HTC 10
PROS
|
CONS
|
KEY FEATURES
· 5.2-inch quad-HD
display · Android 6.0.1 &
Sense 7.0
· Snapdragon 820
· 12 UltraPixel camera
w/OIS
· 4GB RAM
· 5 UltraPixel selfie
camera w/OIS
· 32/64GB internal
storage
· Manufacturer: HTC
· USB-C
· Review Price: £569.99
· 3,000 mAh battery
|
WHAT IS THE
HTC 10?
After the frankly awful HTC One M8, the
Taiwanese brand went back to the drawing board and, well, it worked. The HTC 10
more than matches up to the iPhone 6S in looks, and it doesn’t fall behind the Samsung Galaxy S7 when it comes to specs.
With its sloping curves, aluminium body
and clean front, the HTC 10 is one of the best looking phones on the market,
but with the iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy Note 7 coming soon is it still worth buying?
HTC 10 – DESIGN
While the HTC 10 takes the brand’s
flagship smartphone in a new design direction, it’s still very familiar. The
front is stripped from the One A9, and the back is a tweaked and tuned version
of the rear casing from the One M9.
It’s far from original and looking at it
face-on you’d be forgiven for confusing it with an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S7,
but for me it’s the perfect mix of style and substance.
First off, this phone is clearly made from
metal – and proud of it. The back is cool to the touch, with an elegant curve
that helps it sit comfortably in your hand. This curve flows into some heavily
chamfered edges that add a bit of much-needed flair.
It's a divisive design choice, though. I
really like them as they give your fingers somewhere to sit, but the some of
the TrustedReviews team were less impressed, claiming they’re
far too shiny.
The camera sensor sits bang in the centre, and while
it doesn’t have what I'd consider a ‘hump’, it does jut out ever so slightly.
Alongside it is an LED flash and a space for the laser autofocus system.
Like any metal phone, the sleek design is broken up by
two bands of antenna lines that run around the top and bottom. These don’t
stand out anywhere near as much as they do on the iPhone and they feel like
part of the design, rather than something that has to be there.
Along the side you’ve got the usual combination of a
volume rocker and sleep/wake button, the latter of which is bevelled and easily
identifiable even when the phone is in your pocket.
Most other phones have switched to a single tray that
houses both the Nano SIM tray and a microSD card, but the HTC 10 still has one
tray on each side. I’d like to see this combined to makes things sleeker, but
it makes little difference in reality.
Flip the phone over and the HTC 10 is one of the
cleanest devices around. HTC has even removed its brand logo – a minimal change
that makes a big difference.
Compared to last year’s One M9 flagship, there are a
couple of major differences here.
There’s now a capacitive home key sitting below the
display that isn’t so much of a button but a touchpad. Like pretty much every
worthwhile Android phone this year it features a fingerprint scanner inside,
but coming from the Galaxy S7 it feels strange not to get get that satisfying
‘click’ when I press down.
HTC has also switched to capacitive Back and Recent
Apps keys, as opposed to on-screen versions, and these sit either side of the
home button. It’s all down to personal preference whether you prefer physical
or virtual buttons, but it does free up that extra bit of screen real estate.
The phone comes in black, silver and gold
Whereas LG took plenty of risks with its
funky modular design of the G5, HTC has played it relatively safe here. That’s
not a dig, though. In fact I'd say the HTC 10 is my favourite phone of the year
so far when it comes to the overall look and feel.
It almost matches the Galaxy S7 for size,
though it’s marginally taller and noticeably weightier. It feels reassuringly
expensive and solid, which is something I just can’t say about the LG G5.
It’s the precision, though, that wins it
for HTC. Everything is symmetrical, with the headphone jack, camera sensor and
USB-C port on the bottom, all in line with each other. I would have preferred
to see that headphone port on the bottom, but that’s just a minor quibble.
Considering its history, it’s no surprise
that HTC has designed a stunning looking phone. It hasn’t taken risks and opted
for something more ‘out there’, but it still has charm and is an absolute
pleasure to use.
HTC 10 – SCREEN
HTC has updated just about every part of
the One M9 for its successor, and the display is no exception.
