16:9, 60 fps, video - MPEG-4 AVC ( [email protected]), sound - AAC LC, 192 Kbps, 48 ​​kHz, 2 channels)
• Video No. 4 (HDR, 26.3 MB, 1920×1080, 16:9, 29 fps, video - MPEG-4 AVC ( [email protected]), sound - AAC LC, 192 Kbps, 48 ​​kHz, 2 channels)

And of course, we can’t help but mention another “find” - the photography mode, in which the camera not only takes several pictures in a row, but then glues them together into a whole micro-clip, capable of capturing some short event in motion. This is not a standard video shooting mode, but a slightly different one; this is evidenced even by the different resolution of the resulting micro-videos (1920×1088, and not 1920×1080, as with regular video shooting in Full HD). In principle, there is nothing special about this mode - probably in such cases it would be possible to get by with regular video shooting. Moreover, this format is not unique: on Samsung presentations Galaxy S4 demonstrates exactly the same mode, capable of capturing short events in motion - a dance pirouette, for example. But for some reason, the developers at HTC decided to place a strong emphasis on this, allocated a separate button to this mode in the most prominent place on the screen, and even gave the mode its own unique name: Zoe. Examples of a couple of such “Zoe” are in front of you.

• Zoe №1 (3.82 MB, 1920×1088, 16:9, 24 fps, video - MPEG-4 AVC ( [email protected]), sound - AAC LC, 108 Kbps, 48 ​​kHz, 2 channels)
• Zoe №2 (3.74 MB, 1920×1088, 16:9, 24 fps, video - MPEG-4 AVC ( [email protected]), sound - AAC LC, 107 Kbps, 48 ​​kHz, 2 channels)

It is curious that in the phone’s memory, in addition to these Full HD videos, a whole series of photographs from the same video sequence was found, numbered with the marking “zoe”, but in a resolution different from the micro-clips - 2688x1520. That is, Zoe is a real serial shooting, and you can then work with individual frames from the series using built-in tools - in particular, choose the best one. Here, for example, are the “frames” related to “Zoe No. 2”:

As for the camera control settings, they are somehow unusually collected into a single long ribbon, in which you need to open the sub-items that interest you one by one. It's a little confusing at first, but then you get used to it. It is curious that there is no option to change the resolution of the resulting photographs; shooting is carried out only in one resolution. True, it is possible to “crop” to different aspect ratios. The settings also include the ability to link geotags, add graphic effects, enable face detection, smiles, panoramic shooting and, of course, manual settings for exposure, white balance, etc. The shutter sound can be turned off. You can also display a grid on the screen, which is convenient.

The HTC One does not have a separate hardware key on the side of the device to control the camera. You cannot release the camera shutter using the volume key here either, although this is now often practiced in smartphones from other companies. Here, even in shooting mode, this key still continues to adjust the sound volume, which is frankly surprising. On the positive side, we can note the ability to take photos while recording video; there is also a standard burst shooting capability.

Conclusions on the camera's capabilities for taking photos:

The camera is well suited for everyday photography designed to capture interesting points or important information. Among the advantages we can highlight good program exposure selection, as well as an interesting implementation of macro photography. A significant drawback is the low camera resolution. It was done really well, but still the main task of the smartphone camera is more of a documentary than an artistic one. And here HTC One is almost three times inferior to the top-end smartphones of its competitors. On the other hand, it boasts good sharpness compared to some smartphones whose manufacturers do not consider a large number of pixels on the matrix to be a big liability.

Compared to the LG Nexus 4, the HTC One smartphone loses only in resolution. Edge sharpness drops on the Nexus, but not much. LG Optimus G, in turn, loses to HTC One in terms of the exposure selection program. In some places, its sharpness leaves much to be desired, despite the resolution of 13 megapixels. The same can be said about Sony Xperia Z, whose optics are clearly rather weak for such a “large” matrix. But the camera on the Oppo Find 5 smartphone is made very well: there is practically no drop in sharpness towards the edges of the image, and overall the sharpness of the image is good. The choice of exposure is also good. However, it also has geometric distortions, characteristic of all listed smartphones, as a result of the use of a wide-angle lens. The Samsung Galaxy S4 also copes well with photography, although it is somewhat inferior to the Oppo Find 5. Apparently, all manufacturers have almost managed to overcome chromatic aberrations and “white outlines”. Essentially, the only thing HTC One lacks in this overall comparison is high resolution, so that its camera can be rightly called one of the best among top-end smartphones.

Let us recall that the company refused a large resolution quite deliberately, using standard size matrix with a relatively small number of pixels. That is, the linear size of the photosensitive elements here is relatively large, which at a minimum should provide images from such a matrix with a reduced noise level. And in practice, we really see that in terms of noise, HTC One pictures definitely win. However, if you reduce the image of the same Oppo Find 5 to 4 megapixels, then in terms of detail and noise it will be no worse, and perhaps even better, than the HTC One version. It's no secret that good old cameras with a 4-5 megapixel matrix took cleaner pictures than early cameras with 12 megapixels. Now due software processing Manufacturers are trying to achieve the same clarity at higher resolution. HTC took the opposite route, trying to win with a lower resolution. The experiment is very interesting, but from the series “new is well-forgotten old.” However, we also note that it is impossible to objectively assess the noise and detail of a smartphone using field photographs (or rather, it is very difficult). In a good way, it requires filming the world in a specially prepared room, and we are not at all sure that our readers will be interested in these technical details when applied to a smartphone camera. Returning to the “user” level, we can give the following assessment: HTC managed to achieve the best quality of photographs, but this quality is manifested in the “beauty” of an artistic photograph, and not in the detail of a documentary one. For all its dislike for a large number of pixels on the matrix, we believe that HTC is not going quite the right way, since 4 megapixels is too small for a flagship smartphone - at least for those areas where a smartphone camera is usually used. This camera takes better pictures than the 5-megapixel cameras on previous HTC smartphones, so they should have gone for at least 6 megapixels.

In conclusion, the HTC One camera is well suited for shooting artistic scenes that don't require looking at small parts.

Software

HTC One currently runs on Google's software platform Android versions 4.1.2. On top of the standard OS interface, the company installed a proprietary shell called HTC Sense 5. The shell has undergone significant changes compared to previous versions. Literally everything has been completely redesigned here, from the color schemes and general organization of the desktop to the strange, elongated fonts.

It is curious that the program menu in HTC One completely unexpectedly scrolls not horizontally, like everyone else, but vertically. This is so unusual for users who have previously had experience with the Android system that without a hint they still cannot figure out that they need to scroll vertically. Some people may find this more convenient, but those I asked were not too happy about such changes.

The default application menu itself looks “loose” - program icons are spaced a considerable distance from each other. However, the matrix of application icons can be made denser by changing the grid configuration in the settings from 3x4 to 4x5. The settings buttons for changing, sorting and searching through the program menu are not initially visible - they need to be called up by additionally pulling down the work screen, which is not entirely customary.

But the most noticeable innovation here seems to be HTC BlinkFeed. This is an independent service, built right into the home screen - a kind of widget on the desktop that cannot be removed. It is a live feed of constantly updated events, be it news from websites, social activities friends, event announcements and the like. According to HTC representatives, BlinkFeed brings together relevant content from various sources, which is collected and processed on the company's servers, and then published in the feed. The figure is announced at 10 thousand articles received daily from more than 1,400 media sources from around the world. According to the developers, the user can now take in all the most necessary and significant things at one glance, without switching between various programs and websites. The content of the feed is divided into sections, and the owner of the HTS One smartphone is free to choose what topics he wants to receive information updates on in the BlinkFeed feed. The problem is different: the user cannot independently connect here other sources that are not initially included in the list of those processed by HTC servers for the BlinkFeed service. That is, the user can choose only within the limits limited by the choice of HTC itself. To switch from viewing BlinkFeed to the desktop, you need to perform a horizontal swipe on the screen - this will open the application menu.

There are not very many pre-installed programs. Some of them, such as the Polaris Office document management suite or the flashlight, may be useful. Moreover, office programs, for example, here allow you not only to open the usual Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, but also to edit and save them. There is even an interesting service called Rescue, with the help of which, supposedly, the user can receive remote technical support company specialists. We are impressed by the desire to refine the appearance of the application menu: as soon as Google added the ability to create folders for icons, manufacturers immediately began to neatly organize them by topic.

But, unfortunately, branded applications installed on HTC One do not work in our country. Wherever you click (HTC Watch, HTC TB...) - the programs report that they do not support our region, although they are correctly translated into Russian: Russia is simply not in the list of countries.

In HTC One, unexpectedly a lot of attention is paid to the “children's issue”. Built into the smartphone separate service, which allows you to block access to important settings from children, and this mode is even included in the menu when rebooting as a separate item. Obviously, this may be useful to someone, although nowadays it may be easier to buy a child his own inexpensive electronic toy than to trust such an expensive parent device.

Telephone and communications

The radio part of the tested HTC One smartphone is stable; no random signal losses or dropouts from the telecom operator's network were noticed. The screen is large, the drawing of keys, numbers and letters of the number dialing and virtual keyboard quite convenient for typing SMS messages. In HTC One, a lot of attention is paid to the methods of entering information, there is a standard ability to enter with a stroke, and even a whole tutorial on the topic “how to type easier.”

