HTC U11 hands on review By TechRadar

This is the HTC U 11, now let's deal with that name first. So the U is part of HTC's new brand name which is the HTC U as you can expect and the 11 shows this is the Flagship, is the successor to the HTC 10 from last year we previously had the M9, M8, Asian set a whole litany of history with bad names of phones and it continued it with the HTC U 11 So let's start with a big innovation. HTC hopes will take it away from the leading pack of smartphone manufacturers and into the stratosphere. Its edge sense now this is basically the ability to squeeze the edges of the phone and have the phone do stuff. This is what HTC thinks would make the difference between something like the Galaxy s 8 with beautiful infinity display and essentially means that you could open the camera with a quick squeeze and you can open Google assistant with a long one But you can customize it as well That sounds like a great idea and in practice it kind of is you know be able to open the camera out of your pocket straight away is good And you can change it to other bits and pieces, but you have to squeeze it quite hard. I felt like it should be a little bit more easy, a bit more flexible.

Ultimately this feels like squeezing a metal device, hoping that something happens. You can't do more stuff with it as we mentioned, so you can launch other apps turn the torch on and off but ultimately what's going to make the big difference is where you can change third-Party apps. Now this is coming from HTC But it's going to be a beta version in july so about three months after the phone comes out. When it does emerge however it means you can map nearly any function from any app you can think of to that squeezing ability. For instance if you've got Google maps up in front of you and you've not quite zoomed in enough, instead of having to take two hands and pinch and zoom, you can just squeeze with one hand, make it much easier when you're walking around town trying to find your way around.

If you've seen the HTC do plate or from earlier this year then you'll understand what HTC doing with its design language It's taking the way its phones look into a new direction from the HTC 10 where we had this angular metal unibody It's now 3D Formed glass with a very pearlescent glistening kind of shell with five different colors one of which is solar Red now We do rather like that now this is going to be quite a Subjective design some people really hate it as we saw with the yorkshire some people absolutely love it because it does have a premium finish To it, but is a fingerprint magnets the good news is it wipes off very quickly? But it's not as premium looking as perhaps a metal unibody And we're quite sad to see HTC drop the angular design of the HTC 10? One HTC's headline feature is clearly the edge sense We should talk the camera little bit because again HTC has improved things and technically it looks like it's got a very good camera once more Taking some of the bits from the pixel where basically you've got HDr+ called HDr boost here And that means that every picture that you take will enhanced in some way it does slow down taking the pictures a little bit but nothing too major as usual got its usual range of modes as well and pro mode especially allows you to shooting or tweet all the settings and if You are a technical Photographer you will enjoy this because you've got good 12 megapixel sensor on the bottom and the ability to tweak everything that you want Any fans of HTC will remember that boom sound has been a strong part of the family for quite some years? it began with the HTC we had two front-facing speakers which really push the game on in a way because ultimately Where sound used to fire at the bottom in a single tinny speaker? Suddenly it was coming straight at you with deep bass And that was a real step change it made a big difference Over years HTC is tinker with us a little bit and with the HTC 10 we? Weren't so happy because he had the treble in the base set pressed it out firing in different directions and suddenly It wasn't quite as impressive about this year while the direction still the same the sound quality is better the whole phone itself has been Turned into a resonance chamber, so placed onto a surface the sound quality is much better But the fact they don't fire in the same direction forwards does mean that the effect is slightly diminished But in terms of sound quality HTC has done something really interesting while we haven't got a 3.5 millimeter headphone Jack on there Which is shame there is an adapter in the box, but unlike this has got a dac involved in it as well So that means that not only will you be able to use any pair of headphones? But those headphones will sound better the stack actually draws power from the phone so you can't leave it in all the time But ultimately that's a really great feature to have and it comes up as part of the box so it's bundled in with the price That is a nice move from HTC So we've heard about the HTC U11 and the key question is how much is this going to cost now? We haven't been given exact price figures yet, but it sounds it's going to be among the most expensive on the market We're thinking Samsung Galaxy S8 levels. Which is pretty expensive now We have got some of the high-end features of smartphones these days So we've got the processor a 5.5 inch qhd display 4 gigabytes of Ram 6 in some countries Everything we'd expect for a flagship smartphone is in the HTC you Even the Battery life is the only thing that we slightly suspect about at the moment with a 3000 milliamp hour power pack But we have to test it reads find that if the 85 processor can improve things So has HTC done enough here well, that's the key question ultimately you'd say it has to make a leading smartphone but not the leading smartphone And it made the price a lot cheaper that would have made a big difference had it had a real innovative feature that was a Little less Gimmicky than the Edge scent then maybe again We'd be talking about this as the phone of the year as it stands HTC has made a middle-of-the-pack phone, but still one that's very much worth checking out as Ever thank you very much for liking our videos and thank you very much for subscribing be checking out the HTC u 11th with a full review very soon. So check back to that, and we'll speak to you soon.

Source : TechRadar