It’s grown slightly to 5.2-inches, but the
bigger upgrade is the resolution. It’s much more pixel dense now, thanks to the
2560 x 1440 quad-HD resolution, and it covers 99.9% of the sRGB colour gamut.
It’s a mightily impressive panel, though as it's LCD – 5th-generation LCD, to
be precise – it does lack a little of the vibrancy of Samsung’s Super AMOLED
screen. It’s not far off, and it’s hard to notice unless you have both phones
sat next to each other.
It’s a lovely display to look at. Colours
are punchy and bright, without being oversaturated, and they’re accurate too.
The wide colour gamut is great for watching video as it was originally intended
and accurately editing snaps, making this a strong media machine.
There is a slight pinkish tinge to the
display when it’s tilted to the side and this dampens viewing angles, but it’s
not a deal-breaker. Viewing angles are still great and reflections are kept to
a minimum, but colours are skewed ever so slightly when you’re not looking
directly at it. I had a similar issue with the Galaxy S7 Edge, so it’s certainly not a problem
exclusive to HTC’s displays.
The HTC 10 is missing a feature both the
LG G5 and Galaxy S7 tout, which is an Always-On mode. This clever method of
displaying your most recent notifications when the display is seemingly off is
far from essential, but it’s a useful extra that I’ve grown to like after using
those two phones. LG managed it with an LCD screen, so I’m not sure why HTC
hasn’t tried anything similar.
What it does offer over its rivals is
improved brightness. Well, in certain situations. In regular use, the maximum
brightness on the HTC 10 is much brighter than that of the LG G5 and Galaxy S7,
though it doesn’t feature the trick used by those two where it can boost
brightness even more in direct sunlight. Still, the HTC 10 is perfectly
usable outdoors.
HTC 10 – SOFTWARE
HTC
has done a fantastic job with the software on the 10.
It’s
the perfect mix of a Nexus-like Android 6.0.1 experience with some genuinely useful
and interesting features laid on the top. It might just be my favourite
interpretation of Android yet, and easily beats both Samsung’s TouchWiz and
LG’s UX 5.
The latest version of Sense UI is HTC’s
cleanest and borrows many elements from a stock version of Android. The
notifications shade, for example, is exactly what you’ll get on a Nexus 6P, while icons are simple and clean.
HTC’s biggest masterstroke here is to cull
nearly all the useless, duplicate apps that have become so common on an Android
phone. Both the LG G5 and Samsung Galaxy S7 have multiple apps that each do the same
thing – music players, email clients, galleries – but the HTC 10 doesn’t.
HTC says it's worked directly with Google to clean up
the software experience on its latest flagship phone, but to also build some
its own features into the search giant’s OS.
Take Photos, for example. The Google app is the
default gallery on the 10, but it now works with previously unavailable
features such as RAW files and Zoe photos, the latter of which are sort of like
Apple’s Live Photos.
This makes the whole Android experience much smoother
and more cohesive.
Blinkfeed, the fancy little news and social feed
aggregator that sits to the left of your home screen, is still here. It’s a
Marmite feature amongst users, but I like it. It always manages to select an
interesting and diverse array of content from news sources and Twitter – it
seems Instagram and Facebook support is no longer here – but its picture-based
approach is slick. Don’t like it? It can easily be turned off.
Each of HTC’s native apps, the ones that haven’t been
replaced by Google’s versions, have all received Material-themed makeovers.
A new app called Boost+ is actually quite useful. It’s
main function is to supposedly keep the phone running smoothly by clearing
caches and deleting junk files. Its coolest feature, though, is the ability to
lock apps, meaning you need to use the fingerprint sensor to open them. Apps
themselves don’t even have to do anything to support this, as it’s just an
overlay on the top. It’s perfect for blocking out prying eyes from WhatsApp or
your gallery, but also to add another layer of protection to banking apps which
mostly still don’t seem to support fingerprint authentication on Android.
