HTC One (M7) Revisited: A Brilliant Flagship With Painful Trade‑Offs

I still remember pulling the original HTC One (M7) out of its box and thinking, “This is it. This is what Android hardware should look like.” Six months later, I was also the person grumbling about storage limits, a soft power button, and a camera that fell apart in daylight.

The HTC One is one of those phones that felt destined to win on first impressions, then slowly bled points the longer you lived with it.

Design and Hardware: Gorgeous, But Not Without Headaches

On pure hardware, HTC absolutely showed up. The One’s aluminum unibody, split by fine plastic antenna lines, still looks like something you’d expect to see next to Vertu and Mobiado, not in a carrier store. At 137.4 x 68.2 x 9.3mm and 143g, it lands slightly smaller than Sony’s Xperia Z, but thicker than both the Z and Samsung’s Galaxy S4.

HTC chose feel over spec-sheet thinness, and it mostly works. The metal and glass combo feels significantly more premium than the plastic S4, even if Samsung counters with a removable battery and microSD slot the One simply doesn’t have. You get 32GB of internal storage on the base model (with a 64GB option), and that’s it. USB OTG helps, but it’s still a hard ceiling for heavy media users.

The front is dominated by a 4.7-inch 1080p Super LCD3 covered by Gorilla Glass 2, flanked by dual front-facing BoomSound speakers. The speakers have dedicated amps and can hit 93 dB, and while they’re not the absolute loudest in testing, they’re deep and clear in actual use. The trade-off is the two-capacitive-key layout (Back and Home) crammed under the screen, with no dedicated Menu key and no app switcher button.

Up top, HTC hides an IR blaster inside the power button next to the 3.5mm jack, turning the One into a universal remote for TVs and AV gear. Smart idea, clumsy execution: the button sits on the top edge of a tall phone, is too low-profile, and has weak feedback. It’s one of the most-used controls on any phone; here, it’s one of the worst to reach.

The 2,300mAh Li-Po battery is sealed in, but endurance is decent. In standardized testing, the One pulls a 48-hour endurance rating (roughly two days with a 1-hour mix of calls, web, and video per day). It’s not a battery monster, but it’s better than the specs suggest, which makes the non-removable design more tolerable.

Display and Audio: The Parts HTC Actually Nailed

HTC didn’t chase the 5-inch number; the One sticks to 4.7 inches at 1080p, which works out to a sharp 469 ppi. You can argue about whether 400+ ppi matters, but the One’s panel is objectively excellent. Contrast is strong, colors hold up at extreme angles, and the screen is laminated so the image looks like it’s painted right on the glass.

There is a weak spot: sunlight legibility. It’s fine, but not class-leading. Outdoors, the Xperia Z and a few others edge it with higher effective brightness and better reflectivity control.

Where HTC truly flexed was audio. The One pairs those front-facing speakers with genuinely impressive output quality over the 3.5mm jack. In lab testing, it posts near-excellent frequency response, low noise and crosstalk, and higher volume than most rivals, essentially matching HTC’s own Butterfly. More importantly, the audio quality stays almost unchanged when you plug in headphones. For once, the Beats logo isn’t just EQ marketing fluff.

The custom music player adds DLNA streaming, automatic album art and artist photos, plus lyric search with karaoke-style display. There’s no granular EQ beyond a Beats toggle, which is a missed opportunity given the hardware, but third-party players can cover that.

Sense 5 and BlinkFeed: Ambition With Annoying Edges

The One launched on Android 4.1.2 with Sense 5, a major visual and functional reset. HTC stripped back the skeuomorphism, cleaned up icons, and tried to rethink how you land on content.

The lockscreen is mostly cosmetic: clock, weather, and four shortcuts that must mirror the dock apps. You can’t customize those independently like you can on some LG and Samsung devices, which feels arbitrarily restrictive.

The homescreen story is more divisive. The leftmost pane is BlinkFeed, a Flipboard-style stream for social updates and news. You can pick interests and sources, then scroll through a magazine-like feed. You can set a different pane as your default home so you don’t have to live in BlinkFeed, but you can’t remove the panel entirely or turn it into a normal widget space.

BlinkFeed is smoother than a third-party widget because it hooks deeper into the launcher, and you can share or post directly from it. But HTC made it a structural part of the UI instead of a movable widget you can resize or delete. That design decision alone irritated a lot of power users who just wanted their own grids and widgets back.

