The HTC 10, the latest flagship smartphone of the Taiwanese smartphone maker, has become the company’s perfect comeback story following the debacle that was the HTC One M9 last year.
After rolling out the best VR headset there is in the market in HTC Vive early this year, the Taiwanese tech giant put a punctuation mark on its road to redemption with the successful release of the HTC 10 on April 12 to very warm market reception.
Amid the iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, the Samsung Galaxy S7, and the Galaxy S7 Edge, HTC has placed a legitimate contender for the ‘smartphone of the year’ award with the extremely powerful and smooth-handling HTC 10, notes Gizmag.
The closest competition of the HTC 10 for the plum is perhaps the Galaxy S7 which has other special features that the former does not have including water resistance, wireless charging, and always-on display.
However, the HTC 10 more than made up for those ‘shortcomings’ with its great attention to detail and subtle intangibles including great audio quality, excellent display brightness and white balances, near-stock Marshmallow software, and a design focus that takes no shortcuts.
Undoubtedly, the HTC is a premium smartphone from top to bottom adding a genuine respect for customer taste, and a bullheaded determination to make refined quality and make the handset quite a pleasure to use.
A fresh start
With the disappointment of its much-maligned HTC One M9 when it made it to the retail markets in April of last year, HTC 10, which was previously rumored to be called as HTC One M10, is the Taiwanese smartphone maker’s fresh start in the business.
Coming off from a string of years of not-so-good smartphones, it seems that HTC made a concerted effort to turn things around anchored most likely on a renewed vision and outlook.
Although most critics in the business believe that HTC is now a VR company which makes smartphones, it is still important for the Taiwanese tech giant to flex its muscles in the smartphone market where it was regarded as the maker of the best handsets in the world, notes Droid Life.
True enough, the HTC 10 is a really good smartphone. It does not buck that innovation slowdown trend nor does it try to reinvent the smartphone. More importantly, the HTC 10 signifies the comeback of one of the pioneering, most detail-driven and sophisticated smartphone companies there is in the market.
For the first time in about two or three years, HTC has come up with a smartphone in HTC 10 that could easily be considered as the best of the year in a market that is too often dominated by Apple and Samsung.
People all over the world also loves going for the underdog. And the HTC 10 has simply become the industry’s perfect underdog comeback story.
Exudes great intangibles
The last time that HTC made a smartphone almost this great was way back in 2013 when it launched the HTC One M7 which exuded hard-to-define intangibles.
The HTC 10 features a beautiful aluminum unibody design with chamfered edge running around its backside. It also has cleaner front-side that loses the old forward-spacing speakers in exchange for capacitive buttons including the fingerprint sensor.
The current flagship smartphone of the Taiwanese handset maker also has one of the best smartphone cameras that can be found among smartphones of today. It is actually better than that of the Galaxy S7 and the iPhone 6S, especially under very low lighting.
The smartphone also has excellent hi-res audio support with its audiophile-friendly PSB M4U 2 and noise-cancelling champ Bose QC20 earbuds.
The HTC 10 also provides support for Android’s new adoptable storage. It also has a microSD slot that provides an option of formatting the card so that the phone does not differentiate it with the internal storage, a feature which cannot be done with the Galaxy S7 or on the LG G5.
What everyone seems to forget is that a successful successor device needs to have all the great technology available in the market that can be packaged together. The reason the M9 didn’t do well is because it ran hot initially, the camera was poor, and had no Image Stabilization, and it did NOT have a biometric reader of some type that is needed for future secure commerce transactions.
Note though that any company that removes a great feature like front-facing (FF) STEREO speakers from an existing product on its next iteration has engineers with mush for brains. This HTC 10 will be another weak seller, like its predecessor. Even Samsung brought back a microSD slot on the Galaxy S7, after removing it. There are NO good reasons to change the orientation of FF stereo speakers. Right? One keeps improving, not removing good stuff. Time will soon tell us how mushy those brains are. The Galaxy S7 Edge is the way to go till some company can create a follow up flagship device with FF stereo speakers that offer full frequency of sound through both left and right sides, which will likely be the next Nexus later this year.
Think about it. Why improve the display so greatly and NOT do the same for the audio component, for those times when using only the mobile device in your hand?
If smartphone users think that FF stereo speakers should not be part of their multi-media experience when using the device, then they should ask themselves, “would they buy a TV without stereo speakers – like it was in the 70s – great mono sound?” If you added speakers to your TV, would you face the speakers towards your couch, or would you face them to the side or back walls? If the smartphone plays back HD video, then the smartphone should play back stereo sound. It just makes sense. Of course, both large and small multi-media smart devices should also have jacks for earplugs or headphones when privacy is required. This just makes sense too. Right?
I watch youTube videos on my M9. I hold up my phone and watch different types of clips with it, while I’m lying down. Those FF stereo speakers make a huge difference. I can watch John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) clips in HD, and the stereo sound is awesome. My next portable computer (which will just happen to make phone calls as well) MUST have stereo sound (without accessories), and if HTC does not offer it in a few years, then I’ll be buying someone else’s smart multimedia personal assistant device.
Boomsound is just some hardware and software inside the device (and more importantly it’s a marketing term). It has nothing to do with where sound exits the device. In my opinion, the engineers had it right, when they designed the exits so that the direction of the sound waves moved forward and hit your face, and a strong pleasing stereo effect was achieved by having the sound exit from both sides of the screen when you held it in landscape mode, as if you were watching a small LED flat screen TV.
LightStruk stated: I have a One M8, and I bought it specifically for the loud, front-facing, stereo speakers. I use those speakers every day! I can watch videos without cupping my hand around the bottom bezel like you have to with an iPhone, and the stereo separation is obvious. I can turn my phone around and show some friends what I’m watching, and they don’t have to alternate between pointing the speaker at their ear and watching the video. I put it on my kitchen counter and listen to podcasts as I cook. I turn on music and sit it on the table while playing with my toddler. The sound that comes out is actually tolerable!
So, I believe Stereo FF speakers are just as necessary as a high performance colour display.