No freezes, reboots or spontaneous shutdowns were observed during testing. It is convenient to reboot the phone using a menu that pops up after a long press of the power button. When you bring it to your ear, the screen is blocked by the proximity sensor. The light sensor controls the screen brightness level automatically. There is a convenient LED event indicator, which is not built in the most ordinary way: the indicator does not have its own “window”, but shines directly through the holes in the top speaker grille.

The device is equipped with modern network interfaces and modules wireless communication: Bluetooth version 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11a/ac/b/g/n (this is the first announced device with support for 802.11ac!), there is support Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA and the ability to organize a point Wi-Fi access. The Micro-USB connector supports MHL and OTG modes: a 32 GB flash drive connected to the device via an adapter was perfectly recognized and mounted as a separate storage device. As for MHL, we tested this mode in detail in the section on video playback.

We separately tested the new Wi-Fi standard 802.11ac, which is supported by HTC One. Testing was carried out with the ASUS RT-AC66U router - one of two models supporting the 802.11ac standard present on the local market. As a reminder, this new version of the standard only operates in the 5 GHz band and provides more than double the speed of 802.11n. In the case of smartphones, most often only one antenna is used, so connection speeds in this case can be a maximum of 150 Mbps for 802.11n and 433 Mbps for 802.11ac. Actual performance is usually about half that. In addition, many mobile devices do not even support dual-channel operation, resulting in a 72 Mbps limitation for 802.11n.

Despite the stated support for 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, we were only able to get a connection from the device at the typical 802.11g speed of 54 Mbit/s. At the same time, the actual performance was slightly more than 20 Mbit/s. We put a lot of effort into setting up the router, but the smartphone was unable to see the 5 GHz band, so tests were not carried out in 802.11ac mode. Most likely, the situation is due to the use of a pre-sale sample. If possible, we will definitely return to this issue later.

HTC One also has support for NFC, a short-range high-frequency wireless communication technology that makes it possible to exchange data between devices located at a distance of about 10 centimeters. This technology is aimed primarily at use in mobile phones and payment terminals, and in some countries it is already being widely used for contactless payments, paying for public transport, or even personal identification. In our country, NFC has not yet become widespread, but already now the user of a smartphone that supports this technology can try it out in action. All you need to do is download and install the Yandex.Metro application, which, when you hold a travel ticket to your phone, can show the expiration dates and the number of trips remaining. Another application is offered by the domestic operator cellular communication MTS, which organized NFC support for contactless payments. The Mobile Wallet kit includes a special MTS SIM card with MasterCard PayPass technology, linked to an MTS Money bank card. In addition, the kit comes with an NFC antenna, which must be placed in the SIM card slot. That is, for such contactless payments, in any case, just a smartphone is not enough - you also need to obtain and insert a new special SIM card into it, and also open a corresponding account at MTS Bank. But in the case of a phone that supports NFC technology, you won’t also have to install an antenna - but this is not so simple, and in the iPhone, where the SIM card is pushed into the body through a slot, it simply won’t be possible to install it.

The GPS module is assisted in determining the location by A-GPS technology; with its help, orientation on the terrain is carried out almost instantly. If you turn off all wireless communication modules, a cold start with searching for satellites and determining the location will take one and a half minutes. The phone also claims to support the Russian satellite navigation service Glonass.

Performance

The HTC One hardware platform is based on the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 single-chip system. It includes a quad-core Krait 300 CPU with a frequency of 1.7 GHz and an Adreno 320 GPU. According to the creators, new system Delivers 40% more performance than the previous generation Snapdragon S4 Pro system while reducing power consumption by 30%.

The amount of RAM in HTC One is 2 GB. The system memory in the smartphone is 32 or 64 GB, depending on the selected configuration. In our case, the storage available to the user for uploading their own files was about 25 GB, with a nominal designated volume of 32 GB. When a smartphone is connected to a PC, its internal storage is mounted as an independent removable disk. Unfortunately, the HTC One did not provide the ability to expand memory using microSD cards, so the user will have to be content with only these 25 GB for all his needs.

We compared the HTC One's hardware performance in various popular tests with the performance of other top-end modern smartphones we've previously tested. Most of them, by the way, are built on the very previous Snapdragon S4 Pro platform mentioned above. Therefore, it is quite expected that a device based on the new Snapdragon 600, according to test results, was in the forefront in comparison with its competitors. HTC One demonstrated very high performance results, standing on par with the Samsung Galaxy S4 and leaving behind other top-end smartphones of our time, such as Google Nexus 4, LG Optimus G, HTC One X+ and Samsung Galaxy Note II. We present summary data with a comparison of results based on the AnTuTu test database. Our own data differs slightly from these, but the general balance of forces is clearly clear.

Below are the results of testing HTC One in the new version of GLBenchmark - 2.7.0, where a new T-Rex HD scene of increased complexity was added. As we remember, even such a powerful system as the Oppo Find 5 produced only 13 fps in this test. The new Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 platform in HTC One handled this difficult test better, but only slightly - 15 fps.

Play video and connect to an external screen

To test omnivorousness when playing video (including support for various codecs, containers and special features, for example subtitles), we used the most common formats, which make up the bulk of the content available on the Web. Note that for mobile devices it is important to have support for hardware video decoding at the chip level, since it is most often impossible to process modern options using processor cores alone. Also, don't expect mobile device decoding everything, since the leadership in flexibility belongs to the PC, and no one is going to challenge it.

Format	Container, video, sound	MX Video Player	Standard video player
DVDRip	AVI, XviD 720×400 2200 Kbps, MP3+AC3	plays normally	plays normally
Web-DL SD	AVI, XviD 720×400 1400 Kbps, MP3+AC3	plays normally	plays normally
Web-DL HD	MKV, H.264 1280×720 3000 Kbps, AC3
BDRip 720p	MKV, H.264 1280×720 4000 Kbps, AC3	The video plays normally, the sound is only software¹	The video plays fine, but there is no sound¹
BDRip 1080p	MKV, H.264 1920×1080 8000 Kbps, AC3	The video plays normally, the sound is only software¹	The video plays fine, but there is no sound¹

¹ sound in MX Video Player was played only after switching to software decoding; The standard player does not have this setting

Additionally, the MHL interface was tested. To test it, we used an LG IPS237L monitor that supports direct MHL connection using a passive adapter cable from Micro-USB to HDMI. In this case, output via MHL is carried out in a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels with a frequency of 30 frames/s. Display on the monitor screen when portrait orientation the smartphone screen is carried out in portrait orientation only if the current program does not, in principle, support landscape orientation, while on the monitor screen the height of the image is slightly less than the height of the display area, and black fields are displayed on the right and left. In all other cases, regardless of the orientation of the smartphone, the image on its screen and on the monitor screen is forced to be displayed in landscape orientation. Unfortunately, the image is displayed on the monitor in a slightly reduced form so that black stripes remain around the perimeter. There seems to be no way to disable this output. As a result, the actual resolution on the monitor screen is lower than on the screen of the smartphone itself, that is, less than Full HD. Sound is output via MHL (in this case, the sounds were heard through headphones connected to the monitor, since there are no speakers in the monitor itself) and has good quality. At the same time, at least multimedia sounds are not output through the loudspeaker of the smartphone itself, and the volume is controlled by buttons on the smartphone body. The smartphone connected via MHL is charging.

Video output using the standard player deserves a special description. To begin with, using a set of test files with an arrow and a rectangle moving one division per frame (see Methodology for testing video playback and display devices. Version 1), we checked how the video is displayed on the screen of the smartphone itself. Screenshots with a shutter speed of 1 s helped determine the nature of the output of frames of video files with various parameters: the resolution varied (1280 by 720 (720p) and 1920 by 1080 (1080p) pixels) and frame rate (24, 25, 30, 50 and 60 frames/ With). The results of this (block entitled " Screen") and the following test are tabulated:

File	Uniformity	Passes
Screen
watch-1920x1080-60p.mp4	did not play
watch-1920x1080-50p.mp4	Badly	few
watch-1920x1080-30p.mp4	Fine	No
watch-1920x1080-25p.mp4	Fine	No
watch-1920x1080-24p.mp4	Fine	No
watch-1280x720-60p.mp4	Great	No
watch-1280x720-50p.mp4	Fine	No
watch-1280x720-30p.mp4	Fine	No
watch-1280x720-25p.mp4	Fine	No
watch-1280x720-24p.mp4	Fine	No
MHL (monitor)
watch-1920x1080-60p.mp4	did not play
watch-1920x1080-50p.mp4	Badly	a lot of
watch-1920x1080-30p.mp4	Fine	few
watch-1920x1080-25p.mp4	Badly	No
watch-1920x1080-24p.mp4	Badly	No
watch-1280x720-60p.mp4	Badly	a lot of
watch-1280x720-50p.mp4	Badly	a lot of
watch-1280x720-30p.mp4	Badly	No
watch-1280x720-25p.mp4	Badly	No
watch-1280x720-24p.mp4	Badly	No
MHL (adapter)
watch-1280x720-60p.mp4	Badly	a lot of
watch-1280x720-50p.mp4	Badly	a lot of
watch-1280x720-30p.mp4	Badly	No
watch-1280x720-25p.mp4	Badly	No
watch-1280x720-24p.mp4	Badly	No

Note: If both the Uniformity and Dropout columns are rated green, this means that when watching movies, there will most likely be no or no amount of artifacts caused by frame spacing or dropouts visible. will not affect viewing comfort. "Red" marks indicate possible problems related to the playback of the corresponding files.

