The life of a smartphone manufacturer is not always a bed of roses. HTC knows that all too well, because the manufacturer missed the mark with its top device of 2015: the M9. The phone was plagued in several areas by mediocrity in relation to the high MSRP. The reviews, including ours , were far from positive and sales figures against the M8 plummeted to unprecedented depths. Smartphone manufacturers often release one top device per year and if that is a miss, the company suffers greatly. It is not an industry in which you can rest on your laurels for a year, so to speak.
Hopefully HTC has learned from that. The Taiwanese manufacturer cannot afford another blunder. We were at HTC Nederland’s headquarters in Utrecht to take a first look at the new flagship, which is simply called ’10’. To give something away: HTC seems to be playing it safe this year. Little craziness, focus on more or less the same areas as in previous years and at least do it well.
Design and housing
A first pillar of the 10 is the design. The 10, as befits a flagship HTC device, has a one-piece aluminum body and differs more from the M9 than that device in turn differed from the M8. The back is still round, but the design has been made a bit tighter by flattening the edges at an angle at the back. These edges are smooth, where the back of the phone is matte. That gives a nice effect and you don’t easily see finger smudges on the back.
Also on the front, the 10 has slightly smaller bevels, which connect to the screen. All this benefits the design, which is kind to the hands and fingers, despite the clean lines. The phone is convex at the back, which makes it comfortable to hold, and is flattened where it would otherwise feel sharp to the hand and fingers. However, at first impression, the 10 is a bit heavy in relation to the screen size. It is slightly heavier than the M9. We do not find that so disturbing and it therefore feels solid, but if you appreciate a light device, then the 10 is not ideal.
At the front you can see a striking change compared to the M9. The 10 has hardware buttons. On the left is the back button, on the right the multitask button and in the middle the home button. You might expect the latter to be able to press it, but you can’t. As far as we are concerned, it would have been nicer if that were the case. The fingerprint scanner is integrated into the button and the first impression is fine, but setting it up takes a bit longer than, for example, with the latest Nexus devices and the Huawei P9. Speaking of buttons, the rest is all on the right side of the device and feels very solid. You won’t easily press the power button accidentally and that’s nice.
Due to the arrival of the hardware buttons, the 10 does not have a speaker under the screen. The second loudspeaker is now located at the bottom of the device. That means no more double, front-facing speakers and no stereo sound either. However, HTC still has two speakers, with the aim of producing a better sound than with the average high-end smartphone. The top speaker is a tweeter, so for the high tones, and the low tones come from the speaker at the bottom.
Audio is therefore the second point on which HTC focuses with the 10. For that reason, there are also a 24-bit dac and dsp in the device for better sound reproduction, and you get a set of above-average earplugs, which didn’t sound bad in our very short listening session. If you use the earplugs, you can also immediately set your own listening profile, whereby the volume of each frequency range is adjusted to your hearing. An equalizer, therefore, that is set based on how well your ears hear certain tones.
The sound makes an excellent first impression, but what about the screen? The LCD of the M9 was a bit disappointing and was plagued by a mediocre contrast value and moderate viewing angles. At first glance, HTC has made improvements in that area, but we can only really draw that conclusion when we have our review sample and can test the screen. In any case, the 5.2″ screen has a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels and is extremely sharp, with 564 pixels per inch.
Software
The 10 runs Android 6 with Sense version 8. HTC says it has focused on clarity and especially speed of the software. Many optimizations would have been made to make the Android experience as smooth and smooth as possible. The touchscreen would respond faster and apps should start faster. That does not seem to be saying too much, because during our first treatments the device did indeed respond very quickly.
Another aspect HTC wanted to address is duplicate apps for the same purpose. For example, there are usually a lot of Google apps on Android smartphones, but also apps from the manufacturer itself that can do about the same thing. With the 10, HTC has opted for its own apps or those from Google per functionality. For example, HTC’s gallery is gone and Google Photos is used, because HTC believes that the app contains good functions. HTC does use its own camera app as a matter of course, because it can optimize it for this specific camera. All in all, this principle leads to a limited number of apps, but if you want, you can still download HTC’s apps. They are still being supported and further developed, according to the company.
A new feature in the software is Freestyle Layout. The most obvious benefit of this is that you are freed from the grid on which apps snap into position . You can replace the default app icons with icons from themes, which blend into the background, so to speak. If you didn’t know that there are links to apps behind the icons, you’d think it’s just one image that you can put together yourself by dragging the icons to the desired layout. Normally we don’t find themes that interesting, but it’s nice that you can personalize your phone extensively with them. You can also add pictures and stickers yourself.
