HTC 10 Review: HTC Steps up their Game
The new HTC 10 smartphone is available for pre-order, but does it live up? Our experience with the HTC 10 flagship has been an excellent one; HTC steps up their game with Top Notch production quality, a killer selfie camera and solid performance with good battery life. Let’s take a closer look.
HTC 10 Specs
The HTC 10 features an aluminum unibody body capped with a elegantly bevel-rounded Gorilla Glass 3. The 5.2 inch Quad HD Super LCD 5 screen displays at 2560 x 1440 pixels, 564 PPI. Under the hood we find what seems to be the current magic recipe for a smooth running Android smartphone device; a Quad-core 64-bit 2.2Ghz Snapdragon 820 CPU with 4GB of RAM and a Adreno 530 GPU. Our test unit comes with 32GB of onboard flash storage and an additional 2TB of storage capacity via the microSD card slot. A 64GB version with additional colors will be available at a “later date”. A new reversible USB Type-C port accompanies the HTC 10 increasing data throughput and quickens charge time with Quick-charge 3.0 support for a 27% increase in charge time over Quick-charge 2.0.
The HTC’s main gun is a 12MP UltraPixel 2 that features laser focusing and Optical Image Stabilization or OIS. The front-firing camera or selfie camera is a great performer with it’s 5MP UltraPixel also with OIS hardware. Though the resolution on the display is 2k, you’re able to shoot up to 6 minutes of 4k video along with high resolution audio.
While the HTC 10 doesn’t come with dual front firing speakers, they still use Hi-Fi BoomSound Speakers that provide 360 degree sound with a dedicated Amp with 24-bit built-in DAC and DSP that can upscale your 16-bit audio to 24-bit. Instead the phone’s earpiece becomes the tweeter and the bottom speaker is the woofer or sub, so you’ll have one speaker firing out of the bottom while the other is firing forward. Though the sound isn’t as good as the dual front-firing BoomSound speakers but they do very well and still sound worlds better than any other onboard smartphone speakers.
HTC 10 Supports Apple AirPlay
The 10 supports your DLNA and Miracast streaming protocols it is the first Android smartphone to support Apple’s AirPlay which is awesome since let’s face it, Apple’s AirPlay rocks! We had no issues connecting to Apple TV 3 or AirPlay compatible speaker systems in fact it was quick and painless.
HTC 10 Design
While the overall look and feel of the design isn’t loud and awe striking, the unibody case design cut from a single piece of metal is sturdy. It provides a good foundation for strength and torsional rigidity; the HTC 10 is made to last. The device feels solid, it’s well made and the production quality is immediately apparent.
All the seams line up, power button and volume rocker are crisp and for me as a right handed person are positioned exactly where I’d like them to be and along the right side of the phone so I can use my thumb to operate either quickly. The power button is ribbed for easy identification and the fingerprint scanner works great. Nano SIM and Micro SD card slots are located up near the top of the phone just below the upper antenna on the left and right respectively.
The appeal of the design and layout of the phone is of course subjective but it doesn’t necessarily scream out at you visually. It’s more of a subdued look, clean and minimal. It still feels a bit odd to me not to have a home button to push. It does however leave less room for breakage and seems to work very well. No issues with fingerprint recognition, always quick and responsive. Recent Apps key and Back button come in the form of capacitive buttons or hotspots as I like to refer to them. They will dim/fade out after a few seconds and come to life and light up when you use them.
Physically I love the device, slim enough to feel thin but not so thin that my hand cramps or I’m afraid of it slipping out of my hand when trying to hold it. Enough curve around the back with a couple of hard bevels keep the phone minimal and masculine. Though the sleek design can be somewhat slippery, but the 5.2 inch form factor does bring the phone back to a manageable size you can securely grip.
The 5.2 inch 2k resolution display is neatly tucked into the unibody case in a beautiful bezel-less design. The Gorilla Glass 3 beveled edges/corners butts up to the edge without any gaps and makes the screen appear larger or phone more compact depending on how you look at it. Just a beautifully polished production.
HTC 10 like it’s predecessors also features theme customization. The freedom to personalize your device, download themes or even build or tweak out your own custom theme.
Camera
My biggest beef with the HTC devices, like many others has been the camera performance. Low lighting, speed and overall quality were a bit disappointing so it’s nice to see that HTC has improved upon all of these areas with regards to the camera quality.
Low lighting is always a killer for a smaller phone, the iPhone and Galaxy devices handle low lighting situations a bit more gracefully than ever before. So if you’re an HTC fan, finally you can enjoy some respectable performance out of your smartphone’s camera. The learning curve isn’t huge and tapping around to the different modes is quick and easy. To sharpen your subject area you tap to laser focus with an additional slider to tweak your exposure a bit if you need to. In regular or good lighting conditions the camera is able to produce excellent quality shots with good color saturation, exposure and clarity. It is the UltraPixel technology integrated into both the rear and front firing cameras that enables both cameras to produce smooth detailed pictures. The HTC 10 as much as the camera has improved will still find specific low-lighting scenarios where the exposure slider comes in quite handy.