Only one file plays perfectly - 1280x720 at 60 fps, in all other cases the intervals between frames alternate unevenly, in one case a small part of the frames is skipped, and 1080p files at 60 fps are not played back. However, except for these two cases, it is quite difficult to visually notice artifacts. Note that uniform alternation of frames, if it exists, is still a relatively unstable state, since some external and internal background processes lead to periodic failure of the correct alternation of intervals between frames. When playing video files with Full HD resolution (1920x1080 pixels) on the smartphone screen, the image of the video file itself is displayed one-on-one, exactly along the border of the screen in true Full HD resolution. The brightness range displayed on the screen slightly does not correspond to the original one - in the shadows three or four shades of gray are indistinguishable from black, but in the highlights all gradations of shades are displayed (for video in the range 16-235). It is impossible not to note the relatively good - loud and good quality - stereo sound that is created by two spaced apart speakers of this smartphone. As a result, it is not at all necessary to wear headphones to watch a movie, unless, of course, the sound disturbs those around you.

With connected by MHL monitor When playing a video with a standard player, the image of the video file itself is displayed both on the smartphone screen and on the connected monitor, but information elements and virtual controls are only displayed on the smartphone screen. When playing video files with Full HD resolution (1920×1080 pixels), due to the non-disabled overscan, as noted above, the actual image resolution on the monitor screen is slightly less than Full HD resolution. The brightness range displayed on the monitor corresponds to the original one - all gradations of shades are displayed in highlights and shadows (for video in the range 16-235). The results of the monitor output tests are shown in the table above in the “MHL (monitor)” block. The output quality is not high, since the intervals between frames (or between groups of frames) alternate unevenly, and in some cases frames are skipped.

Additionally, video output (with a standard player) via MHL using an MHL adapter was tested. When using this adapter, output to the monitor was carried out in 720p mode at 60 fps, which determined the maximum actual image resolution. With the exception of resolution and frame rate, everything else - the nature of the interface output, charging, audio output and gray scale - did not differ from a direct connection via MHL. The test results are shown in the table above in the “MHL (adapter)” block. The conclusion is similar - the output quality is low.

As a result, it turns out that the implementation of the MHL interface in the HTC One smartphone has a number of serious shortcomings. Nevertheless, this type connections can, in principle, be used for games, watching movies, displaying web pages, etc., but you will need to come to terms with a decrease in actual resolution and periodic twitching of the picture when displaying a dynamic image.

Battery life

The capacity of the lithium polymer battery installed in HTC One is 2300 mAh. The battery is non-removable, so you won’t be able to remove it and replace it with a new one yourself.

The smartphone demonstrated very good performance in terms of battery life, leaving slightly behind all the top-end new products that we have tested recently. Here are the results of testing the test subject in several battery modes.

Continuous reading in the FBReader program at a minimum comfortable brightness level (the brightness was set to approximately 100 cd/m²) for 2 hours consumed only 14% of the full battery charge, and watching a video from YouTube for two hours high quality(HQ) via home Wi-Fi network The device has used up 27% of its battery capacity. At maximum load in continuous 3D game mode (100% brightness, 60 fps), the smartphone worked for 2 hours 14 minutes. HTC One is fully charged in 2 hours.

Prices

The average retail price of the device in rubles in Moscow at the time of reading the article can be found by moving the mouse to the price tag.

Bottom line

As for the cost, official sales of the HTC smartphone in Russia have already started. From April 10, the smartphone was supposed to start being sold in most retail chains and stores at a recommended price of 29,990 rubles. This time there will be no exclusive contracts with individual sellers, which is understandable: the company is not in a position now to dictate its terms to anyone. Thus, the smartphone will be sold in all stores, and those who pre-ordered on the websites of the company and all its key partners will receive a smartphone at a price of 27,990 rubles. Compared to the flagships of other companies, this is a very attractive price, and the smartphone turned out to be quite interesting. Of the obvious advantages, it has a reliable body made of high-quality and durable materials, as well as a powerful, most advanced hardware platform to date. Relative disadvantages include a strange camera, an inconvenient combination and location of all hardware buttons, as well as the need to get acquainted with the “finds” of developers expressed in software and interface, such as vertical menu programs and BlinkFeed, for example.

For a set of innovative solutions concentrated in one product, flavored with a non-standard attractive appearance, the HTC One smartphone certainly deserves our award.

ergonomic, fast, good software, not buggy, large amount of built-in memory.

A year ago

After so much time, it’s already difficult to remember all the positive emotions that this device gave. But the main aspect I still want to highlight is the sound, it is deep and clear. Changing the equalizer with good headphones does not turn the sound into cacaphony. With this smartphone, even some headphones with a relatively high impedance can open up (for telephone systems). Using an iPhone now, I understand how much it lags behind the HTC ONE in terms of music, in fact, this is precisely the reason I use it now. Also an excellent screen: bright and clear. And of course the appearance. It was beautiful then, but now, in a time of similar “iPhone” devices, it naturally stands out.

2 years ago

Nice, stylish smart. Everything in it is on top level! The most important thing is that this phone is for smart people, not for primitives, but for those who have gray matter in their heads.

2 years ago

Stylish, lightweight, 2 stereo speakers, efficient hardware.

2 years ago

I don’t know about everyone else, but I came across a pretty high-quality item. I bought it from my guy second hand. It's been around for two years now, I've been using it for a year and a half. The advantages of this model include: 1. Housing. The good old aluminum body is better than the new glass phones. Don't lie this phone I dropped it 6-7 times, and after such falls there were small scratches and barely noticeable dents. 2. A 1.7 processor with 4 cores and 2 gigs of RAM flies this way. There are practically no glitches and freezes, but they occur very rarely. 3. The screen is very bright, the clarity is off the charts, the pixels can only be seen under a magnifying glass. 4. Beatsaudio is a cool thing for headphones, here it is consistently 4+. But before that I had an HTC One S, the sound was a little better. And even before that there was a Samsung Galaxy W GT-I8150, there was absolutely nothing without this thing

3 years ago

Very beautiful, durable, works very quickly, supports many programs, for example, I can open documents, edit them, although many say that this is only accessible through a computer. The music is great. The phone falls very often and is not broken, the screen is intact, considering that it hits the asphalt every day by accident, of course... but the screen has the feeling that even if you hit it with a sledgehammer it will still be intact!

3 years ago

A strong phone, it was able to survive me (it was difficult, believe me) - Excellent quality screen. As in 2013, so now. -Optimized HTC Sence, and it’s also very convenient to modify it to suit yourself. -It also works in applications, the same values ​​in benchmarks as from the purchase itself (except for the battery) -The case itself is not only beautiful, but also comfortable, that is, it fits perfectly in the hand and does not tend to fly out. -LTE is still good, Wi-Fi is still stable.

3 years ago

Case OS Performance

3 years ago

I've been using the device for four years now and it works perfectly. The battery lasts at least a day, although I keep the charge from 30% to 80%. That is, 50% per day with the net and waffles always on.

3 years ago

screen, body, design, sound, camera, "zoe", battery

The battery cannot be easily repaired and changed; there are few mega pixels, no 2 SIM cards, no memory card. Glitchy camera.

A year ago

Actually, the disadvantages follow from the advantages, due to a weak battery. The operating time has always suffered and is suffering now, although I use it as a player. But maybe it’s due to the battery being worn out to some extent, because I didn’t change it.

2 years ago

There is no back button, but this can be solved by double tapping on the house

2 years ago

1. Non-removable battery - glitched several times during the game. I had to wait until the battery 2 was completely discharged. In games it just got hot like hell, which is why it started to glitch. 3. The cord is not particularly durable, it bends just like its Chinese counterparts. Due to this, you cannot synchronize with your computer. 4. There is no slot for a memory card 5. Just a terrible update, during which the sidebar simply did not open, I had to roll back the entire system.

2 years ago

Quiet sound from the speakers. One speaker wheezes a little at high power. If you charge the battery and do not use the phone for a day, then on the second day of use the battery sag a little, that is, it runs out 1.5 times faster (even though there will be the same percentage of charge, for example 90%).

3 years ago

The camera, shortly after the purchase, it turned pink, in daylight everything is fine, but in low light everything is fine(((now the pictures are not clear... You have to wait to catch the focus, and it doesn’t always work, maybe this is due to falls. .. +charging... The original one broke, others don’t hold it well, my husband bought a Samsung, even his charger stopped working after a month, that is, mine doesn’t work.... And if the original one, it charges very quickly.

3 years ago

I will write year by year how the situation worsened. When I purchased it, everything seemed perfect to me, because I was 16 years old and I received my first Android, “woohoo,” were my reviews. :) But there was still one drawback: -Weak speaker volume. Compared to other phones, it sounds quiet. After 1 year: Honestly speaking, in the first year I had only one drawback: -In all games, on unknown programs, it heated up to 70 degrees, but after that I stopped using it in powerful games (for this I personally think that It’s worth buying a PC or at least a Console, but my opinion doesn’t really matter to anyone here), the camera was still normal. -In summer, charging temperature reaches 55 degrees. Hot body. At this point, due to the owner’s crookedness, the appearance of the phone began to deteriorate: scratches on the body, signs on the screen

3 years ago

Camera Over time - battery

3 years ago

I had to get root to configure all the services for myself.

