Hands on: HTC One Max

The HTC One Max is HTC’s answer to the growing demand of bigger screens with its latest model that pushes a larger 5.9″ Full HD display. Taking the well loved aluminium clad design of its smaller 4.7″ HTC One, the new HTC One Max is not only larger but comes with several minor changes as well. In terms of hardware and performance, the One Max is rather identical as the HTC One with a quad core 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600 processor and 2GB of RAM. Storage wise you have a choice of 16GB or 32GB options which can be expanded to up to 64GB extra via micro SD. If that’s not enough, HTC is also throwing in 50GB of Google Drive as well.

Firstly you’ll noticed that the back cover is removable giving you access to a expandable microSD and micro SIM card slot. However, its huge 3,300mAh battery is not removable which is rather pointless as seen previously on the Xperia S. While most removable smart phone back covers are made of plastic, the HTC One Max uses a more durable aluminium material which gives it a more upmarket feel. To remove the back cover, there’s a tiny unlocking switch located at the sides. Unfortunately in our hands-on unit, the back cover seems to have some minor gaps issues when we tried to put it back together. Since this is a pre-launch unit, hopefully HTC would resolve this before it gets here commercially.

Another new feature is a fingerprint scanner which lets you unlock the phone however it doesn’t double up as a power or home button as seen on the iPhone 5S. If you’ve enabled finger print unlocking, this means you would need to take 2 steps to unlock by pressing the power button followed by swiping your finger at the back. We will have a video focusing on the fingerprint scanner later on.

Compared to the original HTC One, there are a couple of things missing from the device such as Beats Audio enhancement as well as OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation) for the Ultrapixel camera.

Watch our HTC One Max hands on after the break.

More hands-on photos of the HTC One Max plus side by side comparison with the Galaxy Note 3 here.