HTC One Review: A Daddy Daughter Take

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A Daddy Daughter Review

A 47-year-old father of five and his 18-year-old daughter have tested the HTC One over the last month and they have two very different reviews of this hot looking new phone.

A synopsis of their review is older users may be annoyed by the smaller buttons and a lack of similarities and stability compared to the iPhone, but younger users and folks looking for the latest innovations may appreciate the variety and depth of features, improved picture-taking quality, and great sound output.

Pros

Both daddy and daughter agree on several strengths that this new device touts:

• The Facebook integration onto a main optional front page is beautiful, allowing quick scrolling through all your friends’ postings, with the option to intermix with the manufacturer’s choice of a few of the national news outlets. Microsoft phones have a similar feature, but this is a weakness on the i-Phones.
• The sound from the Beats Audio BoomSound dual speakers is unparalleled and as good as a 1980 Sony Walkman that was many times the size. The Sense Voice also picks up your voice with such alacrity that voice to text dictation is years ahead of iPhone’s Siri. Best of all placing the phone just 5 inches in front of your forehead allows for you to experience a sound quality that many a cars, sound systems nor stereo speakers could have delivered 25 years ago.
• 18-year-old Sarah said she was willing to give up her iPhone 4 for the HTC 1, since she so valued the voice to text feature for dictating homework, picture-taking quality, great sound and the depth of features. The UltraPixel Camera with awesome video editing and playback features as well as, picture taking features like AlwaysSmile (which enables you to get all of your subjects best face regardless of whether they happened in tandem), Optical Image Stabilization and the resulting high megapixel output of the UltraPixel makes this a camera well worth its price if that is all you used it for!

Cons

• The tested device never detected our correct city, but rather identified a city hundreds of miles away as the location of the phone, and thus the “local weather” and other features rang irrelevant, as our current location would not show up. After five hours on tech support and even being elevated to the manufacture’s top echelon level 3-tech support no solution was provided. The promised one-week call back with an answer never came. We spent more time with tech support on this phone in one month than we did with over a dozen different iPhones in our large family.
• A green “Plugged In – On” light is uncomfortably bright when pointed directly at your eye, not a problem as long as you don’t have the screen perpendicular to your face but it is a design flaw that will regularly annoy most users.

 

One-handed use, such as turning on screen and scrolling to correct screen is not as easy as with a Microsoft, Blackberry or iPhone because of a few flaws:

• The lack of a physical home button is a major inconvenience, sure there is a button area to press, but because of both its lack of a tactile feel and its very small size, it requires you to take your eyes off the road and requires a careful aim to ensure that you hit it with your thumb, easier for young girls, tough for old dads
• Back arrows on screen are too small and require both close and longer eye contact with the screen and precise tapping of your fingertip
• It is of a much larger size than an iPhone and although this makes for one of the best screens on the market it becomes clumsy and brick-like if you require putting any kind of protection on it to prevent damage from the inevitable drops

If you prefer a political news source like the number two ranked Drudge Report to be available on the wonderful home screen scrolling view, you’ll be missing out, only approved mainstream news sources are available for connection.

Battery – If you are playing Townsman or making a lot of calls you will need plenty of charging cords around, this battery burns up quickly with the bright lights of the gorgeous screen. The reported 18 hours of talk time for 3G is something we couldn’t come close to duplicating.

When you need to text message, Wi-Fi must be turned off – iPhones don’t have this problem because they have i-messaging – Apple created and patented the ability to message between other phones but Droids will not be able to do this until 2020.

Visual voice mail is a chore and deleting voice mail is more difficult than Microsoft’s or iPhone’s approach.

Tech support confirmed with us that every once and awhile this phone will give you messages that the phone has failed (hmmm, we never had that happen with our iPhones.)

It does not recharge like other phones can when connected to a computer.

Viewing pdf’s is not as smooth or as clear as on other phones, the picture of the pdf moves in a jumpy fashion and doesn’t have as clear nor as smooth of fonts on the print of the pdf page.

Lack of intuitive symbols and poor usability design is apparent by the fact that there were 12 symbols at the top of the screen for things from Wi-Fi to time to Bluetooth activation and yet at any one time we could only intuitively figure out less than half of them vs. on the iPhone where those similar symbols were 100% understandable to us at first glance.

Likewise the lack of intuitive interface on the mail program causes one to make a few mistakes, such as in losing an email or two, before figuring out what symbols mean what as opposed to the more obvious user interface of any iPhone or Blackberry interface.

Bottom Line

Younger users who value the photo quality, a screen great for gaming, movies and more, along with the great speakers and features buried deep within, will find this a good tool for having fun; older users who rely on their phone to be a stable communication tool with a user interface that is easy to navigate while driving a car may want to avoid this feature-rich very smartphone. Dad went back to his iPhone, and daughter is delighted with her HTC 1!

Stay Connected:

• Visit the HTC Website

Author: Mark Faust is a father of five teenagers and Sarah Faust is an 18-year-old high school senior.