3 years ago

price, three dots in some applications, gets hot

Introduction

I usually start reviews of flagships with a story about what happened to the company shortly before the release of the model in question. This time there will also be such a story, but in a short version, because we have already looked at HTC One from several different angles and the site had materials from Eldar Murtazin and me about this device even before the release of the new product. I suggest you read them if the topic is interesting.

For HTC, the previous year, and also partly 2011, turned out to be a crisis. Initially, the company, along with its growing popularity Android platforms stood on par with brands like Samsung, Apple and Nokia, and then over the course of several years lost a significant part of its loyal audience. Enthusiastic reviews from the IT press and individual users for some HTC products did not give anything in terms of improving the brand's position in the market and sales. All this time, the situation did not change much, despite various statements from HTC that the company would focus on top products, everything continued in the same spirit. The release of a new smartphone, and then many of its variations, relatively speaking, then middle-class devices one after another without any differences. At the same time, HTC has never been a large company and did not become one overnight after the success of its first Android smartphones, but within HTC a decision was made to expand the model range and since then we have all witnessed this process.

With the announcement of the HTC One X, it seemed that the situation began to change and the company would again concentrate all its forces around one, top-end device without any compromises, but the release of this model and the subsequent flurry of simpler devices and variations of the HTC One X itself showed that the situation is not changing. The company's release of the HTC One X+ smartphone looked especially strange just six months after the start of sales of the original HTC One X. Both flagships were unsuccessful in the market and the difficulties within the company only worsened.

And now, the beginning of another year, the Taiwanese manufacturer presents another flagship - HTC One. Again there is a lot of hope, a lot of joy and some surprise, all this happened after the release of HTC One X and is happening again. The only difference is that HTC One actually looks more interesting than its predecessor in terms of design and body materials, and this model actually takes into account some of the mistakes of the previous one. But there are also new controversial and incomprehensible points. In this review, I will not answer your question whether the HTC One will become a globally successful and popular “people's smartphone,” but I will try to answer whether I will buy it for myself when I have a choice between the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Sony Xperia Z?

Design

Over the past few years, HTC has been growing in terms of design, in my opinion. This can be clearly seen in the example of the flagships HTC Desire HD, HTC Sensation, and then HTC One and HTC Butterfly. The manufacturer is not afraid to experiment with materials and the shape of the case; this is not always successful, for example, for some reason the glossy Butterfly was brought to Russia, but in general it is difficult not to notice the progress.

Despite its large dimensions and boring colors, the HTC One is available in silver and black (in the future, perhaps in red), the device looks beautiful and interesting. This is achieved through various details - the shape of the case, the curved back, and the speakers, which are unusual for a smartphone and symmetrical relative to the screen. You can talk about the similarities between HTC One and Blackberry Z10, but this can only be done by a person who has not held both smartphones in his hands. In reality, there are no similarities between these models.

It seems to me that HTC One perfectly demonstrates the modern capabilities of companies in terms of the design of their smartphones. On the one hand, we hear universal phrases that every smartphone with a large touch screen this is certainly a display and a body in the form of an appendage and that nothing new can be invented here; on the other hand, there are striking examples of the opposite - Sony Xperia Z and HTC One. However, if with the Xperia Z everything is not so simple, because the glass used in the smartphone is far from universal and, more importantly, not quite familiar for smartphones, then in the HTC One the combination of design and materials is simply a win-win - a lot of metal, familiar classic colors and no bling.

Housing materials

The main body material is aluminum. The base of the smartphone is an all-aluminum “tub”, cut from a single piece of metal, electronics, display and other elements are placed in it, above and below the screen there are aluminum inserts, they are attached to the main part (in the picture there are elements with slots for speakers).

The smartphone is black – painted aluminum. After two weeks of active use, my black HTC One has not lost its presentation at all, no scratches or chips have appeared on it, and I also cannot yet find any areas with peeling paint. On the other hand, two weeks is not too long, so I won’t speak confidently about slight wear and tear on the case.

Below you can watch a video that briefly shows the process of making the aluminum base of the HTC One case:

A separate task for HTC engineers and developers was the issue of placing antennas in the smartphone, since the case is all-metal, and the only pair of holes in it are for the camera and a slot for a microSIM card. Eventually the best solution it was recognized that the antennas were placed outside the body. They were placed in small grooves on the outside of the back of the smartphone and filled with plastic. Thus, those two decorative plastic inserts that we see on the smartphone are precisely the antennas hidden here for the operation of wireless interfaces.

The side edges of the device are also filled with plastic; here it is painted in the color of the body. The screen is protected by a layer of Gorilla Glass 2, there are practically no fingerprints left on it, and those that do exist are invisible. In order to take a photo with prints on the display, I had to try pretty hard.

As for possible scratches, everything is as usual. On paper, glass is very resistant and can be scratched with a knife, scissors and other objects - there will be no scratches. However, after a month of use, small scratches may still appear on the device. So it’s worth remembering that even Gorilla Glass or its equivalent is not a 100% guarantee that the screen will be like new throughout the entire time you use the smartphone.

Another actual question– soiling of the body as a whole. I don’t know how things are with the silver HTC One, but the black device gets dirty surprisingly quickly and marks and stains on the back of the device are clearly visible. Especially oily fingerprints. You can wipe it or put up with a constantly stained smartphone - everyone decides for themselves. From time to time I wipe the body of the HTC One on whatever happens (on my sweatshirt, for example).

Assembly

From the fact that the HTC One uses a unibody case without removable elements (except for a slot for a microSIM card), it follows that the device’s build is excellent. Yes, I understand that this rule does not always work, just remember the HTC One X with peel-off glass in a “monolithic” assembly, but in the HTC One there seems to be no such problem (pah-pah-pah), and it’s hard to come up with others. The case looks very reliable and solid.

Dimensions

Unlike its main competitors, which are equipped with 5" screens, HTC One has at least somewhat retained the "humanity" towards users; it has a 4.7" screen and this is good in terms of the size of the device.

Dimensions of HTC One – 137.4 x 68.2 x 9.3 mm, weight – 143 grams. This is smaller than the dimensions of the HTC Butterfly. Below are other sizes for comparison. popular smartphones:

• Apple iPhone 5 – 123.8 x 58.6 x 7.6 mm, 112 grams
• HTC Butterfly– 143 x 70.5 x 9.1 mm, 140 grams
• – 137.4 x 68.2 x 9.3 mm, 143 grams
• Nokia Lumia 920 – 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

It should be noted here that, despite the 0.3” smaller diagonal compared to the SGS 4, the HTC smartphone still has comparable dimensions, but the Sony Xperia Z is already larger.

By modern standards and compared to some other smartphones (SGS 4, Meizu MX2, LG Optimus G Pro), the HTC One has a thick frame between the screen and the edge of the body, it is almost half a centimeter, while for the above models it is about 3-3.5 mm. In practice, I don’t think that reducing the thickness by a couple of millimeters would give a noticeable gain in size, but the smartphone would definitely look more impressive. Although in terms of design everything is fine.

Carrying the HTC One in your trouser pocket is quite convenient; it is still a smartphone that fits in one hand and you just need to get used to it. More precisely, to its dimensions.

Controls

Once again, HTC is redesigning the control system. This time there are two buttons below the screen, to the left and right of the HTC logo. The button on the left is “Back”, the button on the right is “Home”. If you hold the Home key for a couple of seconds, the Google Now application launches; if you quickly press it twice, the utility of recently opened applications is launched in the form of a matrix of mini-images.

Both buttons are convenient, they vibrate when touched and are backlit, but main question is this: who is the smartest “designer” inside HTC who was able to push the idea that the HTC logo between two keys instead of a third is cool and beautiful? Honestly, I really want to see at least some logical explanation for this decision, because so far it seems absolutely useless to me. And not only me, xda-developers is already actively discussing this problem and searching for solutions.

At first, they decided that the area on which the logo was located would not turn into a full-fledged key, and the topic even included a picture of one of the smartphone spare parts:

Screen

HTC One has a Super LCD3 display. The screen characteristics look like this: 4.7” diagonal, resolution 1920x1080 pixels (FullHD), pixel density – 469 ppi, which is higher than any other smartphone on the market.

Traditionally, I can describe my impressions of the screen of the next HTC smartphone in one succinct word - amazing. The display has maximum viewing angles, no matter what angle you tilt it at: diagonally, edges or edges - the picture is not distorted. There is a good reserve of brightness and the screen remains readable in the sun. Color rendering is close to natural, the colors are moderately saturated and rich, but not overly contrasting or acidic.

Viewing Angles

Automatic brightness adjustment does not work correctly in all situations, but in general I have no particular complaints about its operation. In the screen settings you can select the font size for menus and programs.

The only criticism may be that the black color is not quite deep when comparing the display with AMOLED screens, but personally I am ready to forgive this moment with the HTC One display, because in return I get calm colors and a picture on the screen that does not tire my eyes and does not bleed on the floor after half an hour of working with the device.

