American Zoetrope
A couple of other features worth mentioning are the built-in infrared remote, which lets you use the One to operate your telly - it worked a treat with my Sony - and something called Zoe, which is short for ‘zoetrope’.
In a nutshell, a Zoe captures three-and-a-bit seconds of 1080p MP4 video from 20 photos whenever you press the shutter key. Around half a second is recorded before your finger actually presses the shutter presumably thanks to some sort of buffer.
This is the sort of thing you end up with. The effects, the editing, the music are all entirely the work of the phone. I just took the shots and uploaded the end result to YouTube:
The One’s gallery offers numerous options to mess about with your Zoe videos and stills to create 30-second vignettes with visual effects and music. Think of it as video Instagram. Using it is very much a matter of trial and error because, bizarrely, the One’s PDF guide makes no mention of Zoe whatsoever.
To be honest, I’m not sure I see Zoe ever being more than a novelty even if the Daily Prophet-esque animated images it creates will amuse your Facebook friends. Which, I suspect, is entirely the point. The IR remote is very handy though, and the Zoe function can easily be disabled.
When it comes to battery life, the One couldn’t quite match my Motorola Razr i’s two full days on a charge but it didn’t fall far short. So you certainly won’t need to charge it up every day. Looping a 1080p video turned in an impressive runtime of five hours and 20 minutes.
The micro USB port is MHL and On-the-Go compatible
Before I wrap up I should make it clear that the One lacks anything in the way of storage expansion, but with only 32GB and 64GB versions available that’s not too much of an issue. The micro USB port supports USB On-the-Go and MHL media output. Call quality - thanks to active noise suppression - and signal reception were well up to snuff. And Wi-Fi reception was more than up to snuff - it was extremely good, by far the best I have ever encountered in any mobile device. My home office is a bit of a Wi-Fi black spot, which is why I run my laptop off a Powerline connection, but the One showed a robust signal in it at all times.
The fact that the One supports the new 802.11ac standard is worth remembering too.
The Reg Verdict
Let’s not beat about the bush, the HTC One is a supremely classy, capable and stylish handset. It’s as powerful as you could possibly want, lovely to look at, pleasant to hold and easy to use. The new camera is arguably the best fitted to any current smartphone. The 1080p screen’s a cracker. Battery life more than acceptable. I’m giving the new Sense 5 launcher a thumbs up too. All HTC needs to do is get out there and promote the daylights out of the thing so that world+dog don’t end up buying the Galaxy S4 or the iPhone 5 by thoughtless default. In short, the One deserves to be a success and if you are after a new smartphone in 2013 you really have to include it in your shortlist no matter what your OS allegiance.
On a final note, the fact the One is made in democratic Taiwan rather than China may not matter to you, but it does to me. ®
HTC One
COMMENTS
No microSD AGAIN
I was well up for getting a One S or One X last time round, but the lack of microSD killed that. Realise it doesn't matter to everyone, but I need that feature. So my money went on a Galaxy S3.
Re: No microSD AGAIN
On my current phone (Droid RAZR MAXX HD, imported to the UK at some cost); I have the camera to save snaps to the external microSD card. Maybe this doesn't matter to everyone, but if you drop your phone in the toilet, or somehow it gets corrupted and you can't boot it, at least with the external card, you can pop it out and get the photos off. It's just simple, cheap, replacable NAND. If you, say, wanted to watch many different videos each day, if you had a long commute, would you want to risk wearing out the internal NAND by writing several GB/day to it? with the card it's a cheap swap out.
No SD card slot, no removable battery
It's like they rifled through the iPhone spec sheet and picked the worst features to copy.
No SD no sale
"A year ago, I finished off my review of HTC’s One X by predicting great things for it and its maker. And then Samsung’s Galaxy S3 merrily outsold it ten to one ... The One X is the better phone - it’s better made, better looking and better to use."
Not sure about everyone, but for me the following paragraph explains why;
"Before I wrap up I should make it clear that the One lacks anything in the way of storage expansion, but with only 32GB and 64GB versions available that’s not too much of an issue"
...unless you play a lot of games, or watch a lot of videos, or want to have full offline maps on your GPS on your phone, or have lots of MP3s (or cloudy music service cache files).
The reason I bought an S3 over a One X was the expandable memory. That and a removable battery are very important features for me. Judging by comments and reviews I've read I'm not the only one.
True, Samsung managed to bork their implementation of the S3's expandable storage up by inexplicably mounting the internal storage space as "sdcard" (the external SD card is "extSdCard"), which means that helpful apps like Spotify, Garmin and most games that try to put large data files on your SD card end up putting those data files on your internal memory instead. But at least with the S3 I can still shove video and MP3 files on a large cheap external card.
No swappable battery, no sale
It would probably be the battery rather than memory issue that would kill it for me.
I've just ordered a 5000mAh battery for my Galaxy Note to enable it to carry on displaying maps, tracking my location, monitoring my heart rate, playing music over Bluetooth and so on for far longer than the stock 2500mAh battery gives me when the phone's clamped to my bike's handlebars for 3-4 hour cycle rides in bright sunlight with the display brightness at 100%. When I get home with a depleted battery I can drop in a fully-recharged spare and carry on using it, rather than having to plug the phone in and wait hours for a decent charge before its usable again.
For the kind of uses I've put my phone to, I can't imagine ever wanting one where the battery couldn't be swapped out quickly and easily. It's a simple option that really ought to be standard when these devices have so many possible uses.
