HTC 10 preview: Welcome back to the premier league

If there’s any smartphone manufacturer that deserves a second chance it’s HTC. We can credit HTC for much of what we love about smartphones today. It popularised Android, it pushed premium metal design and build quality focused on user experience.

HTC forged an exciting segment of the market, adding innovation, and was then cannibalised by it. HTC’s road leading up to the HTC 10 over the past 10 years is long, twisted, and well documented.

But with a new champion smartphone, HTC is looking to regain form. You know what? HTC might just have nailed it with the HTC 10. We’ve spent some time with the new handset and these are our first impressions. A full HTC 10 review will follow shortly.

HTC 10 design

We don’t want to be too retrospective in this first look at the new HTC 10, but it’s impossible not to mention the devices that lead up to this new handset. Importantly it drops the One name, taking the simplicity of HTC 10, giving the feeling that this is something of a restart for HTC.

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In doing so, HTC also drops the fussiness of the One M9 design. There are no finicky details that don’t matter, so the HTC 10 is closer to the M8 body design and that’s a good thing. It’s characterised by the deep chamfer on the rear, beadblasted rear and polished sides.

There’s definitely a family feel to this handset and you can see that it’s related to the HTC One metal phones that came before it, but it feels fresh. It comes in three serious colours – carbon, silver and gold – and the carbon grey here is definitely our favourite. There’s a solidity to the feel and a brutal seriousness to the look that makes this a handset that’s difficult to ignore.

When we reviewed the HTC One A9, we said it looked and felt like a precursor to the HTC 10 and we were absolutely right. It was. But where the A9 bears a resemblance to the iPhone 6S thanks to it’s shape, the HTC 10 retains the curve to the back that previous flagships have offered.

The finish is very good. With metal becoming the norm in high-end smartphones, HTC is smacking down pretenders and showing its experience: hold the HTC 10 against the Huawei P9 or the LG G5, and HTC is undeniably the higher quality device.

Part of the simplification in the design comes from a new approach to the front of the handset. The front is now a single sheet of Gorilla Glass that fills the face. This leads to a much cleaner design, dropping the big BoomSound speaker grilles. In this case 2.5D glass meets metal for a wonderfully clean result.

The HTC 10 measures 145.9 x 71.9 x 9mm at the thickest, but due to the curve and the edge chamfers, the narrowest point at the edge is only 3mm thick. The handset weighs 161g, so it is weighty, but there’s a reassuring solidity to that weight.

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HTC 10 BoomSound Hi-Fi edition

One of the obvious design changes means that BoomSound as it was known and loved is no longer on the HTC 10. But don’t panic: the audio story surrounding the HTC 10 is mighty impressive, perhaps more so for losing the big front-facing speakers.

BoomSound still exists, but things have changed, with the base speaker becoming a bass speaker and the top ear speaker becoming a tweeter. Each has a separate amplifier and HTC says this rivals the performance in terms of volume and clarity that BoomSound previously offered. Our first impressions are that this is true, it’s still a great audio performer.

But that’s only a small part of the story, as HTC is changing gears on the headphone experience. Firstly, the HTC 10 offers a 24-bit DAC, aiming to upconvert your music for better quality, but it also offers a more powerful headphone amp, meaning it will drive higher quality headphones too. 

The HTC 10 is Hi-Res certified and it comes with Hi-Res headphones in the box as standard. Rather than having to pay extra, you’re getting premium headphones from the get go. Again, we’ve not had the chance to test the performance fully.

If audio is something you’re interested in, then you might appreciate the Hi-Res capture that HTC 10 also offers. Now you can have video capture with stereo Hi-Res audio too. 

Not only that, but HTC has added support for AirPlay. That’s right, that wireless connection that’s been exclusive to Apple is now on supported by the HTC 10, meaning you’ll be able to send your music to loads of speakers. You can also natively connect to DLNA, Chromecast and plenty of other wireless protocols.

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HTC 10 hardware and specs

HTC’s message is very much along the lines that the hardware is almost immaterial. The message for the HTC 10 is that optimisation and experience makes this a better handset than its rivals. That said, HTC 10 competes with any handset out there.

It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 quad-core chipset, a chipset that we know is hugely powerful from its use in other devices. This is backed by 4GB RAM, so already we’re looking at a fast and powerful phone. HTC says that it has been working on optimisation all across this device to make it the fastest and most responsive handset around.

We can’t gauge that performance definitively from the time that we’ve spent with the handset prior to launch, but it certainly feels slick and fast. 

There’s 32GB of storage, with microSD to expand this, and full support for Android Marshmallow’s adoptable storage feature. This feature will let you use an external storage card as seamlessly integrated internal storage. We applaud its support by HTC, it’s a great feature and something that Samsung, LG and others have avoided. 

Charging comes via USB Type-C on the bottom of the handset and there’s a 3000mAh battery within. HTC is making some great promises with the HTC 10, saying it will offer 2 days of life from a single charge, thanks to the optimisation that HTC has carried out. 

Not only that, but the charger is smart. It comes with a Quick Charge 3.0 charger that will power up your phone, with HTC saying you’ll get a day of use, or 50 per cent charge, from 30 minutes plugged in.