Camera

The main camera is perhaps the weakest point of HTC's new flagship. There is hardly a person who has not yet joked about the 4 MP module in the 2013 flagship. Of course, now we need to take into account that the smartphone software has not been perfected, and in terms of the camera, as HTC notes, there will be significant improvements in future firmware, but for now we are working with what we have. The main series of pictures below were taken on HTC One with the penultimate stable firmware - 1.28.401.7; most of the reviews on the network, both foreign and in other languages, were carried out on it. I also ended up with another sample with more recent software - 1.29.401.5. You will find examples of pictures from HTC One on this firmware in the comparison section with HTC Butterfly. Looking ahead, I will say that there is no particular difference in quality (or rather, no difference) between the pictures, so we continue to wait together for the final firmware, with which the smartphone will go on sale.

Let's take a look at the characteristics of the main camera module, available on the official HTC website.

HTC UltraPixel Camera:

• Pixel size 2.0 micrometers, sensor size 1/3", back-illuminated matrix
• Dedicated HTC ImageChip™ 2 processor
• F2.0 aperture and 28mm lenses
• Built-in multi-axis optical stabilizer for smooth, professional video
• Smart Flash: Automatically selects one of five flash levels based on distance to subject
• Front camera: 88° lens with HDR
• Full HD 1080p video recording from both the main and front cameras
• HDR Video
• VideoPic function: shoot videos and take photos at the same time
• Record and playback video in Slow motion format with speed control
• HTC Zoe™ with recording of memorable events and a service for publishing them HTC Zoe™ Share

First, I will briefly describe the camera's software innovations, and then I will give the floor to Roman Belykh, who will comment on the quality of the pictures taken on the HTC One.

One of the main features of the camera in HTC One, in addition to the use of “ultrapixels”, is HTC Zoe technology. This is a set of tools for shooting and subsequent editing of images. By turning on Zoe, you'll get frames a few seconds before and after the moment you took it, so if the shot itself doesn't work out, you can choose from images that are stored in memory thanks to Zoe. Another interesting possibility is photo editing, in particular, if you take a series of frames where, for example, there is a person who is present in each frame, then using a special tool you can completely remove the person from the frame. That is, the system glues together different sections from different images.

There are other editing tools: in portraits or just pictures where there are faces, you can change the geometry of faces, make them a little plumper or a little longer, and so on. The most important thing about this is that these tools really work and with their help you can edit pictures on your smartphone. Yes, this will be basic editing, but nevertheless, it is possible and it will not spoil the photos.

The camera interface is as similar as possible to that of the HTC Butterfly; all settings are available from a special pop-up menu, the more important ones are located at the top, the minor ones are located below. The maximum image resolution is 2688x1520 pixels for widescreen mode.

The following settings are available:

Plot

• Ordinary
• Portrait
• Scenery
• Backlight
• Text
• Macro

Modes

• Ordinary
• Expanded panorama

By the way, HTC One does expanded panoramas very well, in my opinion. Look at this example of such a shot:

You can also adjust the ISO value (Auto, 100-1600), white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation and image sharpness. There is serial shooting with a very high rate of fire, up to 20 frames can be taken at a time.

Just in case, I remind you that you can look at our comparison of the cameras of HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Apple iPhone 5.

And now I give the floor to Roman Belykh.

Comparison of cameras (Roman Belykh)

Before we briefly describe the quality characteristics of the HTC One photo and video camera, it is necessary to note an important thing: HTC says that the smartphone software will still be updated (before or after the start of sales is unknown), so we will prepare material on the One camera now and we will try to update it immediately after the update is released.

UltraPixel technology

Naturally, this technology also has a minus, and a significant one. The fact is that the sensor was so physically large that the Nokia 808 smartphone had a camera module on the back side: the thickness at its thickest point was as much as 14 mm. Yes, and this affected the weight (169 grams).

The next experimenters in the field of mobile “saving moments” were the HTC people. A few days before the Mobile World Congres (MWC 2013), traditionally held in Barcelona, ​​the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer introduced the HTC One. It became the first device to receive a new technology with the loud name UltraPixel. At the presentation they tried to convince us that “happiness is not in the number of megapixels,” so the pictures from the One camera are only 4 MP in size, but what a size! In part, the developers are right: the user does not always need a huge frame resolution, especially if the pictures were obtained using cell phones, and even, often, of mediocre quality.

The main feature of the technology is the large pixel size on the matrix: it is 2 micrometers. For comparison, the average pixel size of a 13 MP camera is 1.1 micrometer.

Thus, each pixel of the matrix captures 300 times more light. In theory, using UltraPixel technology coupled with high-aperture optics (F/2.0) and a special second-generation ImageChip processor, HTC One should produce excellent images in low-light conditions.

In addition, do not forget that the new camera has a multi-axis optical stabilizer (slightly different from the stabilization in the Nokia Lumia 920). Other characteristics of the One camera include sensor size (1/3") and wide-angle optics (28 mm).

Photo quality

Good level of lighting

Positive points: correct determination of white balance and high sharpness. Negative: despite the excellent lighting level, specific color noise is still noticeable (more like artifacts of their suppression), a rather narrow dynamic range, and often excessive contrast.

Separately, it is worth mentioning that before taking photographs, it is necessary to wipe the camera eye, since the surface of the protective glass of the lens quickly becomes covered with fingerprints, and the frames at the edges turn out to be a little blurry.

Digital zoom operation:

Insufficient lighting level

Taking pictures in such lighting conditions is the strength of the HTC One camera. It does an excellent job of suppressing noise thanks to UltraPixel technology, long shutter speed, image stabilization and a cool fast lens (F/2.0). Focusing is fast and accurate, color reproduction is natural, and white balance is almost always correct.

If we talk about operating modes, it is worth noting “night mode”. In it, the frames come out a little lighter, with the correct BB and even sharper.

Normal and night modes

Ordinary	Night

Portrait and macro photography

Shooting portraits and small objects is always interesting. This device produces simply excellent results: pleasant bokeh, fast focus, good sharpness.

HTC cameras have recently begun to have a “cool” HDR (High Dynamic Range) shooting mode: shadows are brightened and bright areas are darkened. No other device can boast of such results. It’s difficult to describe in words, so it’s better to take pictures yourself once and appreciate the beauty of the HDR mode.

Ordinary	HDR

Comparison of photos taken on HTC Butterfly and HTC One

Judging by the photographs received, HTC Butterfly copes well with automatic selection white balance, which cannot be said about the Van. The detail is about the same, with the only difference being that the Butterfly has a higher resolution, so, sad as it is for the One, some small details are better visible on the Butterfly. If I were HTC, I wouldn’t be too clever: I would use a camera from Butterfly and tinker with the image processing algorithms.

Night shots of HTC Butterfly (Auto mode) and HTC One (Auto/Night mode):

Photos in home lighting of HTC Butterfly and HTC One:

Macro HTC Butterfly and HTC One:

HTC Butterfly and HTC One text:

Comparison of pictures taken on Nokia 920 and HTC One

The first thing worth noting is the different viewing angles: Nokia has 26 mm, while HTC has 28 mm. “Nokiev” optics are of slightly lower quality, so slight blurring of details is easily noticeable at the edges. The second is saturation: Nokia “embellishes” the image a little, HTC, on the contrary, tries to adjust the camera settings to more natural shades, but somehow it doesn’t work out very well: the image lacks color, and therefore looks somewhat dull.

As for detail, it was about the same if HTC had an 8 MP camera. In this case, the footage from the Nokia Lumia 920 comes out a little more detailed: if you zoom in on the photo to 100%, you can see the smallest details.

In general, frames taken on the HTC look as if an 8 MP or 13 PM photo was “resized” to 4 MP and contour sharpening was applied.

Night shots on Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC One

White balance is cheated by one device or another, but a little more often by HTC. The Nokia smartphone in night mode increases the shutter speed regardless of the lighting level, so the frames often come out overexposed.

Sharpness is slightly better in shots taken with the HTC because it doesn't try to turn night into day by increasing the shutter speed. Therefore, pictures taken on the Lumia 920 are more likely to be blurred by hand shake.

Video quality

Traditionally, flagship smartphones shoot video in a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels at 30 frames per second (maximum 20 Mbit/s). Eat additional mode HD at 60 PFS (maximum 12 Mbps). Below specifications:

• Format: MP4
• Video bitrate: AVC, 20.0 Mbps
• Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (1.778), 30 fps
• Audio bitrate: AAC, 192 Kbps
• Channels: 2 channels, 48.0 KHz

The most interesting thing is that the image stabilizer also works in video mode. The picture is quite smooth. But we must not forget that it was difficult to create a stabilization mechanism in a miniature body, so the video has imperfect quality: at the edges, during strong camera shaking, the image is slightly blurred.

The sound is recorded very clearly, but the volume is low. The stereo base is expanded, i.e. You can clearly hear which direction the sound is coming from.

Comparison of video recorded on Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC One

The image on Nokia looks much sharper, the focus does not float as much as on HTC. However, the choice of automatic exposure is depressing: the picture looks much darker than on the HTC.

The stabilizer, let’s say, works more pleasantly on the Lumia 920, since the One, as I said earlier, slightly blurs the picture on the sides.

The sound is definitely better on the HTC One: it is louder, stereo is clearly audible (mono sound on the Nokia 920), automatic recording level adjustment works well, i.e. harsh sounds are muffled.

It is worth remembering that the firmware on HTC One is not final, but the latest. So, there remains hope that the developers will still do everything possible to improve the final result as much as possible.