A nifty, though slightly gimmicky, feature for the HTC
10 is freestyle layouts. This is for you if you’ve gotten bored of the same app
grid homescreen view that pretty much every Android phone has. You can replace
icons with stickers that perform additional functions, taking you straight to a
favoured contact, and these can be laid out anywhere on the screen.
These layouts are fun and a nice change from the
typical Android style, but they’re less functional and grow tiresome quickly.
Still, there’s a cute one if you like cats. And everyone likes cats, right?
My only slight niggle with the software,
and this is incredibly minor, is that you can only have a 4x4 app grid when
using a regular layout. Most other phones now let you have at least a 5x5 grid,
allowing more icons to be crammed onto the homescreen and less space wasted.
Unlike the majority of other brands, HTC
hasn’t messed around with the fantastic operating system Google has created and
it makes the 10 ever so much better for it.
HTC 10 – PERFORMANCE AND AUDIO
Often a neglected feature on phones, HTC
has added a load of audio-centric features to the 10. Although it has ditched,
mostly, the iconic stereo speaker system that pumped out quality audio on the
One M9.
BoomSound, though, is far from dead. It’s
just here in a different form. The main speaker is now on the bottom, but
there's a dedicated amplifier for both the tweeter and subwoofer which sit on
the bottom and top of the phone respectively.
It’s true, the on-board speaker doesn’t
sound quite as good as it used to. It’s still very loud – alarms are
hilariously bombastic and I almost fell out of bed the first morning one went
off. There’s also enough nuance in the audio to make listening to YouTube
videos a better experience than on most phones, but it lacks the bass you’d
want from a Bluetooth speaker replacement. Still, it’s much better than the
Galaxy S7, iPhone 6S and LG G5.
It’s when listening through headphones
that the experience is massively improved. The HTC 10 supports Hi-Res Audio, so
it’ll play 24-bit audio files (like the G5 does) and attempt to upscale
lower-res tunes to sound better.
The kicker is that you actually get a set
of Hi-Res-certified earbuds with the phone. These in-ear 'phones are comfy,
nicely styled and, most importantly, blow every other set of bundled earphones
out out of the water. Multiple times over. They sound great, whether you’re
listening to Hi-Res Audio files or just a bit of Spotify.
Talking about the performance of 2016
flagship phones feels like a broken record. Phones seem to have hit a
performance plateau – they’re all very fast and the only slowdowns seems to
come from a lack of software optimisations. The HTC 10 follows suit, but then
its combo of a Snapdragon 820 and 4GB of RAM seems to be the default
choice for a 2016 flagship.
Everything from gaming to day-to-day use
to intensive multitasking is done with consummate ease. Apps pop open as soon
as your finger taps the icons and so far I haven’t come across anything that
causes any sort of slow-down. Photo editing is chewed through with no trouble
and 3D games – Hitman Sniper, Lara Croft Go, Real Racing – don’t suffer from
dropped frames or any lag.
Unlike the HTC One M9, the 10 manages to stay cool to the touch
during normal use. It heats up ever so slightly when fast charging and
installing a bevy of apps, but that’s something I've noticed on most phones.
In our usual array of benchmark tests, the
HTC 10 performs well. On the Geekbench 3 multi-core test it scores 5,065, which
is slightly lower than both the LG G5 (5,172) and Samsung Galaxy S7 (9,307),
but still a very high score. In AnTuTu, though, it comes out slightly better
than those two with a score of 130,178.
Call quality is impressive too, especially
when you take advantage of the speakers for voice chats.
HTC 10 – CAMERA
The camera
department of the HTC 10 is upgraded with the so-called UltraPixel 2.0 camera.
It's a 12MP sensor that has 1.55µm pixels but about 3 times as many pixels as
the original 4MP sensor from the One M7 and One M8.
The UltraPixel 2.0 comes with Optical Stabilization
System (OIS), which lacks on the Nexus phones. It also has an f/1.8 aperture,
as opposed to f/2.0 on the Google-commissioned phones. The dual-tone LED flash
is another special feature.
The HTC 10 performs well in many various settings of
light. Some of these shots were in bright sunlight, and others, starting from
the fountain, onward, were taking after the sun began setting.
