The HTC 10 Review

Final Words

It’s been a long road to get to this point. In order to try and take the HTC 10 as a whole then we can start by reviewing the details. At a high level, the HTC 10 is specced to take on the high-end Android market. As far as design goes, this represents HTC’s first major design shift since the One M7. I think it’s easy to write it off as a minor change but this device is now truly all metal and glass unlike the One M7, M8, and M9. Instead of plastic speaker grilles or plastic sidewalls like the previous designs, the front is just a sheer piece of glass with no logos or anything to really distract from the experience. The back cover is similarly almost all aluminum other than the antenna insulating lines and the RF window for GPS at the top of the phone. The logo on the back is painted on rather than a discrete, separate piece, and the FCC markings on this PVT are absent altogether in mass production units.

This design really in a lot of ways is HTC finally getting serious about the details as well. If you looked too closely at most of the phone the lack of ID detailing was apparent with SIM trays in random areas and poor color matching as well as buttons and other pieces scattered in a somewhat haphazard fashion. Things like the buttons are so much better than previous models with no take-up and a clean, crisp break with a hard stop. The top-mounted 3.5mm jack is not necessarily ideal for ergonomics but it’s still acceptable. The use of mostly-flat glass is appreciated as well, as those that like using screen protectors will be able to fully cover the display and capacitive buttons with a tempered glass protector unlike the Galaxy S7 or Note7. The move back to capacitive buttons also means much better ergonomics for typing. The One M8 and One M9 both had issues with this as the keyboard was just too high up on the phone to type comfortable with two thumbs, and the HTC 10 resolves this. If HTC makes another high-end device, I think they could afford to go another year before seriously changing the design of their phones again.

If there’s anything that really brings the HTC 10 down the most, it’s the display. While the calibration of the display is good enough and the use of a sunlight display mode means that I’ve never really struggled to see what I’m reading in direct sunlight, the HTC 10’s LCD panel has fairly low maximum brightness, contrast, and noticeable color shift with viewing angle changes. I suspect HTC may be constrained by their relative lack of economies of scale here which is contributing to the problem but for next year the display really needs to get better if possible. One interesting route if HTC intends to keep using LCD would be JDI’s “full active” displays which almost entirely eliminate the bezel requirement for the display driver, which would allow for something like a stereo front-facing speaker design with no “HTC bar” that has been associated with such designs in the past. AMOLED is another viable alternative here, but I’m not sure if HTC can get access to high quality AMOLED displays that would let them compete with other major OEMs.

As far as overall system performance goes, it’s not really a huge surprise to know that the HTC 10 mostly performs similarly to other Snapdragon 820 devices. The only notable slowdown here is the poor performance of the location provider in tests like Discomark and poor performance in the PCMark Video Playback test. These are long-standing issues at this point that persist across system updates so I suspect that solving such things may be more complicated than it really seems on the surface. Storage performance is also not necessarily as easy to call as it might seem despite the use of eMMC as the SLC/TLC hybrid architecture means that the HTC 10 has much faster storage in some scenarios relative to most UFS storage we’ve seen in devices this year. I suspect that by next year though it won’t really be possible to repeat this kind of relative performance and UFS or NVMe will be necessary to keep pace.

In battery life, the HTC 10 is actually fairly impressive when it comes to how well HTC can keep up with the competition. While the Galaxy S7 with Exynos 8890 is still going to last longer, for its size I don’t believe there’s another Snapdragon 820 device with better battery life. It doesn’t necessarily last as long as AMOLED at this point though unless you’re doing web browsing or similar scenarios with high APL. Throttling is also better-controlled than most devices I’ve seen with graceful degradation rather than sinusoidal behavior.

When it comes to the camera on the HTC 10, there are a lot of bright spots but also areas where it falls flat. For whatever reason the HTC 10 is just unusually slow to save images but focuses as fast as just about anything else with PDAF. For obvious reasons the Galaxy S7 and Note7 are still much faster at focusing, and Samsung has really optimized aggressively to get photo captures to be basically instant while the HTC 10 clearly has some latency in capture. On the other hand, the images produced by the HTC 10 on the whole are almost always better, and I would argue that video capture is usually better as well. There’s definitely room to improve here in the form of better optics, better encode settings, and faster capture, but the HTC 10’s camera is as good as, if not better than what you get in the Galaxy S7 and Note7.

High-end smartphones are increasingly differentiated by software and the HTC 10 is no different in that regard. HTC Sense is probably as good as it gets in the Android space if you have to pick an OEM UI though, as HTC has really focused on performance and removing redundancy in the shipping ROM. The HTC 10 with Sense is clearly smoother in most cases than something like the Note7 with TouchWiz, and in general what HTC apps are still around are well-designed to match with Android design guidelines so there aren’t any strange behaviors to learn around if you’re coming from a Nexus device. Third party apps don’t feel foreign either which is a nice bonus. It’s not all perfect though as there are still areas where HTC could stand to further optimize in areas like the weather application to try and get as close to 60 FPS as possible.  The strange auto brightness and volume overlay behavior is also noteworthy, as is the lack of quick settings customization. Fixing these little niggles would get rid of pretty much all UI friction.

When it comes to WiFi, the HTC 10 is definitely disappointing. Received power is just not particularly competitive, and roaming latency is not very good. It’s strange that this is the case despite excellent cellular and GNSS reception, so I suspect there may be some interesting story behind the reason why this is happening. I suspect that these issues will go away as we continue to highlight them, but it’s concerning that it takes someone with the ability to use enterprise-grade test equipment in order to really discover these kinds of things.

When it comes to touch latency, to some extent HTC really is living up to their promises here. However, it seems that the claim is specific to drag latency where the HTC 10 is noticeably quicker to respond than something like the Note5 or the One M9. In general, the HTC 10 is one of the most performant Android devices I’ve used all year. It really feels like the Nexus 5 in a lot of respects when it comes to overall smoothness and responsiveness, which definitely wasn’t the case with the One M9.

In light of everything, the HTC 10 feels like it shows a lot of attention to detail and care that seems to be absent in a lot of devices that I’ve had to review in the past few years. There are definitely sore spots like the display and WiFi, but on the whole the great camera, audio, design, and software experience come together to make a great phone that has really aged quite well over the past few months. There’s been a lot of discussion about how the price is too much, but realistically it looks like the price is closer to 600 USD due to frequent discounts. Considering the direct competition in the price range, on the basis of the device itself I would argue that the price is about in line with expectation. Even now, with the iPhone 7 and Note7 available my experiences with the HTC 10 lead me to believe that it’s well worth buying still if you’re looking for a high-end Android device that can be used with one hand.