Sound

Beats Audio. In addition to the traditional Beats Audio logo on the back of the smartphone, the company offers users several more improvements in HTC One. But I'll start with Beats. On the first HTC smartphones, where the so-called “improvers” from Beats Audio were also responsible for the sound, the situation was like this. When you plugged in headphones and listened to music with Beats turned off, the sound was normal. Just like on the company's previous smartphones. That is, it was a good sound and, for example, I used to listen to music with Beats turned off. Turning this thing on made musical compositions more bassy, ​​or, I don’t know how best to describe it. In general, with the inclusion of Beats, the music was dominated by low frequencies and this was noticeable.

Gradually, the situation changed so that it was impossible to listen to music on a standard HTC player without Beats turned off - the sound was simply strange and incomprehensible. The clearest example of this situation is the HTC One. When you listen to music with Beats turned on (which is turned on by default), everything is fine. As soon as you turn it off, the sound becomes simply terrible, as if when you turn off Beats you are activating the most clumsily configured equalizer “preset.” I don’t know how things really are, but even my poor hearing allows me to hear this difference. It seems that HTC simply left the normal playback mode and called it Beats, and then seriously corrupted the player in software and made it so that when you turn off Beats, you hear some kind of porridge in your ears. I’d like to think that I’m wrong, but I don’t know how else to explain that with Beats turned off, the sound in the smartphone is so terrible. I repeat, this was not the case before.

By the way, with Beats turned on, the smartphone sounds great to my simple village ears.

BoomSound. Above and below the screen on the front side there are two very high-quality speakers for a smartphone. Together they produce a smooth, deep and pleasant sound, as if you were listening not to a smartphone, but to some compact, but still separate and real speaker. Both the stereo effect and depth are felt. The speakers sound especially great if you listen to instrumental music or tracks with pronounced vocals on your smartphone.

I would like to note that the volume level of the HTC One ringing speakers cannot be called excessively loud. Yes, they do have a volume reserve, but not excessive, and at the same time the most important point– not the volume, but the quality of the sound produced by the speakers.

SenseVoice. Another feature related to sound implemented in HTC One is the SenseVoice noise reduction system and two microphones for voice recording. In practice, the work of these two technologies is clearly visible if you use your smartphone as a voice recorder. The device records voice very high quality and cleanly, without extraneous noise, even if they are present close to the source of the voice. At the same time, the voice is clearly distinguishable in the voice recorder, even if the interlocutor was at a distance of 2-3 meters from the smartphone during the recording. This is if you listen to the recording on the smartphone itself, when listening on a PC, it seemed to me that the recording does not sound so loud, although maybe I’m just so deaf.

Music player . The HTC audio player traditionally has good functionality and is beautifully designed in terms of interface. Music can be presented as a library with albums, artists and genres, or you can choose a simpler view - folders. Using the Gracenote service, the player loads album covers and artist photos for the library.

When the player is turned on, it appears in the notification panel with album art and control buttons.

If you choose a lock screen with a player, you can not only scroll through tracks and pause music without unlocking your smartphone, but also select one of several albums to play.

Autonomous operation

The smartphone uses a non-removable Li-Pol battery with a capacity of 2300 mAh. Compared to the HTC Butterfly, we see another step forward; the battery capacity has increased slightly, but there are no significant differences in real-time operating time between these two smartphones.

If the HTC Butterfly in video mode (playing a video in a circle in 720p quality) worked for me for 6 hours 49 minutes, then the HTC One lasted 8 hours. Yes, the difference is more than an hour, but in real use there are almost no differences in operating time between HTC Butterfly and HTC One.

My HTC One sample worked on average until 19-20 pm with the following load: 40-60 minutes of calls, 10-20 text messages, Gmail in push-mail mode, 3-4 hours of listening to music and about 1-2 hours of active using the mobile Internet (photos on Instagram, reading your feed on Twitter, Facebook, browser). In a similar mode, the HTC One X ran out of charge in the middle of the day, that is, at about 16-17 hours, so the progress is huge, at least in my mode of using the smartphone.

The smartphone has a power saving mode, by turning it on you can significantly save battery power. This mode reduces screen brightness, turns off data transmission when the display goes dark, and turns off vibration.

Platform, memory

The smartphone is built on the latest Qualcomm APQ8064T platform (Snapdragon 600) with a 1.7 GHz quad-core processor, Adreno 320 graphics subsystem (GPU). HTC One has 2 GB of RAM and 32/64 GB of internal memory for storing user data. In Russia, only a model with 32 GB will be sold, of which approximately 25 GB is available for downloading data, the rest of the space is occupied by service files, the system and Sense. So we can talk about the 25 GB version of the smartphone; there is no memory card slot in the HTC One.

If in the case of HTC One X and HTC Butterfly the lack of a memory card slot could still be perceived like this:

I only have this reaction to the lack of a slot in the next flagship, HTC One:

In my opinion, 25 GB for an Android flagship is not enough. Now many popular games in Google Play take up 1-3 GB of space on your smartphone after installation, the size of each photo taken with the HTC One camera is approximately 1.5 MB, and a 1080p video lasting about 5 minutes is 1 gigabyte. And this is if you don’t take into account the fact that many people download their favorite music to their smartphone and watch movies and TV series on it. Needless to say, a two-hour movie in 1080p quality is rarely less than 5-10 GB in size?

Performance, tests

The overall speed of the HTC One is excellent: desktops flip through instantly, there are no delays or stutters when launching applications or switching between them. With a large number of programs running, the smartphone does not start to work slower or hesitate. Below are the results of testing HTC One in various benchmarks.

To evaluate gaming performance, I ran GTA on HTC One: Vice City, Nova 3, Dead Trigger and a couple of other toys. All games on the smartphone run smoothly, without stuttering or freezing. When downloading games to your smartphone, you need to be prepared for the fact that some of them (I think many of them are still) are not optimized for such a high resolution and the image in them will simply be stretched by the system to fill the entire screen.

Now a little about video playback. I ran several movies in 1080p quality on the HTC One to see which videos it could handle. As a result, the picture is as follows - films with a resolution of 1920x800 or 1920x1080 pixels, a bitrate of 10-12 Mbps and weighing about 10-15 GB are played by the smartphone generally smoothly, there are some delays in very dynamic scenes, but in general, videos in this quality can be watched comfortably. Accordingly, the device also plays any video of lower quality (bitrate or resolution) without any problems. The standard video player in HTC One is very simple and you shouldn't use it if you are going to watch video on the device. It does not support track selection or subtitles; it is better to install something like Dice Player or MX Player.

And one more point related to performance. If you play on your smartphone for a long time, 10 minutes or longer, the device gets very hot. Moreover, if you measure the battery temperature at the time of heavy load using the Stabilty Test program, it will be about 47-48 degrees, this is not much, an indicator comparable to Google Nexus 4 and other devices. For example, after 30 minutes of load using the Stability Test, the Google Nexus 4 battery heats up to 57 degrees, in the Sony Xperia Z up to 47 degrees, Meizu MX2 up to 52 degrees, in the Samsung Galaxy S3 up to 42 degrees (heating data taken from video portal Mobiltelefon.ru).

However, in my hand the smartphone feels very, very hot, I don’t even have anything to compare it with in this parameter. Holding the device in your hands becomes a little uncomfortable. I don’t know whether this point can be corrected or not and how, but for now the situation is exactly like this. The use of aluminum has an effect; when HTC One heats up, its entire lid acts as a heat sink (and not just the frame, as in the Meizu MX2, for example).

Interfaces

The smartphone works in GSM networks(850/900/1800/1900), HSPA (850/900/1900/2100) and LTE (800/1800/2600), LTE network It is also supported in the version of the smartphone for Russia. You can turn interfaces on and off through settings or by adding one of several widgets to the home screen. Unfortunately, the convenient tab with interface switches was removed from the latest versions of Sense, and who was it bothering?

To synchronize with a PC and transfer data, the included microUSB cable. USB 2.0 interface. A 1GB file is copied to HTC One's memory in about 55-60 seconds. In the connection settings, you can select the Internet modem mode (Internet access via a smartphone) or end-to-end Internet connection. There are no more “Disk Drive”, HTC Sync and other modes; when connected to a PC, the smartphone is defined as a portable device and you can work with its memory either through Explorer or any other file manager of the system, or using HTC programs Sync.

The microUSB connector in HTC One supports USB On-The-Go (USB OTG) – you can connect flash drives and other storage devices, for example, a camera, to the smartphone via an adapter to transfer pictures from it to the device’s memory. The system in HTC One allows you to read and copy information from flash drives formatted in file systems FAT/FAT32/NTFS (haven't tested other file systems).

There's a funny thing to note here. On the one hand, you can connect a flash drive to HTC One via an adapter, on the other hand, you can read data from it standard means you can't, because your smartphone doesn't have it file manager, it must be installed from Google Play separately. HTC is one of the last companies that still does not equip its smartphones with a conductor out of the box.

Bluetooth. Built-in Bluetooth 4.0 module with A2DP support. Information about bluetooth profiles supported by the smartphone could not be found.

Wi-Fi (802.11a/ac/b/g/n). HTC One uses a dual-band WI-FI module. You can leave it to work in automatic mode, or you can manually specify the operating frequency band for Wi-Fi - only 5 GHz or only 2.4 GHz.

The Wi-Fi module works flawlessly. In additional settings, you can set the maximum performance mode, and also enable or disable automatic connection to the last saved active network. When the module is operating, the device does not heat up.