In some situations, the HTC 10 fails to represent the
dynamic ranges in lighting such as when there is light coming from behind the
subject. The Galaxy S7 edge performs better in this regard.
Don't get us wrong, the HTC 10's camera met and
exceeded our expectations. We are simply putting it to a standard that it set for
itself when HTC was teasing its camera. DxOMark gave both the HTC 10 and
Samsung Galaxy S7 edge the same score of 88 though we're inclined to disagree
as from our experience the S7/S7 edge duo has the upper hand.
HTC 10 – Video camera
The HTC 10 can pump out 720p, 1080p, or 4K videos all in 30fps,
unfortunately, it does not look like there is a 60fps option on any of the
video resolution settings. The 1080p videos are extra smooth thanks to the
added benefit of the electronic image stabilization. It takes a slight toll on
the camera's field of view, but you can always turn it off if that bugs you.
4K videos look great and the same color representation
is maintained just as the HTC 10's photos. Details are excellent and OIS is
working hard during video recording to bring us these details. In 4K mode there
is no electronic image stabilization as is the case with many phones that shoot
4K these days.
HTC 10 – BATTERY LIFE
Like
internal components, each of this year’s current crop of Android flagships – Galaxy S7, LG G5 and of course the HTC 10 – have a
similarly sized battery.
The
3,000mAh cell tucked inside the HTC 10 is exactly the same capacity as the
Galaxy S7's and marginally bigger than the LG G5's, and in my tests I've found
that it lasts about the same amount of time as those two.
HTC
might claim you’ll get two days' worth of use, but my findings suggest a little
less. Yes, it is possible to stretch it out to two days, just, but you’ll have
to enable all the battery-saving modes which will, in turn, negatively affect
performance.
In real use the HTC 10 will easily make it through the
day. Even if you’re pushing down multiple email accounts, playing the odd round
of whatever the addictive fad Candy Crush-style game of the moment is, and
streaming some music and so on.
Over the course of a week I got an average of three
hours' screen-on time per day, which is standard for a phone of this size. An
hour of streaming Spotify in the morning takes about 5%, while watching an
hour-long HD TV episode on either Netflix or BBC iPlayer
with auto-brightness enabled chews through 8-10%.
Standby time is ace too – leaving the phone unplugged
overnight only sees a 3-4% drop.
On the bottom of the phone there’s a USB-C port,
replacing the old Micro USB. Samsung decided against switching to this new
reversible connection method, but HTC and LG have taken a step into the future
by making the change.
HTC is trying to make the most of this move, enabling
Quick Charge 3.0, which is something the S7 doesn’t support due to its Exynos
processor. It’ll juice up fully in just under an hour.
HTC will also be selling a pair of JBL
noise-cancelling headphones that take their power from the USB-C port as
opposed to the headphone jack, ditching the need for a bulky battery pack.
The move to USB-C is initially annoying, rendering all
those Micro USB cables you’ve acquired over the years redundant, but it’s the
future and the addition of it here futureproofs the 10.
SHOULD I BUY THE HTC 10?
By ditching gimmicks and fine tuning the formula, HTC
has hit back in style after a disappointing 2015.
It’s not the best phone of the year, but it’s not far
off. Yet, it’s the phone I would want to use. That might sound strange, but
hear me out. From the lovely screen to the speedy performance to the fantastic
representation of Android, the HTC 10 ticks all the boxes.
That’s the point – it might not be the best in every
area, but it’s strong in pretty much all of them. While the Galaxy S7 might
sacrifice audio quality and the LG G5 does the same with build quality, the HTC
10 doesn’t really sacrifice in any area. It doesn’t really do anything
different, granted, but when all the parts fit together this well, I don’t
think it needs to.
I’d still like a slightly better camera, though.
VERDICT
By ditching the gimmicks, HTC has crafted its best
phone ever. It’s not the Android king, but it’s chomping at the heels of the
Samsung Galaxy S7.
SCORES IN
DETAIL
- Battery Life8
- Calls & Sound9
- Camera8
- Design9
- Performance9
- Screen Quality8
- Software10
- Value8
0 commentaires:
Post a Comment