HTC One phone a knockout contender

To the casual observer, the smartphone slugfest has come down to two main combatants: Apple, with its iPhone, and Samsung, with its Galaxy line. The reality, though, is that there are other muscular heavyweights vying for contention, including the Taiwanese handset manufacturer HTC. HTC hasn't been able to duplicate the strong commercial success of its rivals, despite producing Android phones that generally have been critically well received.

Now, HTC is punching away again with the thin and stylish 5-ounce HTC One, which reaches U.S. consumers on April 19, presumably a week or two ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S4. In many respects, HTC One is, well, one knockout of a device, though I also found a few things in my tests that I wasn't wild about.
It will initially be sold at AT&T, Sprint, HTC and Best Buy and cost $199.99 for a version with 32 gigabytes of storage or $299.99 for 64 GB, under customary two-year contracts. It will also be sold later this spring at T-Mobile, which recently announced its intention to ditch traditional wireless contracts. You'll be able to get the T-Mobile version for a down payment of $99.99, after which you'll be responsible for 24 equal monthly payments of $20.
HTC One certainly boasts a long list of positives, starting with a handsome all-metal unibody design that speaks to the premium quality of HTC's latest flagship. And HTC One has a splendid full high-definition screen (468 ppi resolution), robust Qualcomm quad-core processor and powerful speakers (backed by Beats Audio) excellent not only for listening to music but also for using the speakerphone.
The HTC One also has a camera capable of producing fine quality photographs, even when you're shooting in low light. And the "living" Gallery for showing off those photos reveals not only stationary pictures but moving images, too. It's a very cool special effect.
HTC One even doubles as a universal remote control and can serve up TV recommendations of what to watch based on your designated preferences.
In lieu of a traditional home-screen layout with icons and apps, HTC is making much of a new interface called BlinkFeed, a live and constantly updated stream of customizable social feeds from your Facebook friends and the folks you follow on Twitter, as well as feeds from any number of news sources. The feeds appear as pictures in squares and rectangles of different sizes, and brings to mind the Flipboard app.Tap on a square or rectangle to read the underlying content, which HTC says can come from more than 1,400 content providers in a dozen categories. You can drag down to refresh the screen.
The idea is that your HTC One home screen would look different from mine, though I suspect some users will find BlinkFeed a bit overwhelming. If so, you can go with HTC's alternative Sense Android layout. Given Facebook's own intentions, announced last week, to take over the phone screen, you will also soon be able to use the Facebook Home interface on the HTC One, should you find that choice more appealing.
My main gripe with the HTC One has to do with usability.
For example, the decorative HTC logo that sits below the 4.7-inch display is in precisely the location where you'd expect a home button to be. I kept inadvertently hitting that logo to no effect, because the actual on-screen home icon that you're meant to tap is off to its right. A poor design choice.
As I indicated, the HTC One's camera can produce top-notch picture quality and features a suite of clever photographic stunts built around what HTC refers to as Zoe. When Zoe is turned on, for example, you can capture not only a still photograph when you tap the camera icon but also grab a few seconds of video. Through an "always smile" retouch feature inside Zoe you can drag a circle that appears around a face until you get a pose you can live with. Zoe can also automatically produce a little themed highlight reel put together from some of your shots.
But too often I found the Zoe software confusing. It was not always intuitive how to dig down to get to the various features, clever though they may be.
The camera itself is built around what HTC claims to be the largest and most light-sensitive pixels you'll find on a smartphone — so while there are fewer pixels than on other phones, HTC says the ones on board it capture more than 300% more light than other cameras. I was certainly impressed with most of the pictures I took, in a variety of settings.
I was equally impressed with how music sounded on the phone. And HTC had demonstrated to me a fun karaoke software feature with lyrics fetched from Gracenote, but it didn't work with the music that was loaded on my test device.
I didn't do a formal battery test but did notice low-battery warnings late in the day, so it's something to watch. And be mindful that the battery, like that of the iPhone, is not removable.
HTC One is a beautiful well-sculpted device that belongs in the conversation of heavyweight smartphone contenders. You'll appreciate many of its features even as you wish some of the software were more intuitive.