Sense 5 also aggressively chases the trend of killing the dedicated Menu key. System apps use a swipe-down gesture in BlinkFeed and the app drawer to reveal settings. Older apps that still expect a Menu button get an ugly on-screen black bar hosting a virtual key, wasting space on an already not-huge display.

The notification shade stays strangely undercooked. No quick toggles for Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth or mobile data, just a Power Saver switch and a shortcut into full settings. Samsung and LG had usable toggles for years by this point; HTC stubbornly kept ignoring that obvious productivity win.

To HTC’s credit, some changes are genuinely smart. The new 3×3 card-style task switcher is faster to scan than the old carousel. Car mode is clean and straightforward with large controls and auto-launch behavior when docked and paired with car audio. Kid mode profiles let you sandbox apps for children, though setup annoyingly requires an email sign-up.

Overall, Sense 5 feels faster and cleaner than Sense 4, but it also forces you into HTC’s opinions more often than it should.

Performance and Connectivity: Fast Enough, But Not Special

Under the hood, the One runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 with four 1.7GHz Krait 300 cores, Adreno 320 GPU, and 2GB of RAM. On paper and in benchmarks, it slots just behind the fastest Snapdragon 600 phones of the time — mainly the Galaxy S4 and LG Optimus G Pro with their higher clock speeds.

In synthetic tests like AnTuTu and Quadrant, the One usually posts a close second or third, never first. GPU benchmarks like GLBenchmark 2.5 and Epic Citadel show similar results: high frame rates, occasionally capped by the 60Hz display, but still a step behind Galaxy S4’s numbers.

The takeaway: you will not feel this gap in real-world use. The UI is smooth, heavy features like HTC Zoe editing run fine, and HTML5 browsing in Vellamo scores near the top. If you’re buying this thing, performance is the least of your worries.

Connectivity is stacked: quad-band GSM and 3G, market-dependent LTE, dual-band Wi‑Fi a/b/g/n with DLNA client and server, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC with Android Beam, MHL over microUSB with USB OTG, and a solid GPS lock even without A‑GPS. Portable hotspot supports up to eight devices and can auto-shut off to save battery.

The IR blaster plus remote app turn the phone into a legit living room controller for TVs, receivers, and players using standard IR codes. It’s one of those features that quietly makes the phone more useful, even if it never sells a unit on its own.

UltraPixels and Zoe: The Big Bet That Only Half Worked

HTC’s real swing with the One was the camera. Instead of chasing double-digit megapixels, they dropped to a 4MP 16:9 sensor with 2.0µm-class pixels (three times the area of a typical 1.4µm 12MP photosite), optical image stabilization, and an f/2.0, 28mm-equivalent 5-element lens. Marketing rebranded the larger photosites as “UltraPixels.”

On paper, this buys you lower noise, better dynamic range, and stronger low-light performance. In practice, it’s a split decision.

In good light, the One is clearly outgunned by high-megapixel rivals. Per-pixel detail looks decent, but the total resolving power simply isn’t there. You’re looking at 2688 x 1520 in 16:9 and 2048 x 1520 (~3MP) in 4:3, and it shows. Noise is still visible, and purple fringing can creep in. Even after a firmware update improved sharpening and pulled a bit more detail, the Galaxy S4’s 13MP shooter easily wins for daylight detail.

Move indoors or into low light and the story flips. The One’s OIS and big pixels let it keep ISO lower and shutter speeds slower without smearing the shot to oblivion. The Galaxy S4, lacking OIS, has to crank ISO, and fine detail gets chewed up by noise and noise reduction. In dim scenes, the One can match or beat rivals that look stronger in daylight.

HTC Zoe sits on top of this imaging pipeline, powered by a dedicated ImageChip 2. In Zoe mode, each shutter press captures up to 20 full-res frames plus a 3-second video clip (1 second before, 2 seconds after). From that, Sense builds Events — timeline-based groupings with automatically generated 30-second highlight reels mixing video and stills with preset effects and music.

It’s clever and, on-device, looks great. But saving Zoes to a PC leaves you with 20 separate images per shot, which is messy. HTC’s Zoeshare site helps by hosting them as GIF-like sequences you can share via links, but that’s another proprietary service you’re betting on.

The same data powers some legitimately useful tools: object removal marks moving elements with red Xs so you can tap unwanted passersby out of a scene; Always Smile lets you scrub through multiple expressions per face; Sequence Shot layers motion trails for sports-style composites; and the retouch suite goes heavy on face tweaks like slimming, skin smoothing, eye brightening and anti-shine.

