HTC U11 | Review By Engadget

A lot of people have been ready to run off HTC for years now and who could blame them? Their phones have been a rollercoaster of quality, while competitors have gotten steadily better now, HTC seems ready to catch up with the pack. Thanks to this meet the HTC u11, it's got a terrible name, and it's well short of perfect for a few reasons, but it's still the most enticing most exciting HTC phone in a while when it comes to design I have to hand it to HTC. The U 11 is a strikingly pretty machine. It's not because of its face, though there's a 5.5 inch, Super LCD v screen. That's perfectly fine, but not amazing, and it's flanked by big bezels above and below. No, it's all.

Thanks to the way HTC sandwiched, a metal frame between two glass panels. The back in particular, is sure to grab some attention. HTC calls the finish with a 3d liquid glass, and it catches light in some impressive and unexpected ways: we're working with the solar red model here and the effect is just stunning, even better. All the edges just sort of melt into each other. It's very well done, and almost enough to make you forget about how tricky phones covered in class can be prepared for this thing to skitter across your desk.

When you put it down- and you can basically forget about wedging it between your ear and shoulder when taking a call, because it just slips right out of there and of course, here's the other thing about glass it breaks. While we were shooting this video, the U 11 tipped over on to our studio table and well see for yourself. The rest of the hardware is pretty straightforward. There's a solid fingerprint sensor below the screen wedged in between two capacitive navigation keys: there's a USB type-c port on the bottom for charging, which you'll also use for the included. You sonic headphones they're pretty basic, but they offer some noise cancellation without the need for additional batteries.

It's nowhere near the level of say a pair of Bose qc25. So there's also a space on the SIM tray for micros cards as big as 2 terabytes and did I mention. The whole thing is ip67 water-resistant. Thank God on the software side, things really haven't changed that much. The U 11 runs Android 7.1.1 painted overall, with HTC's familiar. Why now I find this both a blessing and a curse? It runs really well, but the custom interfaces from HTC's competitors have gotten really your perfect over the years.

What we have here is ultimately more of the same from the customizable feed of news and highlights to the performance-enhancing boost app, don't yawn. Yet, though, HTC has squeezed a few special tricks into the U 11. For some reason, it has three AI assistants, Google Assistant, HTC's, Sense, companion and Amazon's Alexa. Now the company thinks these assistants complement each other rather than compete with each other and that more or less feels true for now, Google's is still the best for answering general knowledge. Questions and Alexa is great if you want to tap into the over 15,000 skills available for it.

Since the U 11 plays nice with two different wait: words, you can call out to either and expect a pretty snappy response since Companion. Meanwhile, services reminders and notifications based on the weather, your schedule and more, you can't define how often you get those notifications, though so its utility feels a little limited and then there's edge sense, which uses pressure sensors built into the phone. It felt, lame and gimmicky at first, but once I got the pressure settings just right, I could not stop using it. You can think of it as an invisible convenience. Key with two settings, a squeeze performs one action and a squeeze and hold performs another right.

Now, a quick squeeze launches the camera and one more squeeze snaps a photo which is absolutely perfect for selfies, originally I had the squeeze and hold set to launch Alexa, but that was dumb. I usually just talked to her anyway. Now it's set to start a voice recording which has already been a lifesaver in interviews as far as performance goes, HTC is onto something here. The u11 uses one of Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipsets paired with four gigabytes of RAM and the adrenal 540 GPU, all of which should sound really familiar by now. These all surely contribute to just how fast the new 11 feels all the time, especially when it comes to driving intense games like after pulse and Guardians of the Galaxy I suspect HTC has done some serious optimization under the hood too.

To keep things running this well long story short. The new xi is one of the most consistently fast Android phones, I've ever used. Our benchmark tests bear that out too, you can see the full table of results on engadget. com. The battery life meanwhile was basically the same as HTC s you ultra, since they both have the same 3000 William hour batteries, in other words, expect to get just a day of pretty consistent use on a single charge and closer to a day and a half.

If you make it a point to put the phone down every once in a while, you might remember that HTC hasn't always had the best luck with cameras, but that luck is turning around the. U 11, 12 megapixel main camera, it's among the best I've used in a while, and that's really saying something considering the competition's focusing is generally crazy. Fast thanks to the dual pixel face, detection and photos were consistently chock-full of detail. Killer it production was nice and accurate too, though. Sometimes you might notice outdoor photos.

Looking a little on the cool side, it's generally very good in low-light ?, thanks to the sensors large pixels, though I still think Samsung's s8 twins edged out in the dark a bit. Meanwhile, the front-facing camera actually shoots at a higher 16 megapixel resolution and with a wide angle lens, it's capable of some seriously nice selfies HTC's definitely didn't get everything right with the U 11, but that's okay, there's a lot to like about it. To be quite honest, it really wasn't expecting that after the mess that was the new ultra, if CC seemed to be confused about what really mattered, I can't say for sure that confusion has passed, but we ultimately wind up with a phone, that's quirky and mostly worth owning, and that's saying a lot for this company.

Source : Engadget