HTC One: The New Kid On the Block

midst the clamor surrounding HTC’s recent mishap with the alarmingly low sales of HTC’s Facebook smartphone, it finally launched HTC One, its torchbearer smartphone in India.

A high-end smartphone meant to take on the Apple iPhone and the all new Samsung Galaxy S4, the HTC One sure makes its presence felt. Let’s have a closer look at the hands on review of this smartphone and what it holds for us.

The Build

A sleek piece of machinery, the One looks absolutely ravishing in its wafer-thin body, and the all-aluminum encasing, making it a delightful smartphone to hold. Well-laid panels and highly ergonomic, the phone doesn’t seem bulky. HTC definitely takes the cup in the looks department.

The Innards

The One sports a bright 4.7 inch full-HD screen, with a Quallcomm Quad-core processor capable of clocking 1.7 GHz, and a 2 GB RAM to crank it up to the max, meaning you could play all your games with ease while listening to your favorite songs. The One’s true prowess though, lies in its highly acclaimed UltraPixel Camera, an innovation that churns out some brilliant images. Although how well it will fare against the other biggies in the market is debatable, especially with Nokia’s Lumia series making it big the world over. The front-facing camera is 2.1 megapixel. The phone comes in two variants of 32 GB and 64 GB, and just like every other new smartphone, this one too lacks a an expandable memory slot. India is yet to catch up with cloud storage and hence, having expandable memory is a must. Unfortunately HTC is missing out on that point.

The Functioning

HTC has always been lauded for their layer of pimped out Android, the HTC Sense, and they have taken the game up by a notch in the HTC One by introducing lots of new features that make it look even more savvy. Unfortunately, this large dose of innovation might overwhelm a casual Android user and this might take time to get used to, as HTC has tweaked it a tad too much. We would need more than a hands-on preview for a complete analysis, but the phone was no child’s play to use at the first go. The HTC BlinkFeed is a new add-on that connects you to the web and keeps on dishing out information from your social media networks, news feeds, weather forecast and practically everything that you would want. We still have to decipher how useful this would be for too much information may spoil all the fun for us.

The One has what it takes to be at the top of the chain, but the overly tweaked Android interface might prove to be a hindrance. Priced at INR. 42,900/-, the HTC fits right into the high-end smartphone bracket with its competitor, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Sony Xperia Z. We’ll get a full-fledged review once we have our hands on this slick new piece of gadgetry from the HTC camp.