HTC One (Sprint) The first truly great smartphone of 2013, the innovative, well-built, aluminum-clad Sprint HTC One is an easy Editors' Choice winner.

HTC One (Sprint)

  • Pros


  • Cons


  • Bottom Line


TV and Multimedia
Why doesn't every phone have front-facing speakers? HTC's dual BoomSound speakers are one of those "duh" features that I'm shocked not to see more often. They're noticeably louder and more powerful than most other cell phone speakers; although they're still tinny, the sound can fill a room.

The headphone listening experience is typical Beats, which is to say better than typical: The phone comes with a pair of comfortable Beats-branded earphones, and your two options for sound are Beats and not-Beats. (That basically means massive bass and pretty flat.) The slightly customized music player automatically downloads artist and album art from Gracenote, and plays music from DLNA servers, but it doesn't do lyrics the way Motorola's music player does. A solid, clear FM radio is also on board.

Video playback is very sharp with videos up to 1080p, although format support is a bit limited; there's no support for DivX or Xvid, and you pretty much want to stick to H.264. You can get videos onto your HDTV via an MHL cable, DLNA wireless, or HTC's Media Link HD wireless box, although it's a real buzz kill when a calendar or e-mail alert interrupts your video on the big screen.

The phone comes with three—three!—media stores: Google's Play, HTC's Watch, and Sprint TV. Sprint TV offers up streaming channels as well as on-demand video; otherwise they're all redundant, competitively priced, and not as comprehensive as what you’ll find on Amazon.

But there's also a TV twist here: The One integrates an IR emitter (it's in the Power button) and TV remote-control software based on Peel Remote with a built-in program guide. The basic TV remote worked with both Sharp and Samsung TVs, and Dish and TiVo cable boxes. It doesn't control third-party set-top boxes like Roku or WDTV, though, and I'm perpetually disappointed by Peel, because it doesn't do anything with DVRs. Nielsen says about half of U.S. homes have DVRs, and I'm willing to bet these are the same people who buy high-end smartphones. While the remote app shows you what's on right now, the contents of your DVR are completely missing from Peel's program lineup. (Samsung's version of Peel has the same problem.) That makes it more of a curiosity than a truly useful tool.

Pictures, UltraPixels, and Zoes
We don't need more megapixels; we need better megapixels. That's how HTC feels, and I agree. The company has dubbed the One's 4-megapixel camera an UltraPixel camera because it uses 2-micron pixels, larger than the typical 1.1-micron pixels on camera phones, and thus capable of capturing more light. The front camera is a standard 2-megapixel model.

This results in absolutely stunning low-light images. I took shots indoors, in a dimly lit bedroom, which would have been cripplingly blurry with almost any other phone. Yes, they definitely got noisy, but they were still a cut above any phone I've seen other than the Nokia Lumia 920.

In terms of more standard shots, the One's camera isn't a game changer, but it's very good. The shutter is instantaneous, HDR is available for both stills and videos, and even that's fast. In outdoor shots, I couldn't shake the graininess of very aggressive sharpening. On the positive side, though, outdoor shutter speeds were often insanely high, in the thousandths of a second, capturing action very well.

The only loss I found with the UltraPixel camera over traditional high-megapixel cameras was with digital zoom. A four-UltraPixel image gives you less room to crop and zoom than a higher-megapixel image, so you need to make sure your photo is framed correctly when you shoot it.

There's no dedicated camera button, but the camera has a ton of options and scene modes. The most notable is Zoe, which takes a three-second, 1080p HD video and 20 still images when you press the shutter button. Zoe is a really interesting idea, but I'm struggling with what to do with them. You can share them through HTC's own Share website, which gives you a dedicated link to send around to friends. But Zoes don't automatically embed in other photo-sharing sites. Try to download a Zoe yourself, and you get 21 files totaling 25-35MB each time. That builds up fast. And in low light, I found that many of the Zoe component stills were very blurry.

Go into the Gallery app, and the top image for each album (whether auto-created or self-created) will be a Highlight Reel, an automatically generated video combining the Zoes and images in that folder. That's quite neat, and the 30-second highlight reels share cleanly to other services. But the highlight reel doesn't build chronologically, which led to some strange narrative skips.

Going Zoe-happy with my daughter on a trip to the park, I ended up generating 1.3GB of photos in a single morning, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. Downloading them to my computer gave me 490 very similar image files. Uploading them to HTC Share gave me a link that I could send around, but that didn't integrate with any of my other services.

For video, both cameras capture 1080p videos at 30 frames per second in good light. I saw some dynamic range issues with a bright background; the HDR Video mode helped with that. Zoe videos taken at night indoors cut down to as low as 17 fps.

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