After months of leaks and rumors, HTC today unveiled its latest flagship: the HTC 10. Like the rumors had indicated, the HTC 10 features the same design language that the Taiwanese first debuted with the One M7 back in 2013. The design obviously has been tweaked and refined to make the phone more premium and ergonomic friendly.
Most notably though, gone are the front facing BoomSound stereo speaker grilles for which HTC received a lot of criticism over the last couple of years. However, the top and bottom bezels of the phone are still pretty big, with the bottom chin of the phone now sporting capacitive Recents and Back keys with a physical home button that also features an integrated fingerprint scanner.
The front of the 10 is dominated by a 5.2-inch Quad HD SLCD5. The design of the handset from the rear is reminiscent of the One M8 and One M9 though. Inside the beautifully crafted metal body of the 10 is a Snapdragon 820 chipset — a quad-core chip clocked at 2.15GHz — that is paired with an Adreno 530 GPU, 4GB RAM and 32GB of storage space. Other notable specs of the handset include a microSD card slot, Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, GPS and a USB Type-C port.
HTC smartphones have always struggled in the camera department, but this time around things do look impressive. The 10 sports “the world’s first optically stabilised, larger aperture f/1.8 lenses” for both its front and rear cameras. Yes, that’s right: the 5MP selfie shooter on the HTC 10 also features OIS — a first for a smartphone! The rear camera makes use of a 12MP ‘UltraPixel 2’ shooter with large 1.55um pixels and a laserAF sensor on the back. To protect the rear camera from scratches, it is protected by a sapphire lens. The front 5MP camera features a wide-angle lens and also comes with HTC’s own take on Retina Flash to allow the phone to take better selfies in low-light.
HTC says that the 10 is the greater sum of its parts. The company boasts about the Hi-Fi audio recording capabilities of the handset, and the internal DAC that is able to upscale 16-bit audio to 24-bit audio. The BoomSound Hi-Fi speakers on the 10 feature a separate tweeter and woofer design, with a dedicated amplifier for each. There is a speaker hidden inside the top earpiece grille that acts as a tweeter, with the bottom facing speaker acting as a woofer.
Lastly, all this is powered by a 3,000mAh battery that HTC says will easily last through a day of heavy use due to its optimisations. And in case it does not, you can charge the phone to 50% in as little as 30 minutes thanks to Quick Charge 3.0 support.
On the software front, the HTC 10 runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box with Sense 8.0. This new version of the skin from the company comes pre-loaded with less bloatware than before.
HTC will be offering the 10 in Carbon Grey, Glacier Silver, and Topaz Gold colors. The handset will go on sale in most of the major markets of the world from later this month. HTC will also be selling the 10 directly to consumers in the United States for $699, pre-orders for which start from today.
