HTC 10 review: The old guard is back

HTC made bold claims in the build-up to the launch of their brand new flagship smartphone, the HTC 10. They were “obsessed” with perfection, but have they succeeded?

On their brochure, the company did seem to hit a lot of the right notes, with a powerful flagship-class processor, an ample amount of RAM, a moderate battery and a high-resolution display.

What makes the HTC 10 stand out, is how well every part was gelled together thanks to the clean, stock, and very pretty Sense Android skin. I think it’s currently the closest thing you can get to a 2016 Nexus device.

Top it all off with an exquisitely made metal unibody plus an interesting design choice and you’ve got a seriously good smartphone here. Is it perfect? I don’t think so, not in the conventional sense anyway.

But, I do think it’s perfect for one very specific type of person. A type of person that I think is in quite a lot of us.

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We put our trust in a lot of things. Our family, our partners, our friends, our coffee, our bands and, if you’re like me, our technology. My first smartphone ever was an HTC Desire and I loved it. It was everything I needed it to be. It was well built, had a crisp screen, a smooth smartphone experience and a pretty Android interface. And that, I believe, was what captured the hearts of many an HTC fan. It was what HTC was known for.

In fact, ask anyone who has been following tech for awhile and, odds are, their first Android smartphone was a quietly brilliant one. Now, you look at HTC’s falling smartphone sales in befuddlement, wondering what went so horrifically wrong.

The short version of that story was that people lost faith in HTC and their ability to produce the best Android smartphones in the world. After several lackluster flagships, the trust that had been built up was torn down and the public moved on to the likes of Samsung, or Huawei, or Xiaomi.

But, I think deep down, there was always a little part in us that wanted HTC to come back to their glory days simply because they knew how to make great smartphones. A case in point being the excellent One M7 which introduced the world to BoomSound and that fantastic metal build. They never really lost that ability, they just got a little lazy with their recent flagships.

So imagine how our heartstrings fluttered when HTC made a sweeping declaration that they had made the perfect smartphone. A perfect 10, as they liked to call it. But have they really done it?

Well, right off the bat, the HTC 10 does boast an incredibly smooth Android experience. There was practically no lag when multitasking and playing games. Then again, you don’t really expect the pairing of a Snapdragon 820 processor with 4GB of RAM to be laggy, would you? HTC’s even given you a decent 32GB of internal storage that you can further expand via a microSD card.

It’s also very pretty. In front, it’s got a beautiful Quad HD Super LCD 5 display and an incredibly clean Android skin. The new Sense, with its clutter-free girl-next-door good looks, is functional and familiar if you’re someone coming from vanilla. Don’t bother with the “Freestyle” theme, though, because as far as I can work out, that’s just a gimmick.

The HTC 10 will also go on for quite some time on a single charge of its 3,000 mAh battery. Considering the relatively small battery size, I can get about 3.5 to 4 hours of screen on time which easily gets me through a day. If you do run short, topping it up with Quick Charge 3.0 via a USB Type-C port is pretty quick too, giving you about 40% of charge after 30 minutes. But, from my testing, the time it took to fully charge varied from 1.5 hours to about 2 hours.

It also takes photos like an HTC device often does. In terms of photographing satisfaction, it sits somewhere between the purely technological brilliance of the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge’s camera, to the more raw, camera-nerd-juice-inducing experience of the Huawei P9.

That is to say that it isn’t really here nor there. It will take some pretty nice photos, but I did get very annoyed with the apparent lack of ability to tap to expose and often inaccurate (especially in low light) focus confirmation. Don’t show me a green circle if you haven’t actually focused on what I wanted, HTC 10.

If you’re a new-generation HTC fan, then the one other criteria you’d add to your list of a perfect smartphone is BoomSound — a synonym for astounding smartphone audio quality. With the 10, HTC has “upped the ante” with an all new BoomSound Hi-Fi edition. It utilises a high-frequency speaker in the earpiece and a low-frequency speaker at the bottom of the phone to give you the illusion that you’re listening to both a tweeter and a woofer. Does it work?

Well, my peasant ears were clearly not tuned to find out, so I passed it to our resident audiophile. She compared it to the Huawei P9 Plus, which uses a similar setup and found that the HTC 10 performed marginally better as the P9 Plus distorted at high volumes. However, when she pitted it against the dual front-facing speakers on the Lenovo Vibe X3, the Lenovo blew the 10 out of the water.

This then brings us to the conclusion. The HTC 10 is not the perfect smartphone in your conventional sense of measurement. Some of its flaws are pretty easy to pick out. For example, the RM2,799 price tag is a tad too high to digest and the LCD display isn’t nearly as vibrant, bright or contrast-y enough in a world full of gorgeous AMOLEDs.

But, is there really a “conventional” way to measure perfection? I don’t think so. I believe that it’s a concept, a relative idea in our heads, that fluctuates as time goes on and as our needs change and because of that, I think the HTC smartphone is perfect for a very specific type of person.

You’ll know if the HTC 10 is the perfect smartphone for you from the moment you pick it up. You’ll revel in the smoothness of its Android experience, see the beauty of this new Sense, appreciate the lack of excessive bloatware, and most importantly, feel that unbelievably gorgeous metal build. The subtle curve of the back, the large, harsh chamfer that helps with grip and the undeniably premium finish of the metal unibody.

You’ll know it’s perfect because, then, you’d probably be an HTC fan. I think the 10 captures a lot of what an HTC fan cares about in a smartphone and, above all else, it’s reassurance that the old guard is back. Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of trust slowly being rebuilt, one HTC 10 at a time.

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Here are more shots from the HTC 10’s camera. Feel free to click on any of them to view the original image.

From my experience, the camera does struggle in low light conditions. It’s slow to pull focus, rather poor at exposing correctly the first time and gets a lot of lens flare for some reason. Also, I run into the incorrect focus confirmation a lot more when the going gets dark.

Bonus selfie