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HTC 10 display

In the HTC 10, HTC makes the move that many have been calling for, stepping up to a 5.2-inch Quad HD display. That means you have a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels for 564ppi, making this one of the sharpest displays out there.

This is a Super LCD 5 panel and HTC says that a lot of work has been done to make this display as responsive to the touch as possible. That’s something we’ve really not had the chance to test fully, but first impressions are of a slick display. 

However, HTC is facing some serious wow factor from its rivals Samsung, with the Galaxy S7 offering a very good display. Putting the two side-by-side, our immediate impression is that Samsung perhaps retains that advantage, with increased brightness and better viewing angles.

However, this is based on a quick comparison and is far from a final impression. We’re going to be spending a lot more time with this handset in lots of different conditions to gauge its performance.

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HTC 10 software: A new Sense

Software has always been a strength for HTC. From the HTC Hero up to the modern day, HTC Sense has been one of the best Android skins available. With native Android becoming more sophisticated with every iteration, the HTC 10 marks a major departure in software for HTC. 

It was a move that the One A9 started and we commented on it at the time, as layers of Sense were stripped away, duplicated apps and bloat removed, with a focus on offering a clean and fast experience that embraces Android rather than trying to hide it ( like Samsung, LG and Huawei do).

The message for the HTC 10 is that this is being accelerated. This is perhaps the most Androidy HTC phone since the Nexus One, with HTC opting to use native Android apps where it once developed its own. 

This is such a huge move that Sense no longer has a version number: this is Android with HTC Sense and where we might have once expected to see Sense 8, HTC isn’t thinking in those terms.

But that doesn’t mean that the HTC 10 lacks distinction and personality – far from it. HTC isn’t doing a Motorola and offering a stock experience. You still have the HTC Sense launcher with BlinkFeed, you still have Themes and options to customise your phone, including a completely freeform layout controller where you can literally put things anywhere you want, lose the labels and use stickers for icons instead.

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But you won’t find HTC heavily changing the settings menu, or the volume controls, or adding a whole collection of its own apps. The message here is that HTC will only change things were it can offer a better experience. 

This time around, the big app removed is Gallery. HTC will no longer be shipping its own Gallery app on phones as Google’s Photos is now the default app. That’s quite a change, but HTC says it has worked with Google to optimise the experience, so Photos will support raw capture from the camera, as well as legacy formats HTC has used in the past, which wasn’t the case previously.

Optimisation is very much what this story is about, as HTC says that it is working many levels deep to give you optimisations that other manufacturers won’t, with the aims of giving you better power, performance and battery life. 

One of the few additions to help with that is called Boost+. This is an optimisation that will manage memory bloat and battery wastage. HTC said it would rather produce its own app for its own system than leave it to the mercy of third-party apps.

We’ve not had the time to fully explore the software offerings, or test the HTC 10 over a prolonged period, but we like what HTC is doing. We liked it on the A9 and we like it on the HTC 10. Less is more, embracing Android makes for a better experience and the HTC 10 benefits from that.

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HTC 10 camera

While all of the above sets out the HTC 10 as a world class superphone, it will likely be judged in one area, the camera. This is where HTC has stumbled on previous devices in the face of some very good competition.

The HTC 10 drops the gimmicks for a solid position on the spec sheet, offering a 12-megapixel camera with optical image stabilisation. HTC is still calling this an UltraPixel camera, but bear in mind that “UltraPixel” is a marketing term, just as “Retina display” is for Apple.

In this case, the HTC 10 features a Sony sensor with 1.55µm pixels, f/1.8 aperture. It’s supported by laser autofocus and has been built to be fast.

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This is a completely new camera for HTC, but sadly we haven’t had a chance to full test it. Our first impressions are that it’s fast and that the new app is nice and clear, and we spotted convenience features like auto-HDR, long missing from HTC’s cameras.

You have the full manual controls available, as well as raw capture.

But the camera excitement doesn’t stop with the rear camera. The front camera brings with it optical image stabilisation too, so those low light selfies will look better. There’s a 5-megapixel camera with 1.34µm pixels, f/1.8 aperture and it’s autofocus too.

Our first impressions are good and we have the feeling that HTC has thrown off the ghosts of cameras past with the HTC 10, but we’ve got a lot of testing ahead of us to reach a definitive verdict on the camera experience, which we will be bringing to you very soon.

First Impressions

The HTC 10 comes out swinging, with HTC looking to assert itself once again. The simplified design is serious and undeniably high quality, but the 10 goes so much further than just good looks. 

The software pulls it closer to Android, just hanging on to those things that HTC does really well, while there’s innovation packed in to all corners. The hardware competes with just about any smartphone out there, but HTC claims optimisations will see it surpass the performance of its rivals. 

There’s plenty more for us to see and plenty more to test. Ultimately, things like the camera performance are going to be critical.

But as it stands, just as we were ready to hand the 2016 smartphone crown to Samsung, HTC has launched a phone that’s hugely exciting, a phone that might bring it back to the top of the pack.

The HTC 10 will be available from April 2016 and pricing is still to be confirmed. We will be bringing you a full and final review shortly.