With HTC facing serious financial uncertainty in recent months, the company has had to refocus on the essentials as it goes through a mini restructuring. HTC has consolidated its product line into a couple devices in a better attempt to compete with the offerings of Samsung, Apple and LG. Chief among this list is the new HTC One which is being pitted against the iPhone, Galaxy S4, XPERIA Z and Lumia 920. Does the device deliver? Read on to find out.

• Design

In one word, the HTC One is beautiful and is arguably the best designed Android phone, though the XPERIA Z comes in a close second. The brushed aluminum, the unibody housing, the gorgeous display and the attention to detail is on par with what we have come to expect from Nokia, Apple and Sony. But HTC has lived up to our expectations and the One is not only great to look at but great to hold and use.

• Specifications

The HTC One is equipped with a beautiful 4.7-inch 1080p display. It is powered by Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor clocked at 1.7GHz. The device comes with 2GB of RAM, 32 or 64GB of internal storage, LTE, 4 megapixel rear facing camera and a 2.1 megapixel rear facing camera.

• Performance

The 4.7-inch screen is one of the best we have ever seen on a smartphone. HTC has the screen technology down pat and they deserve great props for it. There isn’t another phone screen we have used that we would rate above it.

Overall the device responsiveness is snappy. The quad-core processor does a marvelous job of handling whatever you can throw at it from web pages to multimedia apps to gaming and the occasional video recording.

HTC betted that equipping the One with a 4 megapixel camera instead of an 8, 12 or 16 megapixel camera would help it greatly under low light. That much is true, however it doesn’t negate the fact that the images on the phone are just above VGA standard and so unlike your iPhone which essentially can be used as a secondary point and shoot camera, the HTC One is only useful for when your regular point and shoot isn’t available.

AT&T’s service worked great where we tested it (Orlando, Miami) and LTE saw speeds of 12 and 15 Mbps. The battery life is solid and while not up to par with the Lumia or iPhone, you can still get a full days charge out of it with average usage.

• Conclusion

If there is an Android phone that is worthy of the moniker, king, this is the phone. It not only looks great, but functions well and for once HTC seems to have corrected their wrongs with the battery life issue. If only the rear facing camera were better, we wouldn’t have any major faults with this device. The AT&T version with 64GB of RAM retails for $199 on contract and LTE data plans start at 2GB. The phone is a slight variation from the international HTC One.

About Author

Keith Patton is a computer programmer who works with implementing security software for various companies. He idolizes Steve Heyer, and hopes that we would soon be able to emulate the success of Heyer when it comes to the computer programming field.