Wi-Fi router . HTC One has the ability to “share” a 2G/3G/4G Internet connection via Wi-Fi. In the wireless interfaces menu, select the option “ General access to mobile Internet" and then "Wi-Fi router". Here, when starting for the first time, you need to select the network name, password, and connection type (WEP, WPA, WPA2). You can also set the maximum number of connections to your smartphone (1-8) or separately prohibit or allow each new connection. When the utility is enabled, you can connect to the Internet, “distributed via Wi-Fi by your smartphone, from any device, be it a laptop, another smartphone or tablet, and so on.

DLNA, HDMI. The smartphone supports DLNA technology, so if you have a DLNA-compatible media server and other devices at home, you can use Butterfly with them. For example, output sound or video from the device directly to the TV. Also, the HTC One device has HDMI support; the connector is combined with microUSB (MHL), so in order to use HDMI, you will first need to buy a special cable.

NFC. Like the two previous models, HTC One supports NFC, but so far there are not many scenarios for using this module, and HTC does not equip its devices with special NFC tags. But with the help of this interface you can check on your smartphone the number of remaining trips on your metro pass!

Navigation

HTC One has GPS/Glonass support; searching for satellites takes a minimum amount of time, from 5 to 15 seconds. The device comes pre-installed with Google Maps and Google Navigation. Google Navigation is used as the main navigation program; the application with maps based on Route 66 data has been abandoned. This, on the one hand, is for the better - navigation from Google is now developing very actively, and besides, it is free, on the other hand, now you can’t use offline navigation, because for Google work Navigation requires a constant Internet connection. Therefore, if you decide to go somewhere and use HTC One as a navigator, it is better to look for navigation software in advance.

For comfortable work with a smartphone, when it is in the car in a mount, there is a special “In the car” mode. When you turn it on, you see large icons on the desktop; there are also special enlarged versions of the main applications: address book, music, settings, dialing. If desired, you can add shortcuts to other programs in this menu. In this mode, you can use a special assistant, a utility that performs voice commands like “Call + contact name”, “Play + track name” and some others. It's worth paying attention to this program if you're going to use the HTC One while driving; it really works and recognizes commands quite well if you speak them more or less loudly and clearly.

Text and voice input of text

HTC One uses HTC's traditional on-screen QWERTY keyboard. And it still remains one of the best keyboards available for Android, in my opinion. And it also has one important drawback that has persisted for many centuries... The fact is that when entering text in the Latin alphabet, you see on the keyboard not only the markings of the letters themselves, but also additional symbols. And to add a dog symbol, a hash mark, a percent sign or something else to the text while entering, you do not need to go to a special menu, just hold down one of the letter buttons for a couple of seconds.

In this case, it is worth switching to Cyrillic as markup additional keys disappears from the keyboard.

If we compare the sizes of the keys in both layouts, it turns out that in English keyboard The buttons are a little larger, but to the eye it seems that even on the buttons in the Russian layout the marking of additional characters will fit quite well. Judge for yourself:

Each time you press an on-screen button on the keyboard, the device vibrates slightly, this simplifies input, makes it more realistic, and helps you get used to on-screen keyboard. Switching the language is done by pressing one key, quickly and easily. By holding down the key on the other side of the spacebar, you can call up voice dialing. Voice typing in Android works very well, if you pronounce the message clearly, coherently and with pauses between words, it will be typed almost without errors. The only drawback of the voice dialing system is the inability to add punctuation marks.

In order to move the cursor within the text, you just need to touch any letter, after which a small “toffee” appears to move within the text. There are also four directional keys at the bottom of the keyboard for moving around within text. Double-tapping an individual word in text will highlight it, and you can then select other parts of the text to copy or cut.

In the keyboard settings there is an option “Trace keyboard”. If you turn it on, you can enter words with one movement of your finger, without having to look up to enter the next letter, this is analogous to the Swype keyboard. In the settings you can change the line color for the Trace keyboard.

The keyboard has a personal dictionary, where the device saves new words that you often use. The dictionary can be edited and also synchronized with a backup copy on the memory card.

HTC BlinkFeed

New flagship HTC One is the company's first device with the BlinkFeed service pre-installed. HTC is betting big on this service, judging by how much they talked about it; in addition, the screen with BlinkFeed is the main one in the system by default.

HTC BlinkFeed is a kind of aggregator of news from various sources: websites and social networks. Why peculiar? The fact is that the news that is shown in BlinkFeed first passes through the HTC server, is compressed, reformatted, and only then ends up on the smartphone screen. This was done to reduce the traffic costs of the service, as well as to increase the speed of its operation. News is displayed on the home screen in a tile format, much like on Windows Phone. The tile may be larger or smaller, depending on the image available for the news. The news feed as a whole looks beautiful and neat, provided that good sources are selected. But, if in words the capabilities of HTC BlinkFeed seem interesting, in practice this service is still of little use if you are going to read news with it. I'll try to justify my opinion.

Firstly, there are now some obvious shortcomings in HTC BlinkFeed that will probably be corrected, but they greatly spoil the first impression of it. When the screen with BlinkFeed is set as the main one in the system, you can return to the latest news on it by touching the “Home” key, this is convenient. But if you make any other screen the main screen, and move the screen with BlinkFeed, then the home key will return you exactly to the main screen, and not to the latest news in the feed. In practice, this means this: if you miss a day or even several hours of viewing BlinkFeed, then in order to return to the latest news in the service, you will have to scroll through the entire feed with your finger for this period of time (for a day, for example). It could be hundreds of news items and a minute or even more time when you just mechanically scroll through the news with your finger, from bottom to top, from bottom to top, from bottom to top...

Secondly, and this is the strangest flaw of the service, in my opinion, you cannot add your own news sources to HTC BlinkFeed. The company says that complex compression algorithms are used to operate the service, and in the future HTC itself will try to add the most popular resources to the feed so that they can be selected, but the possibility of adding its own sources is not even being considered. And this is in the 2013 flagship on Android 4.1, on a system for which there are a dozen good RSS aggregators, and people all over the world read a variety of sites, so you definitely can’t please everyone. In my opinion, the inability to add your sites to BlinkFeed makes the service uninteresting for many people.

Thirdly, BlinkFeed doesn’t even allow you to choose to display sites in multiple languages. That is, even if you are approached by sites about technology that BlinkFeed offers in Russian (nomobile, vesti, russia today), but you also want to read news from Engаdget, The Verge, and so on, you will not be able to add them to your feed. Either sites are in Russian from the Russian-language segment, or in English or some other language. We can only congratulate the developers who created HTC BlinkFeed; they invented the 2013 news ghetto for Android smartphones, no less.

Fourthly, even optimization and passing news through “special HTC servers” before being shown on the screen does not save them from having low-quality pictures. It’s hard to blame HTC for this, because on a screen with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, most images will seem of poor quality, but they clearly should have foreseen this. In the meantime, many news in HTC BlinkFeed are displayed with a mess of pixels instead of a clear image, simply because on the source site the news is published not with an image of 1000x1000 or higher, but with an image of something around 500x300, for example.

Fifthly, and this is the strangest thing, it seems to me that HTC BlinkFeed cannot be completely removed. Yes, you can uncheck all resources so that the service does not waste traffic, but even in this case you will be left with one screen occupied by BlinkFeed and there is no escape from it. For most, this is probably a trifle, but there are users who love minimalism and try to place all applications on one or two screens, and it seems to me that they will not like it.

HTC Sense 5

The smartphone runs Android 4.1.2; HTC promises to release an update to 4.2 soon, but the actual use is not latest version The OS is a bit disappointing. Traditionally for HTC - the Sense shell is used, here it is HTC Sense 5 - newest version company's proprietary interface.

I'll start with a brief description external changes in the interface. I, like many other HTC fans, at one time did not like the transition from the traditional Sense design, which we saw literally in the first version through the third, to something more “fresh” and airy in HTC Sense 4. Now the situation is the opposite - I personally really I like Sense 5 precisely in terms of design and graphics, with the exception of the font.

In HTC Sense 5, the base color scheme is dark gray with black elements, the standard combined clock and weather widget with sketchy weather status icons looks very cool, for my taste, it is easy to read without being too cluttered. Additional clock widgets are also a choice, beautiful and laconic, there are plenty to choose from.

Separately, I would like to mention the simply gorgeous desktop pictures from the standard set of HTC background pictures. For my taste, one image here is better than the other; personally, this is my first smartphone where I’ve been using only standard background images for a month now.

In HTC Sense 5, as in previous versions of the shell, you can choose one of several lock screen options: with a clock and weather, with a music control panel, with photo albums, with panels of recent events, or you can simply remove the lock screen. The disadvantage is that you cannot change the set of standard shortcuts on the lock screen, that is, the “Phone”, “Messages”, “Browser” and “Camera” shortcuts at the bottom will remain the same.

By the way, to change shortcuts in the fixed bottom panel in Sense 5, you need to go to the programs menu and drag icons into this panel from here; you can also remove icons from the panel only while in the “application menu” window. If you try to remove a shortcut from a fixed panel while on one of the shell screens, nothing will work - the shortcut will simply be duplicated on the desktop. Why the simple ability to change the set of shortcuts in this panel is made so unobvious - I don’t know.

The program menu has been changed if the previous versions Sense was a classic window with a fixed matrix of icons, but in Sense 5 you can choose the grid size: 3 x 4 or 4 x 5. Also in this window there is a clock and weather widget on top, it cannot be removed. In the program menu you can sort them alphabetically or by recently added. And also simply place it in the order convenient for you. Another innovation in the application menu is that you can now create folders here.