Camera agility has been much improved over the older HTC M9 and A9 devices. Focus speed and processing speed are essential to capturing the moment. The processing lag, time after you tap to snap a photo has been reduced dramatically to where it feels fairly instant and a bit more natural the way it should feel.
The HTC 10 is the first camera to offer Optical Image Stabilization on both front and rear cameras for clear, steady shots. Selfies, if that’s your thing are sharp and detailed without much effort.
Performance
Our experience with the HTC M9 was a bit bug filled and lack luster while the HTC 10 is snappy and a efficient performer. The new flagship is able to handle anything you can throw at it that the big boys can handle. The Screen is responsive; quick and agile opening apps, switching from app to app, surfing or interfacing with Android OS settings, the 10 remains snappy throughout. The HTC 10 is by far the best we’ve seen out of HTC as far as smartphones go.
The buzz around the web from pretty reliable sources tells us that HTC has done such a good job they will be manufacturing the next two Nexus smartphones from Google. This should be a welcome collaboration between HTC and Google as the Nexus phones have typically fallen short of the mark with uninspiring designs and mediocre performance.
Screen brightness and color saturation is excellent. Colors are warm and vibrant with 99.9% sRGB color gamut coverage. If I put it up against the LG V10 or the Samsung Galaxy S7 or iPhone 6S I’m not disappointed watching movies or viewing images though there’s variable differences in saturation and brightness between the three, you’d really need to be holding phones side by side to notice it. The HTC 10’s display looks great make no mistake! Text is clear and crisp and looks particularly well viewing or editing video.
Call quality over AT&T on our test unit was excellent with both reception and voice clarity. Speakerphone conversations never sounded so good in both directions. The three microphones are able to noise cancel pretty well and deliver clearer sound than I can remember on any phone in a long time. The sound I’m hearing back from the person on the other end of the call likewise is much more pleasant and doesn’t sound blown out. Data connectivity was also excellent and on par with other flagships in our 4G and WiFi general usage during our testing period.
HTC’s wiped out a lot of bloatware on the device, but somehow you’ll still start with close to 9.4gb give or take of used space anyway. Regardless of that, the HTC flavor of Android, named Sense UI is clean and minimal and fairly close to the stock version of Android. More importantly the HTC Sense UI OS layer does not seem to weigh down the performance of the phone.
The 10 also features Boost+ which is HTC’s algorithm that fine tunes and optimizes performance. Apps consistently launch faster and you’ll notice it. I’m impressed to see how well and smooth the device does really run, it remains snappy throughout constant app switching and interaction.
HTC 10 Battery Life
Battery life for us was good, under either normal or light usage. Battery life did seem to extend to the 2 days with light usage but under normal or moderate usage, I was surprised to see the phone still lasted me a full work day and then some. With heavy usage the battery drain wasn’t ridiculous and using Google Maps un-tethered, the HTC 10 did not seem to heat up excessively. I would even venture to say that it remained relatively luke warm for a 30 min GPS guided drive. (granted it’s not the middle of the summer either right now in the metro area)
Your mileage may vary of course but after using the LG V10 with it’s 5.5 inch Quad HD display which seemed to guzzle the power down, the HTC 10 seems like it gets very decent battery life with it’s 3,000 mAh battery. The HTC 10 does not natively support Qi Wireless Charging but makes up for it with it’s USB Type-C power/data port and Quick Charge 3.0 with cool charge gives you a nice chunk of power approx 50% in 30 min of plug time! Just a matter of once again establishing your network of charge cables so you have one in the office, in the car and at home etc.
HTC Uh Oh Protection
Unfortunately as we mentioned in our initial HTC 10 New Flagship Smartphone launch day coverage, the HTC 10 isn’t water-proof but rather water-resistant. But the 10 was battle tested with 168 hours of extreme temperature tests and over 10,000 drop, bend, scratch and corrosion tests and if that isn’t enough for you, you get 12 months of Uh Oh Protection, so if you drop it in the toilet or in a river, crack the screen, even change carrier, you can get it replaced FOC one time during that initial 12 month period!
HTC 10 Recommended
HTC has finally put out a smartphone worthy of the title Flagship device with the HTC 10. The upgraded hardware performs very well and is able to keep up to most any task with no apparent lag. Vastly improved camera quality and speed for stills/video make the HTC 10 a contender, especially if you are a big fan of crisp clear quality selfies. With so many households having a form of Apple hardware the addition of AirPlay support makes the HTC 10 that much more attractive and functional.
Carriers include Sprint, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and AT&T customer will need to purchase the unlocked variant.
HTC 10 smartphone available for pre-order today, Ships mid May $699.00
www.htc.com