Hardware
Of course, software alone does not make a smartphone fast; he needs a good soc for that. The 10 runs on a Snapdragon 820, a chipset that we find in more high-end smartphones this year, such as the LG G5. In the 10 it is clocked slightly higher, at a maximum clock speed of 2.2GHz. It is a quad-core CPU, with four Kryo cores designed by Qualcomm with a maximum speed of 2.2 GHz. Compared to its predecessor, the Snapdragon 820 is twice as fast and thirty percent more economical. The GPU is an Adreno 530 and, in addition to being faster, it is, according to Qualcomm, forty percent more economical than the Adreno 430. The modem in the Snapdragon 820 can handle 4G speeds of 450Mbit/s.
The 10 has 32GB of memory as standard. You can expand that by up to 2TB by inserting a micro SD card. Unlike Samsung, for example, HTC supports ‘Adaptable Storage’, so the extra memory is really used as internal memory. Furthermore, the chipset is assisted by 4GB of ram.
The battery in the HTC 10 has a capacity of 3,000mAh. That in itself doesn’t say much; for example, we saw a much longer endurance with the M8 than the M9, while the latter has 10 percent more battery capacity. That was due to the not so economical Snapdragon 810 chipset and hopefully the 820-soc performs better in that area. The battery capacity is in any case six percent larger than that of the M9. The 10 also supports Quick Charge 3.0, with which the smartphone is charged half full in half an hour via the USB-C port.
Another interesting feature of the HTC 10 is the support for Apple AirPlay. Through HTC Connect, you can swipe up the screen with three fingers to stream audio and video content to your screen via AirPlay. The 10 is the first Android smartphone to have support for this, and it’s somewhat remarkable, as Apple must have given HTC explicit permission for it.
Camera
The 10 has a twelve-megapixel camera with laser autofocus and optical image stabilization, with pixels measuring 1.55μm. We were not yet allowed to check which sensor HTC uses and HTC did not want to say as expected. It is probably the Sony IMX377, which we also find in the Nexus 6P and 5X. In combination with an aperture of f/1.8, the camera certainly has potential. In any case, it should be bright. The post-processing is of course also important, so we are curious how HTC has approached that.
It remains difficult to get a good impression of a camera at an event, but at least we did not encounter any strange things in the photo results. The camera starts up quickly and printing is also smooth. Burst mode seemed a bit slower than that of the Huawei P9 we recently got our hands on. The interface of the camera is nice. For example, the Pro mode is nice and clear and easily adjustable, with five sliders that you can move up and down and that disappear again as soon as you have set them. The 10 also has twelve-bit raw mode.
The front camera has a five-megapixel sensor with 1.34μm large pixels. The aperture is f/1.8, which means that a reasonable amount of light has to be collected. If all goes well, the selfies you take with the camera will generally be sharper than with the predecessors, because it is the first front camera that has optical image stabilization. If you often use a front camera, this can be quite an advantage, because when taking selfies, the subject is quite close and you often hold your smartphone less stable than when you take a photo with the camera on the back. In the review we will of course test whether it also produces better results in practice.
As far as video is concerned, the 10 can shoot 4k video and should also record sound well using the three microphones that the device has here and there. We did notice that the 10 cannot shoot slow-motion video with 720p resolution at 240 frames per second, as the Nexus 6P can, for example. The maximum number of fps is 120, which in our opinion just falls short of satisfactory slow-motion results.
Fortunately, the Zoë mode is still there, so that you can record three-second videos and, for example, choose the best frame. The function to make videos of a day or, for example, a holiday with a selection of photos is still there in the form of the Zoë editor, but it is somewhat hidden and can be found in, for example, Google Photos, in a menu with the option ‘edit with’.
Conclusion
No polonaise on the body of the HTC 10. No double camera, extra screen or extendable batteries: the focus is on the points that the company considers important. Those are the design, high-quality audio reproduction, bright cameras with optical image stabilization and a smooth Android experience. Whether all this has been successful, we will look at in detail in the review. In any case, the first impression is not wrong. Whether HTC can return to the top of smartphone land with the 10 is another story. With a suggested retail price of 749 euros, it will be difficult to regain much ground from a manufacturer like Samsung. You pay 50 euros more than for the S7 with the same amount of memory. Still, the down-to-earth strategy of focusing on important core values can be a good first step if it turns out to be well executed.