In my opinion, if before the menu was just a “warehouse” for all the shortcuts, now it is a full-fledged analogue of the desktop, only if a fixed number of elements fit on the desktop, here you can place as many of them as you like and move between them by scrolling up and down.

Standard Applications

Now let's take a quick look at the standard programs preinstalled on HTC One. I will try not to describe each application inside and out, but will only tell you about the interesting, in my opinion, capabilities of a particular program.

The address book. The changes are mainly cosmetic - the appearance of the tabs has changed, the list of contacts has become more strict and neat. In the contact card, half the screen is still occupied by a photo of a person. When incoming or outgoing call The photo is also located approximately half the screen.

By the way, HTC came up with a very elegant solution to the problem of low-resolution contact photos. If you have address book there are contacts with such “photos”, then when you open the contact card or start calling him (or he calls you) - you see the photo also on half the screen, but with a special effect, as if you are looking at it through a grille (I don’t know which is better explain, see screenshots).

Latest running applications. Double tapping the "Home" key launches the utility with the latest open source software, they are arranged in the form of mini-pictures in a 3 x 3 grid. Any application from here can be swiped up from the corresponding mini-picture.

Time, weather. These applications have undergone almost no changes, except that their appearance has changed slightly, and in the weather program more sketchy icons have appeared instead of the previous ones.

TV. We need to talk separately about the TV program. It combines several functions. The first is the TV schedule for the selected operator in the selected country. That is, you indicate your home TV provider and can view the schedule of all programs and films in the program. The second is the remote control for your TV, set-top box or video player. You select the type of equipment, its manufacturer, model, and then you can manage this equipment using HTC One. The infrared port is built into the power key.

HTC promises to soon add Russian television providers here, but so far they are not there. I would like to believe that these promises will come true, but we still need to keep in mind the fact that we have been promised support for HTC Watch for several years.

Kids mode. HTC One has a so-called children's mode, by turning it on you will limit the capabilities of the smartphone, reducing them to a certain minimum - you can launch selected programs and perform some other actions. The operation of this mode is implemented simply - HTC has the Zoodles service installed, which is the “children's mode”. Having enabled it, you first need to set up the rules and add allowed programs, as well as accounts (for several “children,” for example).

Then all that remains is to simply turn on the service every time you give the smartphone to your child for joy. In Zoodles, he will be able to run allowed programs, as well as draw, listen to audiobooks with pictures (information is downloaded from the Internet) and, of course, play games.

Flashlight and voice recorder. Two traditional programs in HTC - they are also available here and work great. Using a voice recorder, you can record conversations, but in this case you will only hear yourself well in the recording, but you will barely be able to hear your interlocutor (the voice recorder does not write from the line).

Service htcsense.com

Along with the release of HTC One, the company is relaunching the Sense web service. Or rather, it restarts, because not so long ago Sense already existed, but then was closed. New service Sense should be more beautiful, better and more useful, although I personally don't understand why HTC is launching it again. The main idea of ​​the service is the ability to quickly configure the device remotely via the website.

In addition, HTC Backup can also be called part of the service - with its help you can save your smartphone settings, account data, installed programs, bookmarks and dictionary for the keyboard. An important point is that HTC Backup stores data from your smartphone in Dropbox, and not on its servers, so using HTC backup you will depend not only on HTC, but also on the stable operation of Dropbox. The second important point is that by turning on HTC Backup you automatically disable the data backup that was originally installed in Android and linked to your Google account. That is, you need to make a choice right away.

The third point is that now the official website htcsense.com in Russian looks something like this:

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t use a service that they couldn’t even properly translate (in its entirety, not in pieces, and by choosing the right fonts) into Russian before launching.

Conclusion

For almost a month of using the smartphone, I had no complaints about the quality of signal reception in HTC One. The device picks up the network well, and the sound in the conversational speaker is clear, without wheezing or extraneous noise. In addition, there is a good volume reserve and you can talk on the phone even while on the subway. The vibration alert in HTC One is powerful, it is felt well even when walking and the smartphone is in your trouser pocket. The volume of the ringing speaker is above average. I can’t say that it directly “screams”, but compared to the volume of previous smartphones from HTC, the difference is clearly noticeable with a plus sign.

The smartphone should go on sale in early April, the pre-order price will be 28,000 rubles (27,990), and at retail the device will initially cost 30,000 rubles (29,990). The start of sales has already been postponed several times and this, of course, slightly overshadows the impression of the launch of HTC One, because initially the smartphone should have been launched together with the announcement of the Samsung Galaxy S 4.

It seems to me that there is no particular point in comparing HTC One with the company’s previous flagship – HTC Butterfly. Especially if we are talking about versions of smartphones for Russia, because HTC Butterfly came to us completely neutered - without a slot for a memory card (only 16 GB), and even with a glossy cover. This smartphone can now be called an intermediate link between HTC One X and HTC One.

Let's take a look at the strengths and weak sides HTC One.

pros:

• Excellent display in all respects (brightness, viewing angles, color rendition, contrast)
• Moderately large dimensions (the smartphone is comparable to HTC One X and more compact than HTC Butterfly)
• Excellent design and use of aluminum (all metal body and glass - what could be better?)
• High speed work in various modes (when working with menus, in games, when watching videos)
• High-quality stereo sound in calling speakers
• Good sound in headphones
• Excellent camera in video recording mode
• Good operating time (compared to previous HTC smartphones)
• Beautiful shell of HTC Sense 5 (if you close your eyes to the strangely elongated fonts)

Minuses:

• Large sizes (it seems that modern flagships cannot escape the “shovel” form factor)
• Only 32 GB of internal memory without the possibility of increasing this volume (about 25 GB available to the user)
• Lack of a touch menu key (it would be forgiven if HTC simply removed the block of touch buttons, but it didn’t)
• Controversial 4 MP camera (yes, progress is visible and HTC’s desire to untie users from the race for megapixels is commendable, but the first pancake rather came out a little lumpy and the quality of the images is not particularly better than the average for the smartphone market, and in some situations - worse)
• Inconvenient power and volume keys (a small thing, but unpleasant)
• Non-removable battery (when traveling you will have to take an external battery with a cable instead of a pair of compact standard batteries)
• HTC BlinkFeed

As usual, HTC has produced an overall interesting smartphone and, as usual, it is a set of largely compromise solutions in different areas. If non-removable battery or a 4 megapixel camera can easily be explained logically - in the first case we are dealing with a non-separable body, in the second - with the company’s desire to stand out and offer something new to the market, then the absence of a card slot is again surprising. How surprising is the decision to abandon the menu button and insert the “htc” logo instead. Yes, this is a small thing, but it’s the little things that add up that give us an idea of ​​a particular device, and it’s from these little things that we form opinions about products: “the HTC One doesn’t have a memory card, but the Samsung Galaxy S4 does.” Isn't this an argument?

Probably the most important question before buying an HTC One is: am I willing to put up with its shortcomings for the sake of its advantages? And the new HTC flagship has many positive qualities, although the main thing, in my opinion, is the excellent design and materials of the case. When you take this smartphone in your hand, you feel the real thing, a device with a capital letter U, which is simply a pleasure to use and which is pleasant to hold in your hands. With each passing year, this is becoming increasingly rare for smartphones; the world is already filled with plastic products of all sizes and textures, so the value of a high-quality aluminum case and a feeling of real quality is difficult to overestimate. And HTC One gives just such a feeling. Otherwise, this is a good, well-built flagship with its own positive qualities and shortcomings.

I don’t know about you, but I have already chosen a smartphone for myself for the next six months - it will be the HTC One.

Characteristics:

• Class: company flagship
• Form factor: monoblock
• Housing materials: aluminum unibody housing
• Operating system: Android 4.1.2, HTC Sense 5 proprietary interface
• Network: GSM/EDGE, WCDMA, LTE
• Platform: Qualcomm Snapdragon 600
• Processor: Quad-core 1.7 GHz, GPU – Adreno 320
• RAM: 2 GB
• Memory for data storage: ~25 GB (32 GB stated) without expandability, there is also a 64 GB version, but they do not plan to sell it in Russia
• Interfaces: Wi-Fi (a/ac/b/g/n), Bluetooth 4.0 (A2DP, aptX), microUSB connector (USB 2.0) for charging/synchronization, 3.5 mm for headset, HDMI (via microUSB), DLNA, NFC
• Screen: capacitive, Super LCD3, 4.7” with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (FulldHD), 468 ppi, automatic backlight level adjustment
• Camera: 4 MP (maximum image resolution 2688 x 1520), using “ultrapixels” 2 micrometers in size, autofocus, BSI, f/2.0, optical multi-axis stabilization, video recorded in 1080p (1920x1080 pixels), LED flash (works like a flashlight)
• Front camera: 2.1 MP, f/2.0, wide-angle (88 degrees), video recording in 1080p
• Navigation: GPS/GLONASS (A-GPS support)
• Additionally: accelerometer, light sensor, proximity sensor, FM radio
• Battery: non-removable, Li-Pol, capacity 2300 mAh
• Dimensions: 137.4 x 68.2 x 9.3 mm/4mm (max/min)
• Weight: 143 grams with battery

Roman Belykh took part in the preparation of the material, for which many thanks to him!