With the last year’s HTC One X and HTC One X+ struggling to pull market share away from Samsung’s immensely popular Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC is bringing a new device to the fore to have another crack at it, in the form of the HTC One. The Android 4.1 Jelly Bean equipped device which was announced today, aims to impress not solely with its imposing all-metal body work, but a Full HD display, a new version of HTC Sense and a new 4.3-’Ultrapixel’ camera.
Unfortunately some of the excitement ahead of the One’s official arrival proved too tricky to contain and so renders of the then dubbed ‘HTC M7’ leaked out early, giving us a glimpse of the company’s new design language. The HTC One is a far departure from 2012’s One Series handsets; not simply due to the choice of materials at work, but the ‘capped’ design from the handset’s frontage, which resembles both the BlackBerry Z10 and the back of the Apple iPhone 5.
Despite featuring a 4.7-inch display, the size and weight in the hand is for the most part unobtrusive. The design language may not work for everyone, but the strong lines blended with the rounded edges and curved back it results in a strong, flexible design which should appeal to a variety of potential users. What’s more the phone’s metal cladding can be had in either silver or black.
Beyond the outside of the handset lies HTC Sense 5 – the newest iteration of HTC’s overlay for Android and on first impressions it’s significantly different to its predecessors, but this comes more as a result of Sense’s newest addition – BlinkFeed. By default, this feed aggregator inhabits the One’s main homescreen, populating it with photos, messages, social feeds and news from HTC-curated feeds interspersed with more personal content. The concept behind BlinkFeed is that mobile users glance only briefly at their lock or homescreen tens to hundreds of times a day to ‘check up on things’ and as such, this new functionality should help streamline what information the user wants into a single glance, with the option to expand on a story should they wish.
Beyond BlinkFeed, Sense UI feels more familiar. The app drawer has switched to the vertical scroll of older iterations of Sense over the horizontal scroll of Sense 4 and the main application icons have all undergone a reworking as well. it’s easier to add and rearrange widgets and homescreens too.
Check back on Recombu Mobile for the full review, where we’ll take a closer look at that stunning 4.7-inch Full HD display, 4.3-Ultrapixel camera and more.
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