Video is arguably where this camera shines most consistently. 1080p clips are captured at a hefty 20Mbps with stereo 192Kbps audio at 48kHz. Detail is high, noise is low, and OIS keeps footage steady. HDR video mode actually works, expanding highlight and shadow detail without turning everything into a flat mess, though it narrows the field of view and drops frame rate slightly. The 720p/60fps mode, however, is a disaster: soft, upscaled-looking footage that’s nowhere near real 720p.

In the end, the UltraPixel gamble doesn’t pay off across the board. You trade too much daylight detail for better low-light shots and some very slick software tricks.

Core Apps, Messaging and Browsing: Competent, But Behind Rivals

The basics are covered thoroughly. The One handles calls with strong reception and very loud earpiece volume. Dialer search is smart, matching both names and numbers. Stock Android tricks like auto-loudspeaker when you lift the phone away from your ear and pocket mode for louder rings are present.

Messaging is standard Android done right, with threaded SMS/MMS, decent predictive keyboard with swipe-style Trace typing, and flexible preview lines in conversation lists. The keyboard layout is comfortable at 4.7 inches, though Trace language support is limited.

Email is handled by both Gmail and HTC’s own Mail client, which supports POP/IMAP and Exchange, combined inbox view, conversation threading, and multiple filter tabs for favorites, unread, invites, and attachments. Sorting by date, subject, sender, priority, or size is possible, and popular services auto-configure.

For productivity, Polaris Office is preloaded for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The redesigned calendar supports multiple views (day, month, agenda, invitations), multiple online calendars including Facebook, and shows weather in the day view. Tasks sync with Google Tasks via HTC Tasks, though there’s no location-based reminders. HTC Note serves as a lightweight note app with drawings, photos, and dictation.

The browser story is mixed. HTC’s own browser on a 1080p panel plus Snapdragon 600 should be a powerhouse. It supports Flash, offers text selection with quick search and sharing, desktop site requests, and preloading of likely search results. Quick Controls can be enabled as an edge gesture menu.

But the UI gets cluttered. Extra bottom buttons appear unpredictably when scrolling, eating into screen space; tabs can’t be flicked away like app cards; and there’s no real innovation beyond what Chrome provides. Chrome ships preinstalled and is easier to live in, but it lacks Flash.

Maps and navigation hinge on Google Maps with voice-guided navigation where supported, Street View, offline caching, and local reviews. GPS locks are quick, even with A-GPS off, and cell/Wi‑Fi positioning gives fast coarse location.

Media and Codec Support: Great Screen, Great Sound, Weak Formats

The One is almost an ideal media device, held back by a simple but annoying flaw: codec support. The gallery and video player are unified — you pick clips from the gallery and play with a minimalist interface. The Super LCD3 panel and BoomSound speakers make movie watching a pleasure, and MHL output plus DLNA let you push content to a TV easily.

But the stock player stumbles on common formats. Most DivX files fail to play, MOV isn’t supported, and it chokes on some audio codecs like AC3. The files that do play run fine up to 1080p, as you’d expect from Snapdragon 600, but you’re essentially forced into third-party players from the Play Store if you watch anything beyond basic MP4.

On the audio side, the situation is far better. The music player supports artist/album/genre/podcast/folder views (folders are still rarer than they should be), DLNA streaming, lyric fetching, and lockscreen controls. SoundHound integration identifies tracks by listening or voice. There’s also an FM radio with RDS and loudspeaker support, plus TuneIn Radio preinstalled for internet stations, though streaming obviously hits the battery.

Verdict: The Phone That Proved HTC Still Had It, Then Got in Its Own Way

The HTC One is a classic “almost.” It proves HTC can still out-design almost everyone, deliver one of the best LCDs in a phone, and produce audio hardware that embarrasses more hyped brands. Sense 5 is cleaner and faster than before, and the Snapdragon 600 platform gives you more than enough performance.

But then the compromises pile up. No microSD in a 32GB flagship, fixed battery, awkward capacitive key layout, a top-mounted, mushy power button, a notification shade still missing quick toggles, and a camera strategy that sacrifices too much daylight detail. Zoe and UltraPixels are fun and occasionally brilliant, but they don’t offset the fact that a Galaxy S4 or Xperia Z will simply give you more usable resolution in good light.

HTC set out to build the One phone to pull them out of a financial and product slump, and from a hardware and UX ambition standpoint, they got closer than most companies ever do. The disappointment is that so many of the missteps were avoidable.

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