Screen
Even if the design isn’t inspired, we can at least say the screen is, with an improvement — yes, freakin’ finally — beyond that of Full HD.
One of the last mobile companies to hold out before a jump to something greater than 1920×1080 also known as “Full HD”, we’re finally seeing the company move on to greener pastures and bluer seas/
In the 10, HTC has equipped a Super LCD running the Quad HD resolution of 2560×1440 inside a 5.2 inch body, and while it isn’t the sharpest of the lot — that goes to Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and its 5.1 inch QHD panel — it’s still sharp all the same, with crystal clear visuals, pin-prick text and icons, and a great look to it.
It’s definitely easy on the eyes, but doesn’t offer the same punch as an OLED or AMOLED display, something that’s not a real shock since we’re running Super LCD tech here.
We would have liked to have seen more brightness, though, because while the screen is beautiful in some environments, others and you feel like the display could be brighter again.
Protection is here, anyway, or some amount of it. In fact, HTC says you’ll find curved Gorilla Glass here protecting the display, and good luck viewing it as “curved”, since the phone doesn’t really feel curved as such. Rather, this is only slightly curved in the same 2.5D design we’ve seen on various Oppo phones, which curves the edges of the glass to better meet the body.
Performance
In the HTC 10, we’re seeing the first Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, since Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge missed out on that chip in Australia, sitting with the Samsung-made Exynos variant instead.
So this is the first time Australians get to try the new processor, and as far as benchmarks go, it hits the marks even if it doesn’t quite wrestle the trophy from Samsung’s hands.
Ignoring the synthetic benchmarks, though, HTC’s 10 is quite quick, letting you jump from point A to point B in no time, with the only hint of lag coming from the occasional very slight delay in soft button pushing.
That wasn’t there all the time, though, and for the most part, the HTC 10 is super snappy and zips along.
The same can be said for 4G LTE performance, with speeds tested in Sydney on Telstra’s 4GX network shown as high as 170Mbps, which is pretty darn nice, though more is possible, network and location dependent, of course.
In-use
Most of how you use the HTC 10 will be pretty much bang on from what anyone who has ever seen an Android phone has experienced before, because there are multiple widgetised home screens, an app drawer and menu, a dropdown notification bar pretty much bang on as to how Google likes it to look, and then HTC’s RSS and social network harvesting news system known as Blinkfeed which you’re not required to use.
HTC’s take on this is still called “Sense”, and in the latest incarnation, the company has scaled back how much design liberties it normally takes on Google’s own, and it’s nice. If you like the way Google typically presents Android, the changes here aren’t quite like what you’ll get on a Nexus, but they’re still very comfortable to use, and we doubt you’ll have a problem using them.
More interestingly, though, HTC has really cottoned onto the idea of theming and home screen customisation, and while the company started to dabble in last year’s HTC One (M9), this year’s effort in the HTC 10 ups the ante.
Last year, it was all about themes, and themes for the HTC Sense home screen weren’t just for the screen itself, but for the overall launcher, which is the little app that Android calls on when you want to load a home screen, go into the app menu, and generally use the phone or tablet before opening an app.
Typically, you can change an Android launcher yourself with one of a variety of options in the Google Play store, and last year, HTC seemed to recognise that with themes that changed menu colours, wallpapers, and so on and so on.
This year in the HTC 10, it amps it up a notch, and your themes appear to do more, with the option included for a “freestyle” mode which loses the grid that normally forces you to align your icons to parts of the screen. You’ll have seen that if you’ve ever tried to move icons around your home screen because they will always align to points, much like how most desktop screens work.
Freestyle changes that by allowing you to kill the almost magnetic alignment and put icons where ever you want, in theory crafting scenes that are more playful and involve an immense amount of customisation. HTC also provides “stickers” which are randomly sized icons — not the typical small squares you get — that allow one of these specially crafted scenes to really be yours, and you can map them to program shortcuts.
If you load in a big sticker, it might represent Google Maps, and if you turn labels off, only you will know what it means. That essentially means that aside for having a passcode on your device to lock it up, only you will know how to operate the phone, delivering interface customisation.
We need to note that this level of freestyle customisation isn’t remarkably new, because launchers have existed supporting it for some time on Google Play, but it is a new thing in a final phone and very interesting to play with.
HTC hasn’t (as of the time of publishing) really opened it up, though, so to play, you need to load one of the very few Freestyle scenes available to you, of which we could find four, and we didn’t like either of them.
It would be better moving forward if HTC would just let you go into Freestyle mode to switch the grid off and load your own wallpapers and design your own sticker packs, but right now, that’s not an option. Instead, you have to load one of the few on the system which also change the sounds, and then tweak, meaning customisation can be a trying effort of removing someone else’s work just to make your own stuff work.
But this whole theming thing is an intriguing inclusion, and one few manufacturers are really playing with, so kudos to HTC for even trying.
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