HTC One max Review - It's Huge
by Brian Klug on October 28, 2013 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HTC
- Mobile
- One
- Snapdragon 600
- Android 4.3
- One max
Battery life remains a huge concern for savvy smartphone shoppers. Opportunistically charging a phone and worrying about making it through an entire day with just a single charge cycle is a common complaint as well. The HTC One max addresses some of the complaints myself and others had with charging on the HTC One which charged at only 1 amp, instead the One max charges at up to 1.5 amps. Although I wasn’t sampled it, the One max box will also include a 1.5 amp charger from HTC that’s slightly taller than the previous generation. This definitely helps offset the increase in charge time that would’ve resulted given the 43 percent larger 3300 mAh 3.8V (12.54 watt hour) battery.
The HTC One charges a bit faster with the latest updates, however the linear region of the charge curve is entirely dominated by that 1 A charging maximum. With the 1.5 A charging in the One max we actually see considerably faster charge times in spite of the larger battery. HTC continues to use BC 1.2 to the best of my knowledge for signaling.
To assess battery life, I ran the One max through our battery life test suite. Our battery life test is unchanged, we calibrate the display to exactly 200 nits and run it through a controlled workload consisting of a dozen or so popular pages and articles with pauses in between continually, until the device dies. This is repeated on cellular and WiFi, in this case since we have an international model of the One max that lacks the LTE bands used in the USA, that’s 3G WCDMA on AT&T’s Band 2 network. The talk time call test is self explanatory and also unchanged.
The results speak for themselves, the One max lasts quite a long time on battery, even with a large display. I expected the One max to lose to the Note 3 on the cellular test initially, but it posts an impressive result. I suspect display power might be the reason here between AMOLED and the more pragmatic LCD in the One max. I measured the One max with the flip case on as well, and it adds about 20 percent more battery time to the device. I'm curious to see how the USA-bound variants with LTE fare, but the One does impress with excellent battery life.
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AbbyYen - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
oh ya, one more thing, the capacitive button. must have Option, Home, and Back. the option there, when in home page, when you click it should have the notification bar option. so that you can operate in one hand! no need to use the other hand to pull down the notification option. multi task button and search button are useless. long press home button and let it show the multitask window.Ranger101 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
As one of the "incredibly small percentage of users that clamors for an SD card", I feel I need to set you straight on the issue. Using one's smartphone as a media player makes an SD card necessary if a sizeable collection of wav files are to be stored on the phone. Secondly I notice that you devote very little attention to the audio quality of the cellphones in your reviews. I suggest that you dispense with any comments on the sound quality of the built in speaker and focus more on important audio issues like what DAC the cellphone uses and what it sounds like through a decent pair of headphones.Ranger101 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
You boys don't take well to criticism do you, every time a comment remotely criticising your articles is posted, it is removed. With that attitude, like the micro sd card, Anandtech will be going the way of the dodo soon as well. I didn't realise you were so narrow minded.superflex - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
AT is going nowhere. You're SD card is.Ranger101 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
You boys don't take well to criticism do you, every time a comment remotely criticising your articles is posted, it is removed. With that attitude, like the micro sd card, Anandtech will be going the way of the dodo soon as well. I didn't realise you were so narrow minded.MercuryStar - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I don't know whether you're just having trouble browsing the comments, but there are many comments critical of the article here, many with responses. Your claim doesn't seem to hold up.Davidjan - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I prefer One. SD slot is not important for me, because there is an option to extend storage with OTG reader like Meenova MicroSD Reader: http://goo.gl/U6IyYrituraj - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Really laughed out loud at that stupid thing..Impulses - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
It actually works just fine, if all you want is space for movies during a long flight (or music for special occasions etc) then it's a perfectly viable alternative to built in cardslots. I use mine pretty often, along with a regular USB OTG cable when I want to pull RAW files from my camera or access stuff I've brought from the PC on a faster USB 3.0 stick. All of it is more convenient than removing my case to get at the card on older phones I've had...Honestly, I'd only want a microSD slot at this point if it's easily accessed from the outside like some Sony phones etc, but I can easily live without it as long as the phone has at least 32GB, so can most people. The price gouging for SKUs with more storage really has to stop tho.
apaceeee - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
The frarme is tooooooo narrow...It's almost frameless...And I trust it can be carelessly touched .