HTC U11 flagship smartphone review | Ars Technica By Ars Technica

Hey guys this is Valentina Palladio for Ars Technica, and today I'm here with the newest HTC phone. This is the HTC: u 11! So this just came out and it kind of models, the design of two HTC phones that were announced back in January I, believe it's the HTC? U ultra and the HTC you play and with those two devices, HTC kind of introduced, this glass and back design. So just to give you some specs. This has an outscore Snapdragon, 835 processors and Arena 540 GPU, four gigabytes of RAM and 64 gigabytes of storage, with the option to expand that with a micros cards. So I've been spending a little of time with this device. So I'm going to tell you a little about the good things and the bad things about the HTC u11.

So one of the good things about the U 11 is the kicker feature, which is the Edge Sense technology that HTC embedded into this device. So when we first kind of talked about it, when it came out, and we had, we got to do a hands-on with it, it seemed kind of gimmicky. So the concept is that currently there's only the power button in the volume rocker on the side of this device, instead of having an extra button that you could use to either launch the camera or do any other type of activity, you just kind of squeeze the sides of the device for something to happen. So for me, I have this set up to take a screenshot when I do just a short press of the sides and when I have a long press, it opens up the camera and there are these embedded, and you're not going to be able to feel them pressure sensors on either side of the device, there's four on either side, so eight in total. So it's going to be able to sense the pressure that you're squeezing the device with and then be able to do whatever action you customized for either a short squeeze or long squeeze.

I was really surprised. How much I actually enjoyed this because I think it really has to do with the fact that it's totally customizable well, mostly customizable. So if you go into the settings, you can see what you can. Customize, with edge sense now, like I, said, I do I, take a lot of screenshots regularly so I. That's why I set these short squeeze to be a screen, shot and I, just kind of left the long press to be opening up the camera, because that makes it really easy to access the camera quickly.

But this can be set to open up any app that you want, so you're not confined to what HTC would suggest either their default apps or default features. You can customize this to open any app that you want, so you can either customize it to be a short squeeze or a long squeeze. So in that respect, I really liked this feature and also when you set up edge sense, you can customize the pressure that it will recognize to your body. So when I hold a device, it's going to be different from how somebody else might hold a device. They might naturally put more pressure when they squeeze on a device.

It will recognize how much pressure you're putting on it and use that as the reference for when you want to open up something else and in the short time that I have been using the HTC. U 11, I've never had any misfires, so I'm holding the device right now pretty comfortably in my hand, and, as you can see in the screen, the touchscreen will recognize my fingers a little more than I would want it to, but the sides of the device are not recognizing a squeeze. If I put more pressure on it like this, like nothing is really happening. You really need to have that full amount of pressure from you intentionally. Another great thing about the U 11 is its performance.

So, like I said this has a Snapdragon 835 processor on it and in our benchmarks it performed pretty much exactly like other current flagships, including the galaxy s 8 plus. So it was really fast. Really a zipper to use never really run into any problems with it, and it performed up to flagship speed. Another great thing about the: u 11 is its battery life, so HTC couldn't really give us an estimate like what they thought the battery life would last, but this has a 3000 William battery inside it and in a battery test that we have run, it lasted about 12 and a half hours on a single charge, which is pretty good and, like I, said, with the performance aspect of it. It's kind of in line with other flagships like the galaxy s A+ and the iPhone 7 as well.

Another great aspect of the U 11, if you are an audiophile, is that HTC took the audio aspect of the phone into account with two ways: first, that there is an improved sound system in it, but also you get this USB type-c ?, 3.5, millimeter audio jack adapter, because, as you can see at the bottom here, there is no headphone jack, but some people might like that even better because, yes, you do have to worry about this adapter, but HTC does include it. However, HTC also includes these little earbuds, which can do active noise-cancelling because it can draw power from the phone using the USB type-c port. They don't need a battery inside them to do the active noise-cancelling, so you're going to get all the features of the non-active noise-cancelling pair of earbuds in the ones that are included in the box. So that's pretty cool so now onto the not so great things about the HTC. U 11! The first thing that, I would say is not my favorite is the design.

So, as you can see, there's nothing inherently wrong about it. There's nothing glaringly different or awful about it. However, I think, overall, the design looks a little dated, especially when you consider these wide bezels at the top and the bottom. Here you know, Samsung and Apple, and a bunch of other OEMs have been making super bezel lists very thin, bezel smartphones, but that's kind of where the industry is going and having these really wide bezels at the bottom, and also even this physical home button is kind of outdated. So I was kind of disappointed to see that so, as you can see, there's this glass back that it has, and it sits on top of a technically unibody design, but while they might have some striking colors that are underneath the glass I have the Sapphire one, which is pretty nice, I'm not going to lie, but, as you can see, it really clings on to fingerprints like so badly, so I mean when I look at it when I first opened it I really liked the color I thought it was really eye-catching and when you, when it kind of catches, the light you see, you know some more of the colors of the surrounding environment.

It's pretty, and also I will say the camera. This rear camera here is really nice and almost flush with the back, which is nice, but because of the glass back. It looks so dirty all the time. So another kind of caveat with the u11 is its dual hot word. Wake word support, so the dual wake board support in general is a good thing, because this phone will be able to support Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

So you could say: okay, Google and you can say Alexa to wake either the voice, assistants and use whatever one that you want. So that's a good thing. However, the model that I have only has Google Assistant on it right now, Alexa is coming later about a month later, HTC said so, you will have to wait, and it's kind of disappointing that you don't get that dual hot word. Wake word support right out of the box, but at least you know it is coming another. Not so great thing about the U 11 in my opinion, is HTC's Sense, companion UI, so this was launched a while back, and basically it's supposed to be an on smartphone assistant and HTC kind of describes it, as you know, not using voice like Google Assistant or Alexa would be, but it's mostly trying to give you tips for your life and how you use your phone directly on the phone here.

It's giving me a little info card, which they're very similar to like the Google now cards that you would get if you use that I've ever really gotten many suggestions yet, but in general, I think when you have a phone that supports both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa personally I wouldn't be inclined to even use sense companion, because most of my life would live on a different service rather than HTC zone AI. However, one of the things that I would use it for is the device management portion of it, which HTC describes, is a little kind of learn how you use your phone and then give you tips on how to use the phone better. So, for example, if you give the sense companion, access to your calendar, it might notice that you have a particularly busy day, one day, and it'll kind of recommend on your free time to charge the phone up if it thinks you're going to need more battery life. So, overall, there are a lot of good things about the HTC. U 11, and it's a really nice update from the HTC 10, which we really enjoyed.

It was a really nice flagship, however, personally I would have preferred if the same you know features and guts were in a design that was like the HTC 10, so I prefer that kind of all-metal design I think it looks better, but I am really happy that edge cents in particular ends up being more useful than I thought. It was going to be because at first you look just really gimmicky. Maybe you won't use it all, but there's a good thing is that you can turn off edge sense entirely, so you don't have to use the kind of squeezable less of this device. So you know for a $650 flagship. The performance adds up, the battery life adds up, and it really just depends on your preference with the design.

If you want to spend your money on HCC's, the newest flagship.

